THEORETICAL REASONING AND PRACTICAL BEHAVIOUR

In a recent discussion on the relationship between phenomenology and hetrophenomenology an interesting criticism was made by philosopher Jennifer Pepin which I think warrants a brief discussion. The criticism on the face of it seems so outlandish that it may seem appropriate to dismiss it with a smile. However I since I have seen examples of this sloppy thinking used by other philosophers I think it is important to clarify explicitly what is wrong with the criticism. The criticism was as follows: A person who is a Hetrophenomenologist upon seeing a wild wolf run aggressively towards him cannot judge that the animal is about to attack but must rather stand there and consult a scientist before acting.  Now as I have said this caricature is so silly it is likely to bring a smile to most reasonable people’s faces. It could be taken to indicate that the person using such silly caricatures is so desperate to avoid the standard methods of science being applied to the mind that they will cling to any absurd caricature that helps them keep the mind as the last sanctuary of magic and mysticism. I will argue below that this is not the case, rather Jennifer, thinks Dennett is guilty of similar caricatures so she is playing him at his own game.

In a different context Alva Noe made similar criticisms. He was commenting on a recent spate of articles by psychologists and neuroscientists on issues discussing evidence that animals are conscious. Noe noted that we should not be impressed by these articles. We already know that animals are conscious we don’t need science to prove this for us. He went onto note that people who need a scientist to convince themselves that animals are conscious have something seriously psychologically wrong with them.

Another example of this thinking is seen by Massimo Pigliucci when discussing Trolley Problems he noted an interesting neuroscientific study. In the study people were asked the standard ethical questions about whether you would push a fat man over a bridge to save the lives of two other people about to be hit by a train. When these questions were being asked people were having an F-Mri scan done on them. The interesting discovery was that people who typically gave the pure utilitarian answers had brain patterns consistent with being a psychopath. Psychologist Bernard Baars used this study as a stick to attack utilitarian philosophers with. In our Facebook group ‘Philosophy, Science and Utube’ he launched a savage personal attack on Peter Singer, claiming that he was a psychopath and that his ethical theories can be dismissed on these grounds.

I should be clear from the start that neither, Jennifer, Massimo, or Alva launched such a stinging attack on their opponents. But they did however all make the similar mistake of confusing a theoretical view point with a question of lived practical day to day affairs. All humans have certain folk intuitions which are vital to helping us mediate our lived world of experience. These folk intuitions are so deeply embedded into our thought processes that we just take them for granted and barely even notice them as we go about our daily affairs. Some of these folk theories are vital for our day to day survival and if our brains are damaged in certain ways this will result in our practical engagement in the world being severely impaired[1]. Our folk theories are not always correct, for example, humans are Intuitive Dualists (See Paul Bloom’s Descartes Baby), but it doesn’t follow that dualism is true. In fact we have overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Nonetheless a child who was not born with this intuitive dualism would suffer severe developmental delays; for example, Autistic children suffer developmental delays as partial result of not being intuitive dualists (Baron-Cohen 1995). So here we can see a clear case of where our folk-psychology which leads to false philosophical conclusions can be very important for a child’s development.

Now let us now consider Alva Noe’s discussion of animal consciousness. There is a sense where he is correct. If a person went through their lives thinking that all other animals were not conscious. This would at the very least indicate a lack of empathy. Such a lack of empathy may affect the person’s interactions and behaviour towards animals and their fellow man. However, the preceding considerations have little to do with theoretical considerations. A philosopher or scientist who is considering the evidence for x or y cannot merely uncritically rely on their intuitions as they investigate what the truth is on a particular subject they are studying. Rather they have to construct tests which will either support or refute their intuitions or conjectures. Philosophers like Dennett and Descartes argue that animals MAY not be conscious, they are presenting theoretical arguments that they think support their position. The same thing is true of philosophers like Donald Davidson who argue that non-linguistic animals MAY not have propositional attitudes, and of scientists like Marion-Stamp Dawkins who argues that animals MAY not have consciousness. There is no reason to think that a person’s theoretical views must override a person’s intuitions. So, for example, people who discover an evolutionary/neurological explanation for his love of their child don’t simply stop loving their child. Likewise, a scientist could argue on theoretical grounds that some animals are not conscious; but while he theoretically believes this proposition, his intuitive folk psychology could override this theoretical belief in the scientist’s day to day activities. So while Alva is correct that a person who instinctively did not experience animals as conscious and needed scientists to prove that they are would be extremely odd. None of this really shows that there is anything wrong with scientific studies into animal consciousness nor that there is anything wrong with the public’s fascination with the topic.

It should be noted that if Alva could show that people who hold certain theoretical positions on the topic of animal consciousness behave in a certain way towards animals in daily life then this view would be very interesting. Noe has provided no such evidence, however it is certainly worth looking into. However, prior to providing such evidence, Noe’s observation that people who needed a scientist to tell them an animal is conscious would have something wrong with them, is of absolutely no consequence to the study of animal cognition and consciousness.

Similar considerations apply to Massimo’s observation that people who go for utilitarian solutions to Trolley problems have brain patterns of psychopaths. This is undoubtedly an interesting discovery. And an ethicist who ignored this fact would be foolish. However, from this interesting discovery it is massive stretch to argue that utilitarians like Peter Singer are psychopaths. It is pretty obvious that a person’s theoretical position on a topic in a philosophy discussion isn’t always a reliable indicator of their behaviour in a day to day life. So, for example, there is no evidence that a deontologist will always behave on ethical matters according to a list of ethical rules that they have formulated. Likewise the same thing is true of utilitarians. Peter Singer does not always behave as his theory maintains that he should. Philosophers are human’s and don’t always live up to their theoretical ideals. Because Peter Singer believes that Utilitarianism is the best moral philosophy doesn’t make him a psychopath. Philosophers should have the space to consider the pros and cons of a particular ethical system without being attacked on such a personal level. If people like Baars really want to maintain their personal attacks on Singer at the very least they will need some behavioural evidence to support their views.

I started this blog by discussing philosopher Jennifer Pepin’s erroneous views on hetrophenomenology. I should note that she is guilty of two things. Conflating theoretical beliefs with practical behaviour, and misinterpreting what hetrophenomenology is in the first place. Her claim that a hetrophenomenologist upon seeing an angry wolf running at him will need to consult a scientist to find out how to behave implies that a hetrophenomenologist bans the use of the intentional stance to interpret the behaviour of another. Obviously this is not the case. When discussing the Hetrophenomenological method in his ‘Consciousness Explained’ Dennett noted the importance of adopting the following stance:

“This sort of interpretation calls for us to adopt what I call the Intentional Stance (Dennett, 1971, 1978a, 1987a): we must treat the noise-emitter as an agent, indeed a rational agent, who harbours beliefs and desires and other mental states that exhibit intentionality or aboutness, and whose actions can be explained (or predicted) on the basis of the content of these states. Thus the uttered noises are to be interpreted as things the subjects wanted to say, of propositions they meant to assert, for instance for, various reasons.” (Dennett: Consciousness Explained, p, 76)

So anybody who has read Dennett’s discussion of Hetrophenomenology in ‘Consciousness Explained’ chapter 4 pp. 66-98 will know that Dennett wants us to use the intentional stance. So there is no reason from Dennett’s point of view that he would not endorse using the intentional stance to interpret the behaviour of an oncoming wolf.

On the other hand, let us assume that (falsely) that Dennett was some radical behaviourist like Skinner. Nothing really changes in our interpretation of the behaviour of a wolf. In practical situations we will do what is expedient, our theoretical views usually don’t interfere with our daily survival unless we have a lot of time to use them. Perhaps if Skinner had unlimited time he could develop a stimulus response theory which is more practical than a folk-psychology approach, it is however doubtful.

At this point one may be wondering why I am wasting my time on such a silly caricature. My reason is simple I think it is very important that we do not attack theoretical positions by wrongly assuming that adopting them will have disastrous  behavioural consequences. Unless Baars, Noe, or Pepin can demonstrate their case that these theoretical approaches will have such behavioural consequences then their critiques amount to nothing more than a caricature. When I criticised Jennifer for caricaturing the hetrophenomenologist position she replied that Dennett does this to phenomenologists all the time. There is a grain of truth to this. However in this case fighting fire with fire is counter-productive.

To see this lets consider a very silly caricature of phenomenology. Husserl recommends that when doing phenomenology we perform ‘The Epoche’ which is the bracketing of all judgements about the existence of the external world. I could without further ado argue that according to people like Husserl when a wolf runs towards us we need to consult a phenomenologist in order to discover if the wolf actually exists in the external world. This is obviously an absurd interpretation of Husserl’s position and one that could only be adopted if I had decided to ignore Husserl’s actual argument and instead just lampoon him by accusing him of holding silly beliefs. I suggest that either side of a theoretical position adopting this approach simply cuts off discussion. So it is seriously counterproductive if your aim is to get at the truth.

If we take Jenifer’s criticism of hetrophenomenology as sincere (as opposed to a silly caricature) then it is simply wrong on two counts (1) It does not accurately characterise Dennett’s position, (2) It confuses theoretical questions as to what methodology to use in experimental situations with empirical questions as to how to live in practical scenarios.

Before finishing I want to briefly note that I am not arguing that theoretical beliefs do not have practical consequences for how a person lives. Rather I argue that if a theorist wants to demonstrate this in a particular case the burden of proof is on them to provide a compelling case. For example, I believe that a person’s views on human nature will have serious consequences on their views on politics. So, for example, I believe that a person who accepts Rousseau’s view of human nature will hold a different politics than a person who accepts Hobbes’s views on human nature. However, if I want to make this case I need to do it in a serious way and engage with social psychology etc. Just asserting that I think it is true is not enough.

I have argued at length in another paper that Dennett’s theory of the mind is partly determined by his own type of consciousness. I had to work very hard to prove this case and I don’t think I have yet met the burden of proof. All I am asking is that theorists like Baars, Noe and Pepin meet the same burden of proof when the make claims about what people’s theoretical beliefs prove about behaviour and type of mind.

Patricia and Paul Churchland’s most recent books ‘Touching a Nerve’ and ‘Plato’s Camera’ respectively are interesting attempts extend their ideas on how neuroscience can expand our understanding of traditional philosophical problems. Patricia’s book is written in a more confessional mode than Paul’s as she intermingles her scientific evidence with stories from her own life and how her science relates to her experiences. Also her book uses a lot more neuroscientific and psychological data than Paul’s does. She brings together interesting evidence on both the nature of morality and in particular on the nature of consciousness.

            Paul’s book on the other hand is more theoretical and aims to show how connectionist models and the more neurally realistic Hebbian learning can be used to solve traditional problems in epistemology. Paul’s book can be read as a neurally focused version of Quine’s attempt to Naturalize Epistemology. I have long called for our Naturalized Epistemology to be updated in light of new scientific evidence. Since Quine’s seminal paper ‘Epistemology Naturalized’ was written over fifty five years ago most of the philosophical attention has been on whether Quine’s conception of epistemology can actually deal with traditional epistemological concerns. So we have had challanges from people like Stroud that Quine’s project reduces to skepticism, and we have had claims that Quine’s Naturalized Epistemology cannot deal with Normative questions. This back and forth has been very instructive and important however I think that it some philosophers have become so obsessed with replying to non-naturalist critics that they haven’t developed an adequate Naturalized Epistemology.

            As an undergraduate philosophy student whenever the topic of Naturalized Epistemology came up Quine would be mentioned, nobody seemed to care that people like Chomsky had radically different views of how people went from stimulus to science. Few cared that Chomsky dismissed Quine’s epistemology as unscientific behaviourist nonsense. Likewise at the same time as Chomsky was busy criticising Quine, the developmentalist psychologist Piaget was sketching his own theory of Genetic Epistemology. While there were some conferences where people like Piaget, Fodor and Putnam thrashed these issues out, typically in philosophy circles when Naturalized Epistemology was mentioned it was Quine’s project which was thought of.

            In my own Phd I tried sort out the debate between Chomsky and Quine on the nature of epistemology and naturalism. I also tried to update the debate in light of current research in both cognitive science and developmental psychology. However I didn’t deal with neuroscientific data. In this sense I find Paul’s book a breath of fresh air. He brings the project of naturalising epistemology much closer to reality by trying to make it neurologically realistic. When philosophers are debating whether epistemology can be naturalized it is this Paul Churchland’s project not Quine’s (no disrespect to Quine intended I am merely acknowledging that the science has evolved since his time) that they should be engaging with.

            I think that both Patricia and Paul’s books should be read together, taken as a whole they offer a detailed introduction to Neurophilosophy and dispel some of the caricatures of the discipline that are offered in the literature. Nonetheless there are aspects of both books that I disagree with to varying degrees.

            I think that Patricia’s explanation of consciousness is excellent and one of the most compelling that I have heard from anyone on the topic. She notes the simple point that the most basic experience we have of being consciousness and not conscious is the difference between being asleep and being awake. So the study of  the activation of the brain during sleep will obviously be an invaluable tool to study consciousness. So we can study and contrast the brain states responsible for being awake, dreaming (REM and non REM), and being in a deep sleep. Sleep is evolutionarily ancient. Even fruit flies sleep, (see Robert Greenspan), also caffine keeps fruitflies awake and  they respond to anesthetics in the same way as humans do. (Touching a Nerve p. 227).Churchland notes that a good way to study sleep is by studying sleep disorders.

She begins by studying sleep walking disorders. She notes that when sleepwalking our perceptual systems are working well enough to be able to perceptually guide our way around the world, we can open doors, we can find our way to places we know (our friends house etc), but our perception is not normal. We may not see or recognise people on front of us, we may give no indication of hearing what somebody says to us. So while we do have some sort of perceptual abilities it is different from the perceptual abilities of our conscious selves. We also typically  do not remember our behaviour while sleep walking. We are also not aware of  the bizzareness of our behaviour (e.g. walking down the road naked), while such behaviour would be embarassing if done while conscious. It would be inappropriate to claim that people who sleep walk are unconscious, rather it makes more sense to say that they are experiencing an alternative form of consciousness. Studying the neruoscience of this alternative form of consciousness will help us to understand the nature of standard forms of consciousness.

            One hypothesis is that sleepwalking is a form of active dreaming in which the normal paralysis which occurs during dreams is switched off. Patricia Churchland denies that this is the case. To do this she discusses some contemporary neurological research into the nature of dreams. She discusses how REM does not occur during deep sleep. People who are woken up during REM typically report having dreams. However this fact should not be interpreted as indicating that dreams do not occur in non-REM states, or in deep sleep states. People who are woken up in deep sleep still sometimes report that they have had dreams. Though their dreams are not typically reported to be as visual during deep sleep.  She reports that brain scans of people sleep walking show that the brain activity which occurs during sleeping does not occur when sleepwalking. So she concludes that sleepwalking is not the same thing as dreaming. She also notes the strange fact that the brain activity which occurs during REM are closer to those a person has when awake than a person has when in a deep sleep. One difference between the brain activity of a person who is dreaming and the brain activity of a person who is awake is that the awake person’s prefrontal cortex is more active. She correctly notes that this brief discussion of consciousness shows us that a great way to understand the nature of consciousness is to study the neuroscientific difference between people who are awake and people who are unconscious i.e. in a deep sleep. 

She agrees with Dennett that there is no single location in the brain where consciousness occurs, and argues that there are particular structures in the brain (along with the looping links connecting those structures) which are necessary for the maintence of consciousness. She maintains that it is important to distinguish between two things:                                      

(1) The structures that support being conscious of ANYTHING AT ALL.

(2) The structures that support being conscious of THIS AND THAT (the contents of consciousness).

She discusses the work of Nicholas Schiff a neurologist who studies disorders of consciousness. His research has lead him to the central thalamus and its ingoing and outgoing pathways as giving us the capacity to respond to the world. She argues that there are looping neurons from these upper layers of cortex projecting  right back  to the ribbon  in the central thalamus. (ibid p. 235) The looping back allows for maintaining  an especially potent but transient  connection for a chunk of time.

She argues that some regions of the thalamus that connect to, for example, the visual area do so in a domain specific manner.  So the retina is connected LGN in the thalamus, however the LGN projects only to the visual cortex area V1-not to everywhere, not even to everywhere in the visual cortex (ibid p. 235). This is typical of other sensory modalities.  She calls this a system by system development of a specific signal. She notes that things are different in the central thalamus, the pattern of the central thalamus suggests a different set of functions: be awake and alert or down regulate and-doze. She makes the point that distinction of functions in the thalamus corresponds with the distinction between being aware of something in particular and being aware of anything.

She goes on to say that there are other aspects of the central thalamus which seperates it from other cortico-thalamic systems such as the style of the neuronal activity. The central thalamus has unique connectivity and unique behaviour. Think of this interms of the awake/sleep cycle. During awake and dreaming states the neurons fire in bursts at an unusually high rate (800 to a 1000 times per second). This bursting pattern is not displayed during dreamless sleep.  So this strongly indicates that the central thalamus plays a big role in making people conscious.

The ribbon of neurons that is the central thalamus is controlled by the brain cell and regulates the cortical neurons to ready themselves from consciousness. Put succintly BRAINSTEM + CENTRAL THALAMUS + CORTEX  is the support structure for consciousness.

She importantly describes what happens when the Central Thalamus is damaged:

(1)   If a lesion occurs on one side of the Central Thalamus people tend not to be conscious of the effected side. If both sides are effected then the person is in a coma.

To be aware of something, say a dog barking one needs to  have the brainstem, central thalamus, and upper layer of cortex in its on state. Central thalamic neurons must be firing in bursts that ride the lower frequency brain wave of 40hertz. In addition, the specific areas of the thalamus (for sound and sight, respectively) must be talking to the proprietary areas of the cortex.She asks how we manage to be conscious of a complex scene when a lot of the consciousness must be backed up by unconscious processes.  She relies on Bernard Baars Global Workspace Theory to explain these facts.

Baars argued that the important way to begin was by listing the significant psychological properties and capacities associated with being aware of SPECIFIC events.

(1)   Our conscious experiences are highly integrated and so rely on a plethora of background unconscious work. (Think of being conscious of what a person says to you; a massive amount of unconscious processing of syntax, phonology etc takes place behind the scenes to determine what you experience).

(2)   Your background information about say your dog are available to help you decide to  what to do in a novel situation. So your background information must interact with your perceptual experiences.

(3)   Consciousness has a limited capacity. You cannot follow two conversations at once.

(4)   Novelty in a situation calls for conscious attention.

(5)   Information that is conscious can be accesed by many other brain functions.

Churchland notes that these five proposals together provided an interesting framework to try and study consciousness empirically. This Global Workspace Theory to indicated the importance of a rich integration of information from different sources to yield conscious experience. The idea is that consciousness is a consumer of information from a variety of different sources. This leads us to another question: what is the difference in the brain for non-conscious processing and conscious processing?

One way to test for what is going on in the brain when a process is non-conscious instead of conscious, she notes is MASKING TESTS.If the word DOG is flashed to a screen followed by a delay of about 500milli seconds and then xxxx is flashed you will consciously see first DOG then xxxx. However if DOG is followed immediately by xxxx you will not see DOG only xxxx. Experimenters who want to get experimental traction on the difference between conscious and non-conscious processes scan the brains of people who have DOG masked and those who do not. What results have they found?

When the visual signal DOG is masked (not consciously perceived), only early visual areas (in the back of the brain) show activation. By contrast, when the visual signal  is consciously seen, the posterior activity has spread to more frontal regions, including pariential, temporal and prefrontal areas. Dehaene and Changeux refer to this as GLOBAL IGNITION.This GLOBAL IGNITION theory is of spreading activation from the posterior to anterior regions nicely confirms Baars GLOBAL WORKSPACE theory which states that conscious perception involves global connectivity in the brain.

Churchland speaks of RICH CLUB NEURONS as being central to making the wiring of the brain cost effective and ensuring that communication between the brain is efficient.  An important discovery of neuroscience was that the connectivity underlying global ignition was that all mammals have a SMALL WORLD organisation. NOT EVERY NEURON IS CONNECTED TO EVERY OTHER NEURON. However any given neuron is only a few connections away from other neurons. Some neurons are extremely well connected we call these rich club neurons.

A signal may follow this sequence: from a Locally Connected Neuron to a Feeder Neuron to a Rich Club Neuron to a different Feeder Neuron and then on to a new Local Neuron. A Small World Organization with hubs is more efficient than having every neuron connected to every other neuron.But how does the Rich Club framework help us connect with the Central Thalamus?Well consciousness of sensory signals involves linking spatially quiet seperate regions of the brain. As attention shifts, the prevailing linkage weakens and other neuronal pools now take their turn in making strong links. So the burst of spikes displayed by the central thalamus are responsible say catching the gist of a lecture while the local connectivity of neurons within groups provides the context of the gist. Studies of the effect of Anesthetics on people support the above model. Anesthetics work by messing up signals between neurons thus blocking global ignition.There are three properties that are very important in the neurobiology of consciousness.

(1)   Rich Club Neurons and their ability to make fast connections to other Rich Club Neurons, thereby providing a scaffolding for rich integration of information.

(2)   Global Ignition for brain events that reach consciousness.

(3)   The Central Thalamus with its role in enabling specific contents of awareness during the awake and dreaming states.

So that in nutshell is Patricia’s theory of consciousness. As  a summary of the state of play of scientific research into consciousness it is excellent. However from a philosophical point of view it leaves a lot of questions unanswered. Philosophers like, for example, Thomas Nagel, David Chalmers and even John Searle would agree with a the scientific evidence provided by Patricia but argue that it leaves the philosophical questions untouched.

            Nagel argues that consciousness emerges from brain processes but the subjective experience of consciousness cannot be reduced to the material brain. While John Searle has argued that consciousness is a biological phenomena, it is an emergent entity hence it is something different from the material basis that it emerged from. David Chalmers notes that explaining the neural correlates of consciousness is what he calls the “Easy Problem” of consciousness, and it leaves the hard problem (explaining how our actual subjective experience emerges these neural correlates) untouched. So the trio of philosophers I have mentioned could justly complain that Patricia is ignoring the philosophical problems that they are concerned with.

            In her ‘Touching a Nerve’ she does briefly criticize Chalmers’ views by arguing that his negative claims about whether consciousness can be explained by neuroscience lead to no real explanatory research programmes. His entirely negative claims are she argues are largely irrelevant to the ongoing scientific research. However it is imperative as philosophers operating within the space of reasons that we explore what the relevance that this scientific data has for philosophical views on the nature of consciousness.

            Patricia Churchland like Paul is famous for adopting the approach of eliminative materialism. However she has also said on many occasions that she is not an eliminativist about consciousness. Her eliminativism about folk theory is not as it is sometimes presented as a kind of a priori philosophical position which she adopts. She merely argues that just like some of our folk physics terms were eliminated as we learned more in theoretical physics, so some aspects of our folk psychology MAY have to be eliminated as we learn more about neuroscience. So her claim was an empirical one not some kind of a priori claim. When it comes to consciousness she does not expect a theory of consciousness to eliminate our ordinary conscious experiences, however she does expect that it may in some cases radically alter our intuitions about consciousness. In her 1998 paper ‘What Should We Expect From a Theory of Consciousness’ she correctly notes that reduction does not always mean elimination. So, for example, she notes that nobody thinks that light is not real as a result of Maxwell’s equations. She surmises that like Pain will not cease to be real as a result of future discoveries in neuroscience. She admits that in the past science has shown that, for example Caloric was not real. So science can show that certain theoretic terms pick out substances and properties which are not real, and she admits that future science may show that our folk-psychology of belief desires is a bad theory which does not pickout a real entity in the empirical world. Yet she claims that future science will not explain away pain. This is a very strange position.

            In one sense it is a position which a lot of philosophers and the man on the street would accept. The vast majority of people would agree that no matter what we learn about the neuroscience of pain it cannot take away from the basic fact that pain feels intrinsically awful. Based on this intepretation of Patricia it would appear that while she thinks that beliefs and caloric are theoretic entities which are subject to refutation by future science, our experience of pain is a basic fact not a theory and hence it cannot be refuted by future science.

            However the above intepretation of Patricia is difficult to maintain in light of other things she says about consciousness. She admits that our views about the nature of conscious experience have been modified as we have learned more about it through neuroscience. She cites discoveries such as Sperry’s discoveries about the nature of commissurotomy, research into sleep and dreaming by people like Hobson, aswell as the discovery of blindsight and argues that they have cast doubt on our intuitive conception of what consciousness amounts to. However she argues that while these experiments show the need to reconceptualise our basic theory of consciousness they do not eliminate our actual conscious experience (Churchland: What We Should Expect From a Theory of Consciousness).

            When she speaks of our actual conscious experiences which remain even after we have modified our theory of consciousness then she seems to being a realist about subjective experience in a similar manner to Thomas Nagel. Her view is uncongenial to the claims that Dennett makes in his ‘Consciousness Explained’. Now obviously there is nothing wrong with siding with Nagel against Dennett but it is surprising given her naturalist leanings. I think it is worth exploring this issue in more detail as it is a very important philosophical issue.

            Nagel argues that there are facts of the matter about subjective experience even though we may not ever be in a position to know precisely what these facts of the matter are. Furthermore he thinks that there are intrinsic facts about our subjective experiences independently of our theorising about these experiences. Patricia Churchland who holds that our consciousness will not be explained away even if our conceptions of it are seems to have landed in a similar position as Nagel. She seems to hold that there is something given in our experiences independent of our theorising about them. 

   CHOMSKY AND THE SCIENCE FORMING FACULTY

Chomsky argues that our ability to construct scientific theories is made possible by an innate domain specific faculty, he calls it our Science-Forming Faculty. It is worth pausing to consider this faculty and its nature.  The Science-Forming Faculty[1] is connected with the fact that our ordinary theories of the world are underdetermined. If one were to take any theory of the world it would be supported by a certain amount of data.  Chomsky’s point is that the data does not just imply one theory; rather there are countless theories which are compatible with the data but which are incompatible with each other. Such underdetermination has the air of a truism about it. Chomsky claims that humans are innately constrained in the types of theories they find plausible and therefore accept. He puts it as follows:

Because we share across the species a kind of science-forming faculty that limits us, if you will, but at the same time provides the possibilities of creating explanatory theories that extend far beyond the evidence that is available…it is worth paying attention to what the scientist is doing when a new theory is created…First of all the scientist has very limited evidence. The theory goes far beyond the evidence. Secondly, much of the evidence that is available is disregarded; that is in the hope that someone else will take care of it. At every stage in the history of science even normal science, there is a high degree of idealisation, selection of evidence even distortion of evidence (Magee 1978 p.187).

 In other words the SFF constrains the types of theories which humans can formulate.  At this point, an obvious question arises: Is Chomsky correct about us having a SFF? Does this faculty help us construct theories which in fact correspond with how things are in the world independent of us?

Chomsky’s answer to the above question is as follows:

The successful natural sciences, then, fall within the intersection of the scope of the SFF and the nature of the world. They treat the (scattered and limited) aspects of the world that we can grasp and comprehend by naturalistic inquiry, in principle. The intersection is a chance product of human nature (200b, 82).

So Chomsky is here claiming that it is just a chance product of how our minds are constituted that we can form accurate theories about some aspects of the objective world. While our SFF may help us construct true theories about some aspects of the world, its very scope and limits determine that there are some areas of the world that we cannot comprehend.

Chomsky holds that the SFF is deeply connected to the Problems/Mysteries distinction. He takes the fact that humans are epistemically bounded to be a truism that any naturalistic philosopher will accept, ‘…We are after all, biological organisms, not angels…’ (ibid., 83-84). Creatures created by evolution are bound to be contingent and fallible, having particular cognitive apparatus which works brilliantly in some domains but totally fails in other areas. Rats are a perfect example: there are some mazes which they simply cannot be taught to solve. Chomsky notes this point claiming: ‘There is no more reason to suppose humans to be capable of solving every problem they can formulate than to expect rats to be able to solve any maze’(1986b, 231). In another discussion of the SFF he claims, ‘The scope and limits are relative to humans; rats and Martians have different problems and mysteries’ (2000b, 83-84).

Chomsky claims that certain questions such as freewill, why a person makes one choice rather than another, are a mystery, whereas he argues other questions are mere problems, such as the questions of physics and questions about the syntax of natural language. He furthermore claims that we do not have to consider such questions as meaningless; rather we can consider them legitimate questions that the structure of our brains will not allow us to answer. In his Basque lectures he commented:

You can give a naturalist interpretation of such matters, and maybe there is a right question and we just cannot formulate it, because we are just not built that way. So if there is one we may not find it (2009, 47).

Chomsky’s discussion of our SFF commits him to a view of reality which is in some respects Kantian. Both thinkers believe that how we view the world is governed by our innate faculties of the mind. For both, reality conforms to our mode of cognition[2].Furthermore, like Kant, Chomsky believes that there is a ‘thing in itself’ which extends beyond what we can know. Clarification of Chomsky’s position is obviously needed. He believes that whatever we know about the world of physics is known because of the innate structure of our minds.  He further believes that there are some facts about the world that we cannot know because of the way our minds are structured. The limit on possible hypotheses which we can make is, Chomsky admits, similar to what Peirce called the principle of abduction. However, unlike Peirce, he does not think that there is anything about the theory of evolution which will guarantee that our SFF will allow us to answer all the questions we want to answer (2000b, 83).

Chomsky is committed to the view that there is a determinate world which exists independent of our cognition. He also believes that what we know can be known only insofar as it conforms to our mode of cognition, so the real world cannot be exhaustively known by humans. He captured this point in his Fara lectures when he used the metaphor of a scientist being like a person looking for his keys at night centring his search around a lamp post; the person is looking for his keys there not because he has lost them beside the lamp, but rather because this is the only place which is lit up. For Chomsky, the scientist achieves success by limiting his researches to the small areas where he can construct intelligible theories. Furthermore, he counsels that we should the treat these scientific theories as being more real than the ordinary world of empirical experience.

Ultimately, Chomsky can be construed as believing that humans are born with an innate SFF, which limits and makes possible the type of scientific theories which we can accept. These theories accurately capture certain aspects of the real world, but are ill equipped to deal with certain problems; hence part of the world will permanently remain hidden from us in darkness. Chomsky’s view on science can be captured with an image which Locke employed in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding. This picture compared a scientist to a person who is positioned within a closet with some light shining in the doors towards him. While the light gives him some understanding of the real world, it is only a fragmentary limited grasp of the world[3]. In other words, the world is partially opaque to us because of the structure of our minds.

 THE EVIDENCE FOR THE FACULTY

We saw in the last section that Chomsky compares the faculty of language with the SFF; he does, however, note a distinction between them. He spells out this difference as follows:

In some domains-acquisition of language, object perception, etc.-the growth of knowledge just happens to us, in effect. The mental faculty grows from its initial to its steady state without choice, though not necessarily without effort of willed action. In other domains- the natural sciences, for example- the growth of knowledge involves deliberate inquiry involving hypothesis formation and conformation; guided no doubt by ‘abductive’ constraints on potential hypotheses as well as other equally obscure factors that enter into choice of idealization and the like. The basic elements of rational inquiry may have some of the properties of such cognitive systems as the language faculty, though the ways in which they are employed is surely quite different: Scientific Knowledge does not grow in the mind of someone placed in the appropriate environment (1980a, 140).

This claim of Chomsky’s obviously needs clarification. He is making two key points: (1) the SFF does not just grow when a human is placed in an appropriate environment, and (2) the SFF uses a ‘generate and test’ model to construct its theories as well as certain abductive principles which Chomsky does not spell out. Since a generate and test model is easily captured by an empiricist model of the mind, he must think that it is the abductive aspect of the SFF which distinguishes it from other theories of how we develop our scientific abilities. This leads to the question of what the nature of this abductive principle is.

Chomsky has rarely explicitly discussed the exact nature of this abductive principle. However, when discussing the problems and mysteries distinction, he vaguely points towards the type of considerations which our abductive principle forces on us. Here are his reflections on the matter:

Equipped with SFF, people confront ‘problem situations’, consisting of certain cognitive states (of belief, understanding, or misunderstanding), questions are posed, and so on. Often SFF yields only a blank stare. Sometimes it provides ideas about how the questions might be answered or reformulated, or the cognitive state modified, ideas that can then be evaluated in ways that SFF offers (empirical test, consistency with other parts of science, criteria of intelligibility and elegance, etc.) (2000b, 83)

What is central here is the manner he claims the SFF evaluates questions. According to Chomsky, the SFF uses empirical tests, consistency with other parts of science, and a criterion of intelligibility and elegance. He adds an etc. at the end of the paragraph which implies that the SFF uses other criteria; however, we have no way of knowing what they are until he explicates them. Empirical testing is presumably what Chomsky refers to as trial and error, so this is something which can be accounted for by general intelligence. There is no reason to believe that consistency with other parts of science cannot be achieved by an inductive reasoner who has internalised a bit of logic. Our criterion of intelligibility and elegance is something which influences our thinking in aesthetics, as well as our reasoning in politics, etc. There is no reason to believe that our criterion of intelligibility and elegance is limited to a particular faculty of the mind.

The evidence that Chomsky has offered in favour of the SFF is so far extremely limited. He has pointed out that scientific theories are underdetermined by experience. This UD is basically an APS. However, it is meaningless unless he can provide an account of how much data is enough data for a scientist to learn from. Until such time that Chomsky provides such a theory, for him to say that such and such scientific theory cannot be learned from experience is meaningless.

Furthermore, Chomsky has never been able to provide a detailed theory of what the nature of the SFF is, and the few details he has provided do not distinguish his views from those of an empiricist. So in this sense he has not provided enough evidence to justify his postulation of a SFF. However there is a different strand of argumentation which Chomsky sometimes uses to support his claim that people have a SFF.  He points to the timing of new scientific discoveries and their reception by the public. Obviously people do not develop scientific theories at a fixed age. Chomsky clearly knows this; he is not claiming something absurd like children automatically acquire Newtonian Physics by the age of 5, and Einsteinian Physics by the age of 7. However, he does make claims about the fact that people hit on new scientific theories at the same time, and once these scientific theories are discovered people accept them as obviously true. In this context he is talking about historical time not developmental time. Chomsky claims that Peirce first recognised these points and in Of Minds and Language he cites approvingly Peirce’s conception of the matter:

Peirce’s sense was very straightforward and, I think, basically correct. He says you want to account for the fact that science does develop, and that people do hit upon theories which sort of seem to be true. He was also struck by the fact, and this is correct, that at a certain stage of science, a certain stage of understanding, everybody tends to come to the same theory, and if one person happens to come to it first, everybody says ‘Yes that’s right’ (2009, 3-4)

Here Chomsky is picking out what seems to be a real phenomenon. It does appear that for at least some scientific discoveries two great thinkers may hit upon the same idea at the same time, even though a generation beforehand nobody would have thought of the idea. Some examples from intellectual history are: Leibniz and Newton co-discovering infinitesimal calculus, Darwin and Wallace co-discovering the theory of evolution, and Frege and Russell co-discovering predicate calculus. However, it is hard to see how such facts can be used as evidence for a SFF. A more natural interpretation is that people like Darwin and Wallace hit upon the same discovery because they were hard working scientists who were able to build on the work of their predecessors. However, the question of how many new discoveries are made possible by prior theories is a question for biographers of scientists and historians of science to answer. Chomsky will need to engage with such thinkers if his speculations are to be given any substance.

Chomsky not only appeals to the fact that great scientific thinkers hit upon the same ideas at the same time to support his theory, he also claims that when such discoveries are made people recognise them as obviously true.  Here he is presumably claiming that people find such discoveries obviously true because they interpret them using their own SFF. Now, while I do not want to engage in amateur intellectual history, the historical record strongly suggests that Chomsky is mistaken on this point. Darwin’s theory of evolution was not greeted by the scientific community as being obviously true. In fact the theory sparked massive debates and controversies. Newton’s infinitesimal calculus was severely criticised by George Berkeley amongst others. In fact most of the great scientific discoveries have been greeted with severe resistance; they have not been just accepted as obviously true upon discovery.  This leads us to the question of how Chomsky’s speculations on the SFF can handle the people who did not find Darwin’s theory of evolution obviously true. Did they have a malfunctioning SFF? Did they have no SFF? Or was the faculty overruled by a stronger faculty in the mind? Chomsky does not even consider such questions. It is obvious that if he wants to construct an accurate theory of a SFF he will need to mesh this theory with actual facts from the history of science and sociological studies of people’s reactions to new scientific discoveries. As in the area of language production, when it comes to scientific discoveries and their reception, Chomsky will need to sketch an accurate description of performance in order to justify any claims he makes about competence. In the absence of such a description Chomsky’s claims remain nothing but idle speculation.

Questions about the history of science raise another interesting point. Most historians believe that science was developed in the seventeenth century. When Chomsky discusses the SFF he usually does it in relation to modern science. John Collins in his paper ‘‘On the Very Idea of a Science Forming Faculty’’ claimed that we could view Chomsky’s SFF in two different ways. The first way he calls the narrow interpretation; on this interpretation the faculty is responsible for our grasp of science in the modern sense. The broad interpretation claims that our faculty is responsible for our ability to construct rational theories to account for our experiences, so this faculty would account for far more than just modern science.

The narrow interpretation is the one which Chomsky seems to intend us to use. All of the examples which he uses pertain to seventeenth century science. However, if this is the account that Chomsky has in mind, then it is seriously in error. Chomsky concedes that his SFF is not on a par with the language faculty in terms of evidence in favour of it. While UD is used as an argument for both faculties, there is much more evidence which can be adduced in favour of a language faculty than for a SFF. Collins notes that there are four tests which can be used to argue that a particular ability is made possible by a distinct faculty: (1) a faculty-based competence must be uniform across the species, it cannot be a culturally specific capacity; (2) the competence must follow a strict ontogenetic course, explicit teaching must not make a significant difference to the speed of the development of a final competence arrived at; (3) the competence must, to some degree, be invariant over various pathologies, injuries and differences of intelligence, so that a disturbance of a face recognition faculty should not necessarily lead to a disturbance of the language faculty; (4) the competence should reach normal maturity in the face of a poverty of stimulus (2002, 135).

Whether we interpret the SFF in the broad or narrow sense will influence whether we think that the SFF meets conditions 1-4. It is plausible to say that all cultures have science in the broad sense of constructing theories to explain, predict and control their experiences. However, science in the narrow sense is definitely culture specific, and did not even exist five hundred years ago. So, taken in the broad sense, we could say that science is species specific and does occur in all cultures. However, science in the narrow sense obviously does not occur in all cultures. In both the broad and narrow interpretations obviously scientific competence does not seem to follow a strict ontogenetic course and teaching does make a difference to it. In both interpretations the competence is not invariant over pathologies.  Furthermore, understanding whether the competence arrives in the face of APS is impossible until Chomsky specifies how much stimulus we need in order to learn[4] science in its broad or narrow sense. Until we have such a theory, it is impossible to answer the question or understand whether the stimulus is indeed impoverished.

So, as of yet, Chomsky has not provided us with any good reason to postulate a SFF in either the broad or the narrow sense.  He has given us no reason to think that such a faculty is needed to account for our scientific knowledge. His primary reason for postulating the faculty is because he thinks that the faculty can help us overcome UD.

In the next blog I will show that Quine linguistic conception of science is also incapable of accounting for our scientific competence. In the final blog I will show what how Paul Churchland’s model in Plato’s Camera in terms of non-linguistic maps can deal with problems which elude the Quinean and Chomskian models.

      CHOMSKY AND QUINE ON THE NATURE OF REFERENCE

…Suppose Peter says that Joe Sixpack voted for a living wage because he’s worried about his childs health. Are we entitled to conclude that Peter believed the world to be constituted of such entities as Joe Sixpack, living wages, and health, and relations like voting-for and worrying-about that hold among them? Would the parallel inference be legitimate when Peter says that Tom visited Boston? If Peter says that the bank moved across the street after it was destroyed by fire, does he believe that among the things in the world there are some that can be destroyed but still be around, so that they can move? (Chomsky: New Horizons in The Study of Language and Mind)

As the above quote shows Chomsky argues that if we use a term in language it does not follow automatically that the term commits us ontologically. So if we take terms  like: flaw, the average man, unicorn, it does not follow that because these terms exist in our language that they refer to mind independent entities.  He correctly stresses that we should not read off our ontology from our ordinary way of speaking. In another context he mentions how our ordinary concepts reflect intricate and surprising constraints on how we can interpret them, he also believes that these constraints are best explained interms of innate concepts. These constraints will to a certain extent determine how we use our concepts to refer.  Chomsky labels these constraints an I-variant of Frege’s telescope, implying that it is through the lense of these constraints that we can refer to entities in the world. So, for example, if we take the word ‘London’, this word has various different properties some of which are contradictory:

We can regard London with or without regard to its population: from one point of view, it is the same city if its people desert it; from another, we can say that London came to have a harsher feel to it through the Thatcher years, a comment on how people act and live. Referring to London, we can be talking about a location or area, people who sometimes live there, the air above it (but not too high), buildings, institutions, etc., in various combinations  (as in London is so unhappy, ugly and polluted that it should be destroyed and rebuilt 100 miles away, still being the same city). Such terms as London  are used to talk about the actual world, but neither are or are believed to be things-in-the world with the properties of  the intricate modes of reference that a city name encapsulates. (NHLM, p. 37)

So terms such as ‘London’ are used to talk about the actual world but, according to Chomsky, people do not think that there are things in the world with the properties of the intricate modes of reference that a city name encapsulates.  Chomsky’s discussion of the vagaries of reference here will remind people of Quine’s similar discussion in chapter 4 of Word and Object:

Insofar as it is left unsettled how far down the spectrum toward yellow or up toward blue a thing can be and still count as green, ‘green’ is vague. Insofar as it is left unsettled where to withhold ‘muddy water’ in favour of ‘wet mud’, ‘water’ and ‘mud’ are vague. In so far as it is left unsettled how far from the summit of Mount Rainier one can be and still count as on Mount Rainier, ‘Mount Rainier’ is vague. (Quine: Word and Object, p. 126)

In the above section Quine is discussing the vagueness of terms and of how the extension of the terms are unclear. Here Quine is reminding us that while some sentences may appear to be purely referential one of the terms in the sentence does not actually refer at all and is in fact a purely relational term. So clearly Quine and Chomsky are making similar points about language. The points being that ordinary language is shot through with vagueness and ambiguity and that while some terms may appear to be referential when analysed it turns out that they are not referential at all.

Quine emphasises that the vagueness of term is a natural consequence of word learning. So, for example, he claims that the indefinite objects of a vague term are the terms which bear only a slight similarity to the objects for which we have been rewarded for verbally responding to in the past.  So if we think of a child learning a word by induction through observing societys usage of the term, the vague cases will be the cases for which induction is most inconclusive because of a lack of evidence.  Quine argues that the evidence will not be there to be gathered because of society’s members having themselves had to accept similarly fuzzy edges when they were learning.

Vague words can he claims be either singular or general.  He gives the following example of vague terms:

Insofar as it is left unsettled how far down the spectrum toward yellow or up toward blue a thing can be and still count as green, ‘green’ is vague. Insofar as it is left unsettled where to withhold ‘muddy water’ in favour of ‘wet mud’, ‘water’ and ‘mud’ are vague. In so far as it is left unsettled how far from the summit of Mount Rainier one can be and still count as on Mount Rainier, ‘Mount Rainier’ is vague. (Word and Object, p.126)

According to Quine a general term true of objects can be vague in two different ways. Firstly because of the several boundaries of the objects, and secondly because of the ambiguity as to whether to include or exclude marginal objects.

So, for example, if we take a term like ‘mountain’ it is vague as to how much terrain we can count as a mountain, where exactly the cut off point is? It is also vague as to what lesser entities we can even count as mountains at all.

Ambiguous terms differ from Vague terms. A Vague term is a term which we are unsure how to apply to marginal objects, whereas an ambigous term may variously true of certain objects, and false of them aswell. Quine, gives the example of the term ‘light’,  this, he argues, will be true of ‘dark feathers’ but false of them in another sense. In the first sense we will take ‘light’ as ‘light as a feather’, in the second we will take ‘light’ as ‘a beam of light’. Quine claims that a partial explanation of ambiguity can be achieved by considering the linguistic term homonyms.  His gloss on homonyms is as follows:

Lexicographers and grammarians have long permitted themselves to treat words otherwise than as linguistic forms, by declaring of a form that it functions sometimes as one word and sometimes as another. (ibid, p. 129)

This of course leaves us with another question such as when do we have two homonyms as opposed to one ambiguous word? According to Quine lexicographers suit their convenience when trying to answer such questions. So if we take the example of ‘bore’, in the sense of ‘she bore her child’, and in the different sense of ‘she is a bore’ the lexicogropher will treat ‘bore’ in these sentences as homonyms because of their different etymology, and different grammatical functions.

Quine claims that we deliberately create ambiguity when we name somebody. He uses the example of naming somebody ‘Paul’, this name is not a general term true of many people it is rather a singular term with wide ambiguity. The evidence for this claim is based on a grammatical fact about general terms. A general term like ‘Dog’, permits the following grammatical constructions and it is the possibility of such constructions that marks out a term as a general term: a dog, the dog, dogs etc. Obviously in the case of ‘Paul’ we are not permitted to use such constructions as ‘A Paul’, ‘The Paul’, ‘Pauls’ etc.  The example of ‘Paul’ distinguishes between general terms and ambiguous singular terms in terms of the grammar of english.

Now though Quine asks us to consider a general term; and he asks us how we can decide how much of the terms multiple applicability is due to ambiguity and how much is due to generality? To decide between the two alternatives Quine gives some concrete examples of terms with multiple applications such the following:

[1] That is a hard question.

[2] That is a hard table.

[3] The proposition ‘either it is going to rain or it is not going to rain’ is true.

[4] The proposition ‘it will rain tomorrow’ is true.

[5] Material objects exist.

[6] Numbers exist.

Some philosophers claim that the above terms (in italics) are different uses of the same ambiguous terms. Quine disagrees and claims rather that they are merely very general terms:

Why  not view ‘true’ as unambiguous but very general, and recognize the difference between true logical laws and true confessions as a difference merely between logical laws and confessions?

Ultimately Quine suggests that we treat terms as being ambiguous when they can be clearly true and false of one and the same thing from utterance to utterance.  However he reminds us that while this may be our best way of discovering what terms are ambiguous it certainly does not follow that terms which vary in truth value can all be explained in terms of ambiguity. He gives the example of the statement ‘The door is open’ which changes its truth value depending on the movement of the door but which is not an ambiguous statement.

A further point which Quine makes is that ambiguity can have implications for composite words in the sense that such words can be interpreted in the attributive sense and the syncategorematic sense. Quine explains this distinction in the following manner:

One way it enters is through indeterminacy between the truly attributive and the syncategorematic use of certain adjectives. Thus consider the rich little word ‘poor’  When it is ostensibly in attributive position it may either have truly attributive use, in which case it may either impute poverty or express pity, or it may be syncategorematic, suggesting ‘badly’. If in  ‘poor violinist’ we take the use of poor as truly attributive, then poor violinsts are poor (or perhaps pitiable) and they are violinists; if we take it in the syncategorematic way,  then poor violinsts need to be neither poor nor pitiable nor even, by descent standards, violinists. (ibid p.132)

Quine further clarifys his views on this topic by explaining that when it comes to ambiguity of syncategorematic compounds that the ambigious term is the compound not the adjective; because an adjective in a syncategorematic use is not used as a term. Quine offers a good example of this type of sentence: ‘I passed nobody on the street’ where nobody is clearly not being used as a term.

Like Quine Chomsky also discusses homonymy:

Consider the word ‘Bank’  (savings, river). We can say that:

(1) The bank burned down and then it moved across the street;

(2) The bank, which had raised the interest rate, was destroyed by fire; and

(3) The bank lowered the interest rate to keep from being blown up.

Referential dependence is preserved across the abstract concrete divide. Thus  (1) means that the building burned down and then the institution moved; similarly (2) and (3). But we cannot say that:

(4) The bank burned down and then it eroded; or

(5) The bank, which had raised the interest rate, was eroding fast; or

(6) The bank raised the interest rate without eroding.

Sentence (4) does not mean that the savings bank burned down and then the river bank eroded.

The facts are often clear, but not trivial. Thus, referentially dependent elements, even the most narrowly constrained, observe some distinctions but ignore others, pronouns, relatives, the ‘empty category’ that is the subject of ‘being blown up’ and eroding’. In the case of ‘bank’, the natural conclusion is that there are two Lis that happen to share the same I-sound (homonymy),  and that one of them,’savings bank’ is polysemous, like ‘book’: it provides a way of looking at the world that combines abstract and concrete properties, allowing referential dependence across these perspectives. (Chomsky, NHLM p. 180)

Chomsky is not here concerned with how to distinguish between an ambiguous general term and homonyms, his concern is with showing the complexity of our referential apparatus and how subject it is to internal constraints.

So he asks us to think of the linguistic form ‘Bank’ this written inscription (or spoken sound) is used to label two different concepts: (1) Bank as in river bank, (2) Bank as in financial institution. The key point to note in the above 6 examples is the referential dependence of the pronoun it on Bank and how this dependence changes depending on how we interpret the term ‘bank’. Thus in consider 1 in relation to 4:

(1) The bank burned down and then it moved across the street.

(4) The bank burned down and then it eroded.

A number of points should be obvious from the above sentences; firstly in 1 ‘Bank’ and ‘it’ are referentially dependent on each other. ‘Bank’ in 1 refers to a concrete object i.e a particular building, whereas ‘it’  refers to an abstract entity i.e. a financial institute, nonetheless despite this fact ‘Bank’ and ‘it’ are referentially dependent on each other in sentence 1. Now let us consider sentence (4)  we cannot treat ‘bank’ as in financial institution in the first part of the sentence and treat ‘it’ as refering to river bank in the second part. It is a fact about referential dependence that such a move is blocked.

While both thinkers agree about the ambiguity of language they use this point for different purposes. Quine who thinks that our scientific theories are a web of sentences which face the tribunal of experience as a corporate whole tries to tidy up our language by translating it into the syntax of quantification. Chomsky, on the other hand thinks that a different faculty of the mind (our Science Forming Faculty) is responsible for us developing our scientific theories so he argues that we don’t need to modify our language. Our ordinary language is vague for Chomsky but it is ok for the purposes of day to day communication. Chomsky only discusses the problems of conceiving of language as referential to illustrate what he conceives of as a poverty of stimulus for concept acquisition.

Chomsky’s primary point is that the words of our language are richly constrained by rules of the lexicon and that the meaning of a term is not to be discovered by pairing it with an external object in the world. He is making the point that no external object could have the properties which we attribute to our concepts such as being concrete and abstract at the same time. He cites approvingly Strawsons clsim that there is no such thing as a logically proper name. And he alludes to the fact that any act of naming will require a lot of stage setting (he cites Goodman explicitely) and he claims that this stage setting will be provided by our innate constitution.

Chomsky asks us what goes into refering to an object, he claims that such things, as design, intended and characteristic use and institutional role will be a decisive factor in deciding. He claims that if something looks like a book, but we are told that it was designed to be a paperweight we may come to think of it as a paperweight.  We can think of a book as being an abstract entity as in ‘War and Peace’ or a concrete entity as in a particular copy of ‘War and Peace’.

Chomsky believes that the proceeding discussion shows that the act of refering requires intensive mental architeciture. Chomsky makes the following point about reference:

The question, ‘to what does word X refer?’ has no clear sense, whether posed for Peter, or (more mysteriously) for some ‘common language’. In general, a word, even of the simplest kind, does not pick out an entity of the world, or of our ‘belief space’- which is not to deny, of course, that there are banks… The observations extend to the simplest referential and referentially dependent elements [pro-nouns, same, re build, etc]; or to proper names, which have rich semantic-conceptual properties derived in large part from our nature, with some overlay of experience. (NHLM p 181)

In the above section Chomsky is claiming something which seems somewhat bizzare; he is claiming that a question such as ‘to what does word x refer?’ is senseless, yet at the same time he is claiming that there are of course things like banks in the world.  This passage is difficult to interpret because Chomsky seems to be claiming that a question, ‘To what does the word ‘bank’ refer to? Is a senseless question, yet on the other hand he admits that banks do of course exist. So a sceptic could ask; Given that banks exist, why can’t we just claim that ‘banks’ refer to banks? The obvious reply to the above question is that if we take the word ‘bank’ on it own and say that it refers to bank, does this mean riverbank, lending bank, the abstract entity bank as a finantial institution, lending bank as in a particular building? This can only be decided by seeing how the word is used in sentences (its syntactic constraints), and by seeing the contexts the word is used in (pragmatic use of the word). So the reference of the world is determined by how the person uses the word, and the way  the person uses the word. In other words people refer not words.

Chomsky follows up his remarks on how we refer to bank by claiming that the act of naming is a kind of ‘world-making’, in Goodman’s sense of the word. However Chomsky believes that the world-making is made possible by our innate human nature not by experience. Chomsky notes at this point that his approach to semantic-interpretation has a traditional flavor to it and he likens it to the approach which was taken by seventeenth-century rationalist philosophers. For Chomsky according to rationalist philosophers claimed that we recieved the data of sense and interpreted it according to our innate cognoscitive powers. So for both Chomsky and the rationalists our interpretations of data was largely achieved as a result of our innate prowess.

Chomsky then goes on to quote Locke, Hume, Hobbes and Cudworth as exemplars of the view on semantic-interpretation which he favours.  This itself is a curious move considering that with the exception of Cudworth none of the above thinkers are infact rationalists. However given that we know from other writings that Chomsky knows that Hume and Locke were empiricists not rationalists we will not interpret him as making such a basic mistake. Chomsky’s quotes from Hobbes, Locke and Hume can be read as exemplifying the complexity of the ordinary concepts we use such as those of: tree, river, person etc. Furthermore Chomsky seems to be implying that concepts which such rich intricate structure cannot be learned from experience despite what the empiricist philosophers seem to think.

It is perhaps helpful at this point to illustrate some of the points which Hume, Locke, and Hobbes made about according to Chomsky:

A man will always be the same, whose actions and thoughts proceed all from the same beginning of motion, namely, that which was in his generation; and that will be the same river which flows from one and the same fountain, whether the same water, or other water, or something else than water, flow from thence (as in the classical case of the ship of Theseus); and that the same city, whose acts proceed continually from the same institution. ( NHLM, p. 183 quoting Hobbes)

This quote which Chomsky attributes to Hobbes is that the nature of identity whether of ships, or rivers, or cities can be traced to the point of their origin. So for example we cannot say that the river liffey and the river boyne are the same river because they originated from different sources. Chomsky then goes on to discuss how philosophers from Locke to Hume developed the concept of personal identity:

The inquiry into personal identity from Locke to Hume was concerned with organic unity, a broader notion. A tree or an animal ‘differs from a mass of matter,’ Locke noted by virtue of the ‘organization of parts, in one coherent body, partaking of one common life’ with ‘continued organization’ that comes from within, unlike artifacts. The identity of an oak resides in ‘a sympathy of parts’ contributing to ‘one common end’ of ‘support, nourismhment and propagation’ of the form, Shaftesbury added. Hume largely agreed, though taking ‘the identity, which we ascribe to the mind of men,’ and ‘the like kind… that we ascribe to vegetables and animal bodies,’ to be ‘only a fictitious one’ established by the imagination, not Shaftesbury’s ‘peculiar nature belonging to this form’ (NHLM, p.183)

So Chomsky goes from speaking sympathetically of Hobbes view that identity is to do with the source of the thing considered to move on to consider later views on the topic. He notes Locke’s view that the identity of a thing is concerned with its organic unity, and notes that Shaftesbury added to this account that a further criterion of calling something an entity is that it has a common end, e.g. propagation of the form. It is the Hume’s view that these identities we project onto things are just psychological constructs which particularly interests Chomsky.

Chomsky agrees with Hume on this point and thinks that when we look closely at the intricacy of concepts we will come to see that Hume is correct. He cites the work of Locke, to illustrate exactly how intricate and detailed concepts are. A person for Locke was a forensic term which had the following properties:

Person is a forensic term appropriating actions and their merit; and so belongs only to intelligent agents, capable of a law, and happiness and misery as well as accountability for actions and much else. (NHLM, p.183 Chomsky quoting Locke)

Chomsky then goes on to quote Locke’s views on the identity of a river which go beyond Hobbes views on the matter. Chomsky claims that such views on identity (which he considers a psychological matter not a metaphysical matter) barely skim the surface of what we know of concepts and that our understanding of these concepts can only be marginally be effected by experience. Once we realise the complex nature of these innate concepts our task in semantics becomes studying their nature, and how they interact with other faculties of the mind to yield our rich interpretation of the world. Our task is no longer to study the relation between concepts and the world.

One of the first points which come to mind upon reading Chomsky’s discussion of concepts is his reliance on complex philosophical theories of identity as a way of revealing incredible complexity of our concepts of person, tree, river etc. Chomsky views these complex concepts as being psychological ways of organising our experiences, and he claims that such philosophical exposition of concepts hardly skim the surface when compared with the knowledge that people implicitely have. According to Chomsky most of our conceptual knowledge is unconscious, this can be seen from the fact that ordinary language users can reliably distinguish between rivers, trees, and persons, as well as speak about such entities in a manner that has coherence and appropriatness to the situation, yet still be unable to give philosphical explications of such concepts.  So, for Chomsky, philosophers like Locke, Hobbes and Hume are doing their best to try and rationally reconstruct what it is that they implicitely know. So Chomsky can be fruitfully seen as a sort of inverse Hume. Hume believed that our ideas were faint copies of our impressions, wheras Chomsky believes that our ideas (concepts, lexical items) are innate rules which we unconsciously use to interpret the flux of experience.

Chomsky has often written about his picture semantics asthough it were diametrically opposed to Quine’s view on semantics. Here he criticises what he takes to be a modern consensus in the philosophy of language:

In general, there appears to be no reference  relation in human language and thought in the technical sense of Frege, Peirce, Tarski, Quine, and contemporary ‘externalist’ philosophy of language and mind. Referring is an action, and the internal symbols that are used to refer do not pick out mind-independent objects. On investegation, it turns out that what we understant to be a house, a river, a person, a tree, water, and so on, is not a physical construct of some kind. Rather, these are creations of what seventeenth century investigators called our ‘cognoscitive powers’, which provide us with a rich means to interpret and refer to the outside world from certain perspectives. (Chomsky Evolution of Human Language: p, 12)

We saw above that Quine actually agrees with Chomsky on the ambiguities of language and the vagueness of its reference. So Quine doesn’t hold the unrealistic conception of language reference that Chomsky attributes to him. Where the real difference lies between both thinkers is that Quine doesn’t use facts about the ambiguous vague nature of language to argue for innate concepts.

Quine’s magum opus Word and Object is primarily concerned with two things (1) How a child develops his overall theory of the world through learning his language, (2) How we can regiment this language to make its ontological commitments clear.  When Quine speaks of language being a social art which we learn from in our peers in intersubjectively conspicuous circumstances, he seems to be endorsing precisely the view of language which Chomsky is criticising. But as always in philosophy, the situation is much more complicated than this.

When Chomsky speaks of  concepts of ‘tables’, ‘trees’, and ‘people’ as being psychological concepts which we use to organise our experiences he is echoing claims which Quine made 50 years eariler in From a Logical Point of View.  In his third paper of From a Logical Point of View, called Identity, Ostension, and Hypostasis Quine spoke about the process of imputing identity to an object. He emphasised how ostensive definition would be massively undetermined by the data:

Pointing is of itself ambiguous as to the temporal spread of the indicated object. Even  given that the indicated object is to be a process with considerable temporal spread, and hence a summation of momentary objects, still pointing does not tell us which summation of momentary objects is intended,  beyond the fact that the momentary object at hand is to be in the desired summation. Pointing to a, if construed as referring to a time-extended process and not merely to the momentary object a, could be interpreted either as referring to the river Cayster of which a and b are stages, or as referring to the water of which a and c are stages, or as referring to any one of an unlimited numner of further less natural summations to which a also belongs. (LPV, p.67)

In other words ostensive definition requires a lot of stage setting. Quine points out that such difficulties are typically overcome by saying ‘this river’ in other words appealing a prior concept of river as one distinctive time consuming process, one distinctive form of summation of momentary objects.  At this point Quine notes we have moved beyond ostension and moved to the stage of conceptualisation. However he then asks us to assume that we do not already have the prior concept of ‘river’, and asks again how far we could get with ostension alone?

Quine sketches the following procedure:

What we may do then is point to a and two days later to b and say each time, ‘This is the Cayster’.The word ‘this’ so used must have referred not to a nor to b, but beyond to something more inclusive, identical in the two cases. Our specification of the Cayster is not yet unique, however, for we might still mean any of a vast variety of other collections of momentary objects, related in other modes than that of river kinship; all we know is that a and b, are among its constituents. By pointing to more and more stages additional to a and b, however, we eliminate more and more alternatives, until our listener, aided by his own tendency to favor the most natural  groupings has grasped the idea of Cayster.

Quine’s emphasis on ‘natural groupings’ shows that he allows some innate apparatus to explain concept learning, however his primary emphasis is reinforcement and trial and error.  Chomsky  on the other hand when discussing the complex ordinary language concept of a house simply uses the complexity of the concept to show that the concept must be innate.

Chomsky’s discussion aims to clarify what the meaning of the word is, and to emphasise how much information is included in such a supposedly simple concept,  he thinks that this complexity shows that the concepts cannot have been learned in a purely referentialist manner. One interesting property of the concept ‘house’ is that if we were to say that ‘John is painting the house’, we mean that he is painting the exterior of the house not the interior. Another connected feature of the concept of ‘house’ is the concept ‘brown house’, Chomsky notes that a universal feature of language is that ‘brown house’ will be interpretated as meaning that the exterior of the house is brown not the interior. One point to note about this claims Chomsky is that exterior of a surface is very important for understanding a term. Thus if I see a house I see its exterior surface, seeing its interior surface does not surfice. But he notes a house is not just its exterior surface, a geometric substance. If John and Mary are equi-distant to the exterior of a house but John is in the house and Mary is outside the house. We will say that Mary is near the house but not that John is. But he  notes the interior of  the house is abstractly concieved, the house will be the same house even if I fill it entirely with concrete.

These strange properties complex properties of the complex concept of house combined with the speed children supposedly acquire the concepts are used as evidence that the concepts are innate. I will not go into who is right and who is wrong on the question of concept acquisition (spoiler alert: neither of them are), here I merely wanted to show that both thinkers agree that our ordinary language is too vague and sloppy to be accorded any ontological significance. This is a problem for Quine who thinks that our overall scientific theories of the world are an interconnected set of sentences. Hence Quine has to try and modify language by translating it into the syntax of quantification. Chomsky who thinks our science forming faculty has little to do with our language faculty.

In my next blog I will discuss why Chomsky’s postulation of a science forming faculty has little evidence to support it. In the following one I will show that Quine’s attempt to translate scientific theories into the syntax of quantification has failed. Given that both of their explanations of scientific competence fail and their views on language show that language is too vague to house the precise theories of science, neither has a satisfactory theory of scientific competence. So in my final blog I will discuss how Paul Churchland’s (as interpreted by Matt Bush) theory of Hebbian Maps solves some of the difficulties facing Chomsky and Quine.

Excellent lecture by Dr Ramachandran. http://youtu.be/6fipuHMHqxU

Radical Interpretation and Intellectual Disability.

              Part 1:  The Principle of Charity and the Typical Mind Fallacy.

Different persons growing up in the same language are like different bushes trimmed and trained to take the shape of identical elephants. The anatomical details of the twigs and branches will fulfil the elephantine form differently from bush to bush, but the overall outward results are alike. (Word and Object, p. 8)

In institutions all around the world live people with severe intellectual disabilities. Such disabilities often go hand in hand with communication difficulties. People can have an inability to understand language through damage to the Wernicke’s area, while others can be born with an inability to speak language through damage to the Broca’s area. Obviously having an inability to speak or understand language does not make communication impossible, animals that have no linguistic abilities nevertheless are very skilled at communicating with each other (See Hauser 1996, and Tomasello 2008). People with profound intellectual disabilities sometimes have serious difficulties communicating their needs and interests. Carers whose role it is to provide help for people with intellectual disabilities to fulfil their life goals, and achieve a full life integrated in society at large, often have difficulties interpreting the attempted communication of the people they are trying to help. Even for two people without profound intellectual disabilities or communication impairments interpreting each other can be difficult. Our linguistic communication is shot through with metaphor and analogies (Lakoff and Johnston 1987, Hofstadter and Sander 2013). When two people converse with each other they share a background theory which they use to interpret what the other is saying to them, and to guide their own prospective speech-acts. Donald Davidson sums up this process as follows:

Here is a highly simplified and idealised proposal about what goes on. An interpreter has, at any moment of a speech transaction, what I persist in calling a theory. (I call it a theory, as remarked above, only because a description of the interpreter’s competence requires a recursive account.) I assume that the interpreter’s theory has been adjusted to the evidence so far available to him: knowledge of character, dress, role, sex, of the speaker, and whatever else has been gained by observing the speaker’s behaviour, linguistic or otherwise. As the speaker speaks his piece the interpreter alters his theory, entering hypotheses about new names, altering the interpretation of familiar predicates, and revising past interpretations of particular utterances in light of new evidence… To put this differently: the theory we actually use to interpret an utterance is geared to the occasion…The speaker wants to be understood, so he intends to speak in such a way that he will be interpreted in a certain way. In order to judge how he will be interpreted, he forms, or uses a picture of the interpreter’s readiness to interpret along certain lines. (A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs pp. 99)

Davidson is picking out a key component of what goes on in interpretation between two people. Both people come to the occasion of interpretation with their own prior theory, a background expectation about the world and the agents it contains. When conversing they try to guess what prior theory the person they are speaking to is using and they use their speech acts in ways they think are congenial with the other person’s prior theory. Ultimately, Davidson argues, understanding takes place when both thinkers converge on a passing theory. Davidson claims that accident aside a passing theory is where agreement is greatest (ibid p. 102). As people talk their prior-theories become more and more alike, and as a result so do their passing theories. Where agreement and understanding coincides so does the people’s passing theory. An important point to note is that Davidson’s theory of interpretation involves maximizing agreement with the person we are conversing with. For Davidson, without a massive shared background of truths, interpretation and hence communication will be impossible. He stresses the importance of maximising agreement in the quote below:

The methodological advice to interpret in a way that optimizes agreement should not be conceived as resting on a charitable assumption about human intelligence that might turn out to be false. If we cannot find a way to interpret the utterances and other behaviour of a creature as revealing a set of beliefs largely consistent and true by our standards, we have no reason to count that creature as having beliefs, or saying anything. (Radical Interpretation p. 137)

So, for Davidson, a shared background set of beliefs in common is a necessary condition of communication taking place. He also argues that it is important to keep in mind, not only the embodied presence of both people communicating with each other, but also to the shared objects of experience of both people. This triangulation of self, other, and shared object of experience is a necessary condition of communication taking place. Communication does not take place in a vacuum, and a theory of communication that ignores the world that both thinkers are communicating about will go badly wrong.

When Davidson speaks about triangulating on a shared object of experience, he is arguing that such triangulation is a necessary condition of communication. There is good empirical evidence which indicates that humans do in fact communicate with each other by triangulating on a shared object of experience (Cavell 2008). Such triangulation is typically facilitated by the way young children automatically track the eye movements of each other and understand what the meaning of pointing is. However this ability is not universal, children with autism are typically bad at tracking eye movement and interpreting the pointing gestures of others (Baron-Cohen 1995). Autistic children who do not also suffer from any kind of intellectual disabilities may experience language delays but with training usually develop language. However with children who suffer from intellectual disabilities and autism the possibility of developing language is greatly decreased. A substantial proportion of people who have an intellectual disability, do so because of some birth trauma, or because of toxins that the child in utero was inadvertently exposed to. So the disability which affects the child can have multiple effects throughout the brain. So, for example, as a result of an accident of birth a child could be born with an inability to understand speech, and an inability to track eye-movements and interpret the pointing gestures. Obviously communicating with a person like this will be extremely difficult, and facilitating communication will require a lot of careful thought on behalf of care givers.

It is important, at this point, to discuss some developmental phases children typically go through. A few hours after birth children are drawn to look longer at drawings of human faces than at other patterns (Fantz 1963).From 3 months children are monitoring the eye gaze of others. (Cohen 1995). From 4 months humans have some grasp of object behaviour (Baillargeon, et al., 1985). At 6 months children begin reaching for objects. At 9 months children begin to recognise intentionality. At 9 months proto-declarative referencing begins (Cohen 1995). At 10 months children begin to crawl. Between 9-12 months children begin to engage in triadic behaviours. At 12 months children begin pointing and this brings them deeper into the world of triadic relations. From 12- 16 months children begin to learn 0.3 words per day (Bloom, 2002). From 14-16 months children begin to walk. From 18-23 months children begin to learn 0.8 words per day. Between 18-24 months children recognize themselves in the mirror (Rochat and Straino, 1999). From18-24 months children display a deep understanding of others intentional aims. From 23- 30 months children learn 1.6 words per day. At 30 months children begin to master the distinction between Mass and Count nouns (Gordon, 1985). At 48 months children begin to pass the false belief test. From 4 to 6 years of age children begin explicit mentalising; justifying false beliefs by pointing out misleading reasons.  They also begin to understanding higher order mental states (Fritz and Cohen 1995) Up to the age of 6 years children prefer to organise things according to thematic relations .From 9 onwards children begin peak period of language acquisition learning up to 12 words a day.[1]

All of the above developmental facts are important to the child as they begin to learn their language and try to communicate with each other. Some of these developmental regularities are learned while some are the result of innate mechanisms. We have seen above that autistic children who do not go through the pointing phase have extreme communication difficulties. Considered in Davidsonian terms the children’s shared developmental history forms a part of their prior theory which they take for granted when they communicate with each other. Children with profound intellectual disabilities sometimes never pass through these various developmental phases. As a result of this their prior theory is so different than their peers that converging on a passing theory is virtually impossible. When this happens people with profound intellectual disabilities sometimes retreat into their own subjective worlds, and despite their carers best intentions never learn to communicate their needs.

As we saw above when discussing Radical Interpretation Davidson recommends applying what he calls the principle of charity. To do this we need to try and make maximum sense of the utterances of the people we are interpreting. We need to minimize the incoherencies which we attribute to the people who we are trying to interpret. So, for example, if when interpreting the utterances of an alien tribe we encounter we find ourselves ascribing to them a belief in true contradictions we should consider the possibility that we are simply misinterpreting them. It is after all a simpler assumption that we have misinterpreted them than that they hold radically anti-logical views. This principle of charity is a valuable heuristic device to help us when engaging in radical interpretation. Assuming that the person is a lot like us, and holds a lot of the same true beliefs about the world is very important if we want to engage with the person about shared objects in the environment. Shared intentionality (similar belief/desire psychology), and shared background knowledge about the world of ordinary enduring middle sized perceptual objects helps triangulation on a shared object of experience take place, and hence facilitates communication. However, as we saw above, with people with profound intellectual disabilities the idea of a principle of charity and prior theories converging as people talk with each other is of limited help.

When we apply Davidson’s approach we run the risk of interpreting people so closely by the lights of our own conceptual scheme that we bracket their otherness. So, for example, Davidson using the principle of charity argues that we should not interpret (or translate) people as believing in true contradictions. However, even within our own linguistic community we have people who believe in true contradictions. Graham Priest’s Dialetheism, is a good example of a theoretical position which accepts the existence of true contradictions. Matte Blanco in his ‘The Unconscious as infinite Sets’ argue that people’s unconscious is governed by a logic that sometimes accepts true contradictions. Blanco and Priest pose a serious difficulty for the Davidson’s principle of charity. An interpreter trying to understand an alien tribe using the principle of charity would end up falsifying the data if they were interpreting an alien version of Priest or Blanco.

A real difficulty with interpreting another is that it is necessary to assume that the person one is interpreting is in most ways similar to you, without making this assumption it is virtually impossible to interpret what the other is saying, however  as we saw above this strategy risks us falsifying the data. William James was sensitive to the problem of incorrectly interpreting others because we assume that their minds have the same structure as ours; he called this The Typical Mind Fallacy. He noted how philosophers like Berkeley and Locke misinterpreted each other because they wrongly assumed that all minds were wrongly structured in the same way as their own. The Typical Mind Fallacy led to disputes between Locke and Berkeley on the nature of abstract ideas. This dispute could have been resolved, if they had not wrongly assumed that all people have the same capacity for mental Imagery (See Berman, (2008) and Berman and King (2014)).

So when trying to correctly interpret the communication of another while it is necessary to try and assume that they are mostly like us we must be aware that this tool can lead us astray, me must recognise difference when it manifests itself. For example, children with Williams-Syndrome typically have a different intuitive folk biology to ordinary children[2]. So if someone were to apply a strict principle of charity to the interpretation of those with William-Syndrome this will impede communication rather than help it. So it is important to note that at the beginning of interpreting another person the possibility of missing essential detail is always possible. Amongst people who do not suffer from profound intellectual disability, people sometimes misinterpret each other, because they wrongly believe that the other has a mind just like ours. So, for example, for years colour blindness was not noticed, variation in people’s ability to form mental images was ignored, the existence of synaesthesia (e.g. people who taste colours) was denied. These differences were ignored despite the fact that people could communicate their ideas to each other through language. Given these facts it seems likely that we are not aware of the mode of experience of a lot of people with profound intellectual disabilities who we care for, most of whom do not even have the ability to communicate their experiences to us through language.

In 1968 Russian Neuroscientist wrote his famous The Mind of a Mnemonist about S. V. Shereshevskii who had and almost unlimited memory as a result of his synaesthesia. Luria’s book was important because he not only discussed the neurological and psychological abilities of Shereshevskii but he also told the story about his subjective experience of the world. Contemporary neuroscientist Oliver Sacks, who was heavily influenced by Luria has followed on in this tradition and over the last 40 years has written a series of case studies describing the subjective experience of people suffering from a variety of neurological disorders. Like Sacks and Luria, Vilayanur S Ramachandran has written some beautiful case studies describing the subjective experience of people with various different neurological disorders. What these case studies have revealed is a variety of subjective experiences which are simply amazing and tragic at the same time. So, for example, there are people called prosopagnosiaics who become face-blind, they lose the ability to recognise even their own wives faces. On the other side of the coin there are people with Capgras delusion who can recognise people’s faces, but because of damage to the connection between the amygdala and the inferotemporal cortex, are no longer capable of attaching the same emotional significance to the faces and develop the delusion that their family and friends are imposters. There are people who acquire types of Amusia which makes them find the sound of music intolerable. Sometimes these disorders and ones like them are acquired (through brain damage or a degenerative neurological disorder), while other times they are congenital. In the case of people with profound intellectual disability who have difficulty communicating; disorders like these can go undiagnosed. Behaviour which seems odd may be explained as the result of some kind of acquired disorder. However arranging an MRI or a CT scan can be difficult as the patient may not be able to sit still when being scanned and there may be difficulties in sedating the patient as a result of other meds they are on. Also sometimes the waiting list for an MRI or CT can take months or typically even a year till they can be provided. In the meantime measures need to be taken to help the person with Intellectual disability lead a fulfilling life and rich life.

So far we have seen that Davidson’s principle of charity as a heuristic tool is useful to interpreting the behaviour of others however it runs the risk of ignoring radical otherness. In his “Unified Theory of Thought and Action” Davidson employs the two formal tools in interpreting the verbal behaviour of the other he uses Bayes Theorem and Tarski’s Theory of Truth. His formal treatment of interpretation is very useful and important and can be applied to data gathered by carers on the ground.

The carer though will go astray if they stick to strictly to Davidson’s principle of charity. It is important to realise that people whose brains are structured radically different from those of others may not enjoy or want the same things as most other people in society. So, for example, a person with intellectual disabilities who is suffering from certain types of Amusia will obviously not like being brought to concerts etc. We can typically judge whether this person who has no language likes music by attending to their behaviour in certain circumstances. Now obviously observing the environmental conditions which cause unhappy or happy behaviour is a minimal requirement for a carer. However, what is important is not just exploring what environmental conditions lead to what behaviours, but using these facts to construct an accurate cognitive map of the person whose behaviour we are interpreting. This cognitive map can be used to help predict the behaviour of the person being cared for and help them experience the world as they choose to.

Everything I have said here may seem to be blindingly obvious. However, I think the important point I want to make is the need to construct accurate models of the people whose behaviour we are interpreting, and to use these models to help us to construct humanistic case studies of the people we are caring for in the mode of Luria, and Sacks. These stories which we construct with the people we are caring for help them to be understood and in a sense join our world as they are. We need to try and rationally reconstruct how the people with profound intellectual disability we are caring for experience the world. We do this by studying their developmental history and seeing what developmental phases they have passed through, and what phases they not passed through; we need to study their actual behaviour in their daily environment, to use any neurological and psychological data we have to discover how they see the world. With these facts in mind we can use the Bayesian analysis and Tarski’s Theory of Truth to construct a model of the beliefs and desires of the people we care for. We can then translate these models into humanistic stories which we use to guide us as we interact with our clients on a daily basis.

 Part 2 Interpreting the Mind of the Other

Beneath the uniformity that unites us in communication there is a chaotic personal diversity of connections, and, for each of us, the connections continue to evolve. No two of us learn our language alike, nor, in a sense, does any finish learning it while he lives.

(Word and Object, p. 12)

When you meet another and you want to interpret their behaviour it is best to begin externally to try and triangulate on shared objects of experience in the external world. Doing this is difficult, typically we will use the language of the eyes or pointing gestures to help us latch onto or refer to objects in the external world. As we saw in our last section the majority of children from about the age of 12 months will point to things they want their care giver to get for them. Children follow the direction of their parents gaze and use their own gaze to indicate shared objects in their own environment. This is the beginning of a two year process where the child develops shared intentionality. Again not every child goes through goes through this phase; for example some autistic children are severely developmentally delayed and do not develop shared intentionality as quick as their peers, if at all.

One of our key entering wedges to understanding each other is our ability to triangulate on shared objects of experience. Another key is our ability to say yes, and no. People who through motor damage to their vocal cords or who have severe Broca’s Aphasia cannot speak, but they usually have the ability to assent or dissent to propositions spoken to them. Such people can use their heads to nod assent or to shake their heads to indicate dissent. People who have locked in syndrome for whatever reason: Motor Neurone Disease, a severe stroke, or some debilitating accident, can be trained to indicate yes and no through blinking of the eyes: once to indicate yes and twice to indicate no[3]. Trying to communicate with people with Wernicke’s Aphasia is much more difficult and is best achieved by focusing on objects in the external world and using gestures as much as possible.

With people who have specific diagnoses such as Wernicke’s Aphasia, Broca’s Aphasia, Autism, or an inability to speak because of motor difficulties: e.g. severe Cerebral Palsy, speech and language therapists will have set programmes set which have worked (as well as can be expected) in the past. However you don’t always have a clear diagnosis to work with and sometimes your client will have multiple diagnoses, and a personal idiosyncratic history only a tiny portion of which may be captured in care plans and medical notes. So here it is up to the carer who is with the client on a daily basis to try and rationally reconstruct the inner world of the client so a high quality of life can be maintained.

However this task should not be underestimated, we have seen that typical wedges into language may not be available. People may find it difficult to triangulate on a shared object of experience, they may not automatically track eye direction, and if their understanding of language is severely impaired or non-existent then we may not even be able to get the subject to assent of dissent to propositions verbally. However this should not be taken to be an object of despair, we can still track the subjects interests and desires by careful study of what they tend to orientate towards and away from. Though we may need to facilitate this process by providing new opportunities for the client on a daily basis to try and ascertain what aspects of reality they like and dislike.

However, even when we do not face the above problems, interpretation is not as easy as it may seem. We will still face the problem of Underdetermination (henceforth UD). UD is a phenomenon which philosophers have been working on for years. The basic idea of UD is that our total observational data is consistent with more than one theory. Underdetermination has been discussed in detail by philosophers like Quine, Wittgenstein, and Goodman. Linguists like Chomsky have argued that the Underdetermination that faces a child as they learn their first language can only be overcome by postulating innate apparatus.

Most contemporary cognitive scientists agree with Chomsky on this point. I will now cite three of these thinkers to give you a flavour of what how they understand UD. In his book The Language Instinct, Stephen Pinker discusses UD:

A rabbit scurries by, and a native shouts, ‘Gavagai’ What does gavagai mean? Logically speaking, it needn’t be ‘Rabbit’. It could refer to that particular rabbit (Flopsy, for example). It could mean any furry thing, any mammal, or any member of that species of rabbit (say, Oryctolagus), or any other member of that variety of that species (say, chinchilla rabbit). It could mean scurrying rabbit, scurrying thing, rabbit plus the ground it scurries upon, or scurrying in general. It could mean footprint-maker, or habitat for rabbit fleas. It could mean the top half of a rabbit, or rabbit meat on the hoof, or possessor of at least one rabbit’s foot. It could mean anything that is either a rabbit or a Buick. It could mean collection of undetached rabbit parts, or ‘Lo Rabbit hood again, or ‘It rabbiteth’, analogous to ‘it raineth’. The problem is the same when the child is the linguist and the parents are the natives…Figuring out which word to attach to which concept is the Gavagai problem, and if infants start out with concepts corresponding to the kind of meanings that languages use, the problem is partly solved. (1994, 156)

Pinker then goes on to cite the research of the psychologist Ellen Markman to show that it is indeed the case that children are born with concepts which constrain the types of meanings that words can be given. It is Pinker’s view that Quine’s problem is a problem of UD which is solved by the fact that the concepts that children are born with will place innate constraints on the type of meanings that children can attach to words.

The child psychologist Paul Bloom draws a similar conclusion to Pinker:

These problems of reference and generalization are solved so easily by children and adults that it takes philosophers like Quine and Goodman to even notice that they exist. If we see someone point to a rabbit and say ‘gavagai’, it is entirely natural to assume that this is an act of naming and that the word refers to the rabbit and should be extended to other rabbits. It would be mad to think that the word refers to undetached rabbit parts or rabbits plus the Eiffel Tower. But the naturalness of the rabbit hypothesis and the madness of the alternatives is not a logical necessity; it is instead the result of how the human mind works. (2000, 5)[4].

The Harvard linguist Cedric Boeckx echoes the claims of the above thinkers:

Yet, if you think about it, the Gavagai situation is the one we all faced as children trying to acquire the meaning of words. How did we guess that elephant refers to that big grey animal with a long trunk? Because someone pointed to the animal and said elephant? But how did you know what exactly was being pointed at? Surely the finger couldn’t point at the whole elephant; it was your cognitive bias that interpreted the act of pointing in that way. (2010, 41)

There is a lot of debate in contemporary cognitive science as to whether Pinker et al. are justified in postulating innate concepts to overcome UD. However, when it comes to dealing with people who have profound intellectual disabilities, and have not learned to speak, we really need to be careful not to impose our own ontology onto then. Their way of interpreting the world might be radically different from ours, we cannot be sure that they share the same innate apparatus as us, so we must proceed with caution.

                                                Part 3: The Web of Belief

The approach to the problems of meaning, belief, and desire that I have outlined is not, I am sure it is clear, meant to throw any light on how in real life we come to understand each other, much less how we understand our first concepts and our first language. I have been engaged in a conceptual exercise aimed at revealing the dependencies among our basic propositional attitudes at a level fundamental  enough to avoid the assumption that we can come to grasp them-or intelligibly attribute them to others-one at a time. My way of performing this exercise has been to show how it is in principle possible to arrive at all of them at once.  (Problems of Rationality, p. 166)

When using Davidson’s views on the theory of interpretation we need to be careful not to confuse Davidson’s project with the one I am interested in. My project is primarily a pragmatic one; I am concerned coming up with basic principles which are useful in helping to interpret the behaviour of people with profound Intellectual Disability. Davidson, on the other hand, is concerned with constructing a theory of meaning, and interpretation. Because of our different purposes I use Davidson’s project as needed and dismiss what is not useful to my project. This is no criticism of Davidson’s project as he intended his theories to deal with entirely different problems.

One proviso I should make at the outset is that Davidson limits himself to verbal communication alone. This is because of his belief that we are not justified in attributing propositional attitudes to non-linguistic animals. I will not be following Davidson in this. There is ample evidence from ethno-science that animals without complex language can think using propositional-attitudes.

In his 1987 “A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs” Davidson makes the following claim:

We may say that linguistic ability is the ability to converge on a passing theory from time to time-this is what I have suggested and I have no better proposal. But if we do say this, then we should realise that we have abandoned not only the ordinary notion of a language, but we have erased the boundary between  knowing a language and knowing our way around in the world generally. A passing theory is really like a theory at least in this, that it is derived by wit, luck, and wisdom from a private vocabulary and grammar, knowledge of the ways people get their point across, and rules of thumb for figuring out what deviations from the dictionary are most likely. There is no more chance of regularising or teaching, this process than there is of regularising or teaching the process of creating new theories to cope with the new data in any field-for that is what this process involves ( A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs p. 107)

I think that he is correct on this point, and I think it contradicts a lot of his other claims about the necessity of language in order for a creature to have propositional attitudes. On the Davidsonian picture in his “A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs” having a language isn’t a black and white issue, where we can say a person has a language can be considered a sliding scale. I think this is accurate. Do we say a person with Broca’s aphasia has language, or does a person with Wernicke’s aphasia have a language? To a certain degree we can answer yes to the preceding questions and to a certain degree no. Everyone agrees that a deaf person who uses sign language has a language, but what about a person who can use gestures to communicate their needs but who has not mastered the complex sign language that most of their peers do. Again we can answer yes and no to these questions.

Consider Lamh a type of sign language used by children or people with intellectual disabilities. This sign language uses a few basic symbols some of which can be combined with each other; these symbols help the children communicate their basic needs to each other. Now in an obvious sense Lamh is not a language. It lacks the recursive ability to combine a finite amount of symbols into an infinite series; it lacks the complex and grammars typical of the world’s languages. The words used in the language lack the sometimes complex ambiguous context sensitive features of typical language, they lack some of the productive morphological features we find in ordinary language words, and the words are not really compositional. So there is a clear sense in which we can argue that Lamh is not a language. Lamh clearly isn’t an internal generative procedure which we use to link sound and meaning.  So it isn’t a language in the sense that Chomsky uses the term.

Lamh is on the other hand an attempt to communicate using signals. A person using Lamh is using the signal with the intention that the person they are communicating with shares the same meaning of the term that they do, and hence will understand them. A person with profound intellectual disability who cannot use Lamh can still try to communicate by indicating objects in the world and saying yes and no if people interpret them correctly or incorrectly. Likewise, a person who cannot move their bodies but who can understand what others are saying to them can assent and dissent to what is being said to them has a language. My definition of language is any intentional attempt to communicate with another. My more expansive use of language is more intuitive than Chomskies, in that it captures all intentional attempts at communication with others. My definition is not really at odds with Chomsky, people can define the word ‘language’ as they please, using language in my expansive way makes sense for my project because it nicely captures the various different communicative abilities of people with different forms of aphasia[5].

So I think that given Davidson’s (1987) definition of language, his statement that only of creatures with a language can we sensibly attribute propositional attitudes, becomes less controversial. Anybody that is engaging with the world and others, using intentional signals, in however limited a way, has a language on this Davidsonian model[6].

With the preliminaries out of the way we can now begin to outline the model for interpreting people with profound intellectual disabilities. Davidson notes correctly that when we are trying to understand linguistic utterances we need the locutions of intentional action, belief, desire, meaning, hopes, wishes, attempts etc.  These intentional locutions are the background conditions which are needed in order for speech to occur. For Davidson, meaning, belief, and desire are three interlocking terms which cannot be reduced to the other. I think that Davidson is correct on this general point. When we try to interpret the behaviour and communicative intent of people speaking to us we must help ourselves to these interlocked concepts.

Davidson grounds his Unified, Theory of Thought, Meaning and Action, on Ramsey’s decision theory. Ramsey’s Bayesian Decision Theory relies on two basic intensional notions: belief and preference.  This Ramsey picture tries to make sense of behaviour by assuming that people being interpreted are rational agents who act in their own best interests. We assume that a person attaches a value to a particular course of action, which is calculated by the outcome that will be achieved by performing an action, and the likelihood that the action will achieve the desired outcome. We do not have to make the assumption that the subject is consciously working out this formula, we only need to assume that the brain is doing the relevant calculations. Ramsey’s Bayesian Decision Theory typically operates in the form of getting subjects to gamble on certain outcomes and judging their beliefs and preferences based on how they choose. This method is a bit complex for the task of interpreting the behaviour of people with intellectual disabilities. So I suggest instead of using gambling we can use the simpler Davidsonian method of testing for assent and dissent to various propositions spoken about the external world.

Davidson correctly notes that “A sentence held true plus interpretation is equal to a belief” (ibid p. 156). So if a rabbit passes by and I say (1) ‘rabbit’ and my client assents, we can conclude that he believes that ‘(1)’ is true. Now to say that a person holds (1) True, means that they believe that (1) is true. If they believe that (1) is true then it follows that they understand the meaning of (1). So, here we can see how we can get meaning and belief out of someone assenting to a sentence. However, if I spent the day with a client questioning him, and determined a list of sentences which he held true, and which sentences he held false, I would have a lot of data but very little theory to explain the data. I would be able to derive meaning and belief from evidence of what environmental factors cause a client to hold a sentence true. Obviously this process is still subject to the massive Underdetermination that we discussed earlier. But we have little choice but to impose our ontology onto the child at the beginning as we begin to interpret what sentences they are assenting to. So, for example, we must assume that they assent ‘Rabbit’ as in ‘a particular rabbit’ as opposed to rabbit as in ‘undetached rabbit part’, ‘particular instance of universal rabbit hood’ etc. As we move into assessing how the various sentences they assent to connect to each other we will remove some indeterminacy. However, at the end of any process of interpretation some indeterminacy will remain.

As we saw above our process of interpretation will involve some degree of imposing our rationality onto the people we are interpreting. So should not interpret people as accepting contradictions, or denying the law of identity etc. Again there are instances where people do accept contradictions, for example, in dreams people report accepting contradictions and breaking the law of identity. The psychologist and logician Matte Blanco takes this to indicate at a deep unconscious level we follow different logical laws. However, outside, of these esoteric examples people typically follow the same logical laws. Anyway we have little choice when we begin to interpret our clients but to accept that they are using the same logical laws as us.

It is best to think of our process of interpreting our clients as uncovering what Quine calls their web of belief. The person we are interpreting has an interconnected set of sentence like beliefs which are related to each other in terms of logic entailment. Sentences which are at the interior of the web are our deepest held truths which we are most wedded to, while sentences at the periphery are our more speculative beliefs. Since these sentences are all indirectly connected to each other, changing the truth value of any sentence will have consequences for the rest the web of belief. We assume that the person holds a web of belief which is somewhat like ours at the core, in terms of ordinary enduring middle sized objects (trees, mountains) and logical laws obeyed.  The core of the web of belief can equated with what Davidson calls a prior theory. Davidson correctly notes that when interpreting the behaviour of another we might not be able to make these principles definite but we can at least form heuristic rules of thumb.

When trying to explicate another person’s web of belief, an important piece of evidence to be discovered, is the degree to which a subject will believe that one sentence supports another.  So, for example, suppose a subject accepts that sentence (1) The cat is on the mat. Is true. Then an important step is to ask the subject to what degree they think (2) The mat is under the cat. Supports (1) Or to what degree does (3) The cat likes sitting on the mat. Support (1). By understanding how much a subject thinks a series of sentences support or do not support another sentence we can assign numbers and understand the degree to which a person believes the original sentence to be true.  And using this model we will be able to predict what beliefs our client will likely hold on various different topics. We can further develop this model to help understand their preferences relative to their beliefs, once we have this done will be in a position to facilitate them as they interact with their respective worlds.

Part 4: Being-in-the-World

Much of modern philosophy, following from Descartes in the seventeenth century, has viewed the mind as a disembodied entity.  When philosophers have considered the mind they have viewed it as an inherently private entity. This perspective lead to a problem called the problem of other minds. Philosophers since Descartes have been asking how we can know that other people have minds, how do we justify the ascription of minds to others. The answer which Descartes came up with was that we are justified in attributing a mind to a creature if they have a language and can use it to converse. In recent years the brilliant mathematician and inventor of the computer Alan Turing claimed that if a computer was able to pass a Turing Test[7], then we would be justified in saying that it was conscious. The Turing Test is a test which involves a computer programme hidden behind a screen and a person hidden behind another screen. To administer the test a person is given computer of their own and can type any question to the hidden computer and the hidden person. If the person is not able to decide whether it is the computer or the person he is talking to, then it is argued that the computer must be conscious. The argument being that if a computer can converse on all topics as well as a person then there is no sensible reason to deny the computer consciousness.

Both the Turing Test, and Descartes test, make language a central key to discover whether others have minds and are conscious. Neither test mentions embodiment. This omission is strange given that humans are by nature always embodied; all people are embodied and related to the world from some aspect. Furthermore human thought is intentional; it is about something beyond itself. A test that ignores the embodied nature of thought and the intentional nature of thought will miss a key aspect of thought. Furthermore looking at the attribution of mind and conscious to others as a test is wrongheaded in the first place. Rather our normal developmental course is to assume intentional agency when creatures act contingently with us and try to engage with us about the shared world we experience. It is only when people have a developmental disorder such as autism that they fail to attribute intentional agency and triangulate with their peers.

When dealing with people with profound intellectual disabilities we should not start off like Descartes or Turing, looking for verbal behaviour to give us signs of some hidden consciousness, rather we should begin with the assumption that they are embodied agents engaged with our shared world of experience with us. One of the key insights of Occupational Therapy is the idea that a substantial part of who we are is constituted by what we do. Our every day practices help in making us who we are. People with intellectual disability typically have a key worker who helps their client to decide on what activities they want to engage in on a weekly basis.  This person centred care approach relies on the carer working closely with the client who they are key workers for and helping to facilitate organising activities for the client. This work is vital as a large part of who we are is dictated by our daily interactions with the external world. A person who has very limited interactions with the world outside them could end up having an impoverished mode of being.

However, one difficulty which a lot of carers have is that they find it difficult to know what it is that their client actually enjoys doing. If the client can say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to your  questions then you can ask them whether they want to engage in activity X or Y. One difficulty with this approach is that the client is reliant on you to suggest options. If you begin with a limited set of options, you risk inadvertently boxing the client in with a few forced options.   Given a limited choice of activities the client may end up choosing X because it is slightly more preferable to Y. As a result of limited binary choices the client will end up doing one of a few things every day. A habit will build up and the child may end up having his world shrink, his daily routine predicable from one day to the next. The mind which isn’t some fixed point hidden from view, but rather a series of dispositions to engage in various activities with others as we interact with the shared world of experience, loses its potential for growth if not nurtured. It is therefore vital that the carer has the skills to help the client make new interesting choices which result in the client having new experiences which help the client grow.

The techniques which I discussed earlier in the paper will help the carer hugely in this process. Instead of just passively asking the client what they want we build up an accurate model of their cognitive processes. We need to firstly have a model of their likes and dislikes, an abstract model of how they perceive the world, this model of how they perceive the world needs to beware of committing the Typical Mind Fallacy. There is no fixed way of avoiding the Typical Mind Fallacy we simply have to keep our eyes open to behavioural differences any evidence of neurological differences etc. We have to do our best to interpret our clients in-terms of logical inference as possible. By questioning them and working out the degree they think one sentence they believe to be true supports another sentence we are giving ourselves a model of not only what they want in a particular circumstance but a model of  would want in a different circumstance. Our model will not be perfect but it will help us to construct a series of things we think the client would want to do based on our worked out theory of their preferences. The primary benefit of the model is that it will be productive; various different sentences which are believed true, held to be important can be combined to give us a potential infinity of sentences to put to the client. With this model we will not be forced into simple binary choices.

There are obvious difficulties with this model, namely collecting the data. Finding out what the client wants involves questioning them on a variety of different topics, seeing what sentences they think are true, what sentences they think supports another sentence, and to what degree it supports the other sentence etc. A client will spend may have spent a substantial proportion of their day at a day-service and may be tired upon returning home. To expect such a client to engage in a long series of questions may be to expect too much. Any intervention in the form of questions will obviously involve a strategy worked out with the client, the client’s family member, and a team of professions working with the client, e.g. Social Worker, Nurse, Psychologist, Speech and Language Therapist, Occupational Therapist etc.  This strategy will likely involve a non-invasive collection of data by talking with the client bit by bit over a long period of time, and constructing your model over this period. This model will be used on a daily basis and modified as we learn more and more. It is important that the model doesn’t remain a series of numbers on a page representing preferences; we need to translate the model into the client’s story, of how they experience the world. With this model in place we will be in a position to help the clients choose more and more interesting activities for them to do. The client’s key worker will be in a position to facilitate the client as he interacts with the world, instead of presenting the client with a few limited choices.

Radical Interpretation and Intellectual Disability: The Principle of Charity and the Typical Mind Fallacy.

Different persons growing up in the same language are like different bushes trimmed and trained to take the shape of identical elephants. The anatomical details of the twigs and branches will fulfil the elephantine form differently from bush to bush, but the overall outward results are alike. (Word and Object, p. 8)

In institutions all around the world live people with severe intellectual disabilities. Such disabilities often go hand in hand with communication difficulties. People can have an inability to understand language through damage to the Wernicke’s area, while others can be born with an inability to speak language through damage to the Broca’s area. Obviously having an inability to speak or understand language does not make communication impossible, animals that have no linguistic abilities nevertheless are very skilled at communicating with each other (See Hauser 1996, and Tomasello 2008). People with profound intellectual disabilities sometimes have serious difficulties communicating their needs and interests. Carers whose role it is to provide help for people with intellectual disabilities to fulfil their life goals, and achieve a full life integrated in society at large, often have difficulties interpreting the attempted communication of the people they are trying to help. Even for two people without profound intellectual disabilities or communication impairments interpreting each other can be difficult. Our linguistic communication is shot through with metaphor and analogies (Lakoff and Johnston 1987, Hofstadter and Sander 2013). When two people converse with each other they share a background theory which they use to interpret what the other is saying to them, and to guide their own prospective speech-acts. Donald Davidson sums up this process as follows:

Here is a highly simplified and idealised proposal about what goes on. An interpreter has, at any moment of a speech transaction, what I persist in calling a theory. (I call it a theory, as remarked above, only because a description of the interpreter’s competence requires a recursive account.) I assume that the interpreter’s theory has been adjusted to the evidence so far available to him: knowledge of character, dress, role, sex, of the speaker, and whatever else has been gained by observing the speaker’s behaviour, linguistic or otherwise. As the speaker speaks his piece the interpreter alters his theory, entering hypotheses about new names, altering the interpretation of familiar predicates, and revising past interpretations of particular utterances in light of new evidence… To put this differently: the theory we actually use to interpret an utterance is geared to the occasion…The speaker wants to be understood, so he intends to speak in such a way that he will be interpreted in a certain way. In order to judge how he will be interpreted, he forms, or uses a picture of the interpreter’s readiness to interpret along certain lines. (A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs pp. 99)

Davidson is picking out a key component of what goes on in interpretation between two people. Both people come to the occasion of interpretation with their own prior theory, a background expectation about the world and the agents it contains. When conversing they try to guess what prior theory the person they are speaking to is using and they use their speech acts in ways they think are congenial with the other person’s prior theory. Ultimately, Davidson argues, understanding takes place when both thinkers converge on a passing theory. Davidson claims that accident aside a passing theory is where agreement is greatest (ibid p. 102). As people talk their prior-theories become more and more alike, and as a result so do their passing theories. Where agreement and understanding coincides so does the people’s passing theory. An important point to note is that Davidson’s theory of interpretation involves maximizing agreement with the person we are conversing with. For Davidson, without a massive shared background of truths that people share, interpretation and hence communication will be impossible. He stresses the importance of maximising agreement in the quote below:

The methodological advice to interpret in a way that optimizes agreement should not be conceived as resting on a charitable assumption about human intelligence that might turn out to be false. If we cannot find a way to interpret the utterances and other behaviour of a creature as revealing a set of beliefs largely consistent and true by our standards, we have no reason to count that creature as having beliefs, or saying anything. (Radical Interpretation p. 137)

So, for Davidson, a shared background set of beliefs in common is a necessary condition of communication taking place. He also argues that it is important to keep in mind, not only the embodied presence of both people communicating with each other, but also to the shared objects of experience of both people. This triangulation of self, other, and shared object of experience is a necessary condition of communication taking place. Communication does not take place in a vacuum, and a theory of communication that ignores the world that both thinkers are communicating about will go badly wrong.

When Davidson speaks about triangulating on a shared object of experience, he is arguing that such triangulation is a necessary condition of communication. There is good empirical evidence which indicates that humans do in fact communicate with each other by triangulating on a shared object of experience (Cavell 2008). Such triangulation is typically facilitated by the way young children automatically track the eye movements of each other and understand what the meaning of pointing is. However this ability is not universal, children with autism are typically bad at tracking eye movement and interpreting the pointing gestures of others (Baron-Cohen 1995). Autistic children who do not also suffer from any kind of intellectual disabilities may experience language delays but with training usually develop language. However with children who suffer from intellectual disabilities and autism the possibility of developing language is greatly decreased. A substantial proportion of people who have an intellectual disability, do so because of some birth trauma, or because of toxins that the child in utero was inadvertently exposed to. So the disability which affects the child can have multiple effects throughout the brain. So, for example, as a result of an accident of birth a child could be born with an inability to understand speech, and an inability to track eye-movements and interpret the pointing gestures. Obviously communicating with a person like this will be extremely difficult, and facilitating communication will require a lot of careful thought on behalf of care givers.

It important, at this point, to discuss some developmental phases children typically go through. A few hours after birth children are drawn to look longer at drawings of human faces than at other patterns (Fantz 1963).From 3 months children are monitoring the eye gaze of others. (Cohen 1995). From 4 months humans have some grasp of object behaviour (Baillargeon, et al., 1985). At 6 months children begin reaching for objects. At 9 months children begin to recognise intentionality. At 9 months proto-declarative referencing begins (Cohen 1995). At 10 months children begin to crawl. Between 9-12 months children begin to engage in triadic behaviours. At 12 months children begin pointing and this brings them deeper into the world of triadic relations. From 12- 16 months children begin to learn 0.3 words per day (Bloom, 2002). From 14-16 months children begin to walk. From 18-23 months children begin to learn 0.8 words per day. Between 18-24 months children recognize themselves in the mirror (Rochat and Straino, 1999). From18-24 months children display a deep understanding of others intentional aims. From 23- 30 months children learn 1.6 words per day. At 30 months children begin to master the distinction between Mass and Count nouns (Gordon, 1985). At 48 months children begin to pass the false belief test. From 4 to 6 years of age children begin explicit mentalising; justifying false beliefs by pointing out misleading reasons.  They also begin to understanding higher order mental states (Fritz and Cohen 1995) Up to the age of 6 years children prefer to organise things according to thematic relations .From 9 onwards children begin peak period of language acquisition learning up to 12 words a day.[1]

All of the above developmental facts are important to the child as they begin to learn their language and try to communicate with each other. Some of these developmental regularities are learned while some are the result of innate mechanisms. We have seen above that autistic children who do not go through the pointing phase have extreme communication difficulties. Considered in Davidsonian terms the children’s shared developmental history forms a part of their prior theory which they take for granted when they communicate with each other. Children with profound intellectual disabilities sometimes never pass through these various developmental phases. As a result of this their prior theory is so different than their peers that converging on a passing theory is virtually impossible. When this happens people with profound intellectual disabilities sometimes retreat into their own subjective worlds, and despite their carers best intentions never learn to communicate their needs.

As we saw above when discussing Radical Interpretation Davidson recommends applying what he calls the principle of charity. To do this we need to try and make maximum sense of the utterances of the people we are interpreting. We need to minimize the incoherencies which we attribute to the people who we are trying to interpret. So, for example, if when interpreting the utterances of an alien tribe we encounter we find ourselves ascribing to them a belief in true contradictions we should consider the possibility that we are simply misinterpreting them. It is after all a simpler assumption that we have misinterpreted them than that they hold radically anti-logical views. This principle of charity is a valuable heuristic device to help us when engaging in radical interpretation. Assuming that the person is a lot like us, and holds a lot of the same true beliefs about the world is very important if we want to engage with the person about shared objects in the environment. Shared intentionality (similar belief/desire psychology), and shared background knowledge about the world of ordinary enduring middle sized perceptual objects, helps triangulation on a shared object of experience take place, and hence facilitates communication. However as we saw above with people with profound intellectual disabilities the idea of a principle of charity and prior theories converging as people talk with each other is of limited help.

When we apply Davidson’s approach we run the risk of interpreting people so closely by the lights of our own conceptual scheme that we bracket their otherness. So, for example, Davidson using the principle of charity argues that we should not interpret (or translate) people as believing in true contradictions. However, even within our own linguistic community we have people who believe in true contradictions. Graham Priest’s Dialetheism, is a good example of a theoretical position which accepts the existence of true contradictions. Matte Blanco in his ‘The Unconscious as infinite Sets’ argue that people’s unconscious is governed by a logic that sometimes accepts true contradictions. Blanco and Priest pose a serious difficulty for the Davidson’s principle of charity. An interpreter trying to understand an alien tribe using the principle of charity would end up falsifying the data if they were interpreting an alien version of Priest or Blanco.

A real difficulty with interpreting another is that it is necessary to assume that the person one is interpreting is in most ways similar to you, without making this assumption it is virtually impossible to interpret what the other is saying, however  as we saw above this strategy risks us falsifying the data. William James was sensitive to the problem of incorrectly interpreting others because we assume that their minds have the same structure as ours; he called this The Typical Mind Fallacy. He noted how philosophers like Berkeley and Locke misinterpreted each other because they wrongly assumed that all minds were wrongly structured in the same way as their own. This faulty reasoning lead to disputes between Locke and Berkeley, on the nature of abstract ideas, which could have been resolved, if they had not wrongly assumed that all people have the same capacity for mental Imagery (See Berman, (2008) and Berman and King 2014)

So when trying to correctly interpret the communication of another while it is necessary to try and assume that they are mostly like us we must be aware that this tool can lead us astray, me must recognise difference when it manifests itself. For example, children with Williams-Syndrome typically have a different intuitive folk biology to ordinary children[2]. So if someone were to apply a strict principle of charity to the interpretation of those with William-Syndrome this will impede communication rather than help it. So it is important to note that at the beginning of interpreting another person the possibility of missing essential detail is always possible. Amongst people who do not suffer from profound intellectual disability, people sometimes misinterpret each other, because they wrongly believe that the other has a mind just like ours. So, for example, for years colour blindness was not noticed, variation in people’s ability to form mental images was ignored, the existence of synaesthesia (e.g. people who taste colours) was denied. These differences were ignored despite the fact that people could communicate their ideas to each other through language. Given these facts it seems likely that we are not aware of the mode of experience of a lot of people with profound intellectual disabilities who we care for, most of whom do not even have the ability to communicate their experiences to us through language.

In 1968 Russian Neuroscientist wrote his famous The Mind of a Mnemonist about S. V. Shereshevskii who had and almost unlimited memory as a result of his synaesthesia. Luria’s book was important because he not only discussed the neurological and psychological abilities of Shereshevskii but he also told the story about his subjective experience of the world. Contemporary neuroscientist Oliver Sacks, who was heavily influenced by Luria has followed on in this tradition and over the last 40 years has written a series of case studies describing the subjective experience of people suffering from a variety of neurological disorders. Like Sacks and Luria, Vilayanur S Ramachandran has written some beautiful case studies describing the subjective experience of people with various different neurological disorders. What these case studies have revealed is a variety of subjective experiences which are simply amazing and tragic at the same time. So, for example, there are people called prosopagnosiaics who become face-blind, they lose the ability to recognise even their own wives faces. On the other side of the coin there are people with Capgras delusion who can recognise people’s faces, but because of damage to the connection between the amygdala and the inferotemporal cortex, are no longer capable of attaching the same emotional significance to the faces and develop the delusion that their family and friends are imposters. There are people who acquire types of Amusia which makes them find the sound of music intolerable. Sometimes these disorders and ones like them are acquired (through brain damage or a degenerative neurological disorder), while other times they are congenital. In the case of people with profound intellectual disability who have difficulty communicating; disorders like these can go undiagnosed. Behaviour which seems odd may be explained as the result of some kind of acquired disorder. However arranging an MRI or a CT scan can be difficult as the patient may not be able to sit still when being scanned and there may be difficulties in sedating the patient as a result of other meds they are on. Also sometimes the waiting list for an MRI or CT can take months or typically even a year till they can be provided. In the meantime measures need to be taken to help the person with Intellectual disability can lead a fulfilling life and rich life.

So far we have seen that Davidson’s principle of charity as a heuristic tool is useful to interpreting the behaviour of others however it runs the risk of ignoring radical otherness. In his “Unified Theory of Thought and Action” Davidson employs the two formal tools in interpreting the verbal behaviour of the other he uses Bayes Theorem and Tarski’s Theory of Truth. His formal treatment of interpretation is very useful and important and can be applied to data gathered by carers on the ground.

The carer though will go astray if they stick to strictly to Davidson’s principle of charity. It is important to realise that people whose brains are structured radically different from those of others may not enjoy or want the same things as most other people in society. So, for example, a person with intellectual disabilities who is suffering from certain types of Amusia will obviously not like being brought to concerts etc. We can typically judge whether this person who has no language likes music by attending to their behaviour in certain circumstances. Now obviously observing the environmental conditions which cause unhappy or happy behaviour is a minimal requirement for a carer. However, what is important is not just exploring what environmental conditions lead to what behaviours, but using these facts to construct an accurate cognitive map of the person whose behaviour we are interpreting. This cognitive map can be used to help predict the behaviour of the person being cared for and help them experience the world as they choose to.

Everything I have said here may seem to be blindingly obvious. However, I think the important point I want to make is the need to construct accurate models of the people whose behaviour we are interpreting, and to use these models to help us to construct humanistic case studies of the people we are caring for in the mode of Luria, and Sacks. These stories which we construct with the people we are caring for help them to be understood and in a sense join our world as they are. We need to try and rationally reconstruct how the people with profound intellectual disability we are caring for experience the world. We do this by studying their developmental history and seeing what developmental phases they have passed through, and what phases they not passed through; we need to study their actual behaviour in their daily environment, to use any neurological and psychological data we have to discover how they see the world. With these facts in mind we can use the Bayesian analysis and Tarski’s Theory of Truth to construct a model of the beliefs and desires of the people we care for. We can then translate these models into humanistic stories which we use to guide us as we interact with our clients on a daily basis.

 Part 2 Interpreting the Mind of the Other

Beneath the uniformity that unites us in communication there is a chaotic personal diversity of connections, and, for each of us, the connections continue to evolve. No two of us learn our language alike, nor, in a sense, does any finish learning it while he lives.

(Word and Object, p. 12)

When you meet another and you want to interpret their behaviour it is best to begin externally to try and triangulate on shared objects of experience in the external world. Doing this is difficult, typically we will use the language of the eyes or pointing gestures to help us latch onto or refer to objects in the external world. As we saw in our last section the majority of children from about the age of 12 months will point to things they want their care giver to get for them. Children follow the direction of their parents gaze and use their own gaze to indicate shared objects in their own environment. This is the beginning of a two year process where the child develops shared intentionality. Again not every child goes through goes through this phase; for example some autistic children are severely developmentally delayed and do not develop shared intentionality as quick as their peers, if at all.

One of our key entering wedges to understanding each other is our ability to triangulate on shared objects of experience. Another key is our ability to say yes, and no. People who through motor damage to their vocal cords or who have severe Broca’s Aphasia, and hence cannot speak, usually have the ability to assent or dissent to propositions spoken to them. Such people can use their heads to nod assent or to shake their heads to indicate dissent. People who have locked in syndrome for whatever reason: Motor Neurone Disease, a severe stroke, or some debilitating accident, can be trained to indicate yes and no through blinking of the eyes: once to indicate yes and twice to indicate no. Trying to communicate with people with Wernicke’s Aphasia is much more difficult and is best achieved by focusing on objects in the external world and using gestures as much as possible.

With people who have specific diagnoses such as Wernicke’s Aphasia, Broca’s Aphasia, Autism, or an inability to speak because of motor difficulties: e.g. severe Cerebral Palsy, speech and language therapists will have set programmes set which have worked (as well as can be expected) in the past. However you don’t always have a clear diagnosis to work with and sometimes you have multiple diagnoses, also the person you are working with personal idiosyncratic experiences, only a tiny portion of which may be captured in care plans and medical notes. So here it is up to the carer who is with the client on a daily basis to try and rationally reconstruct the inner world of the client so a high quality of life can be maintained.

However this task should not be underestimated, we have seen that typical wedges into language may not be available. People may find it difficult to triangulate on a shared object of experience, they may not automatically track eye direction, and if their understanding of language is severely impaired or non-existent then we may not even be able to get the subject to assent of dissent to propositions verbally. However this should not be taken to be an object of despair, we can still track the subjects interests and desires by careful study of what they tend to orientate towards and away from. Though we may need to facilitate this process by providing new opportunities for the client on a daily basis to try and ascertain what aspects of reality they like and dislike.

However, even when we do not face the above problems, interpretation is not as easy as it may seem. We will still face the problem of Underdetermination (henceforth UD). UD is a phenomenon which philosophers have been working on for years. The basic idea of UD is that our total observational data is consistent with more than one theory. Underdetermination has been discussed in detail by philosophers like Quine, Wittgenstein, and Goodman. Linguists like Chomsky have argued that the Underdetermination that faces a child as they learn their first language can only be overcome by postulating innate apparatus.

Most contemporary cognitive scientists agree with Chomsky on this point. I will now cite three of these thinkers to give you a flavour of what how they understand UD. In his book The Language Instinct, Stephen Pinker discusses UD:

A rabbit scurries by, and a native shouts, ‘Gavagai’ What does gavagai mean? Logically speaking, it needn’t be ‘Rabbit’. It could refer to that particular rabbit (Flopsy, for example). It could mean any furry thing, any mammal, or any member of that species of rabbit (say, Oryctolagus), or any other member of that variety of that species (say, chinchilla rabbit). It could mean scurrying rabbit, scurrying thing, rabbit plus the ground it scurries upon, or scurrying in general. It could mean footprint-maker, or habitat for rabbit fleas. It could mean the top half of a rabbit, or rabbit meat on the hoof, or possessor of at least one rabbit’s foot. It could mean anything that is either a rabbit or a Buick. It could mean collection of undetached rabbit parts, or ‘Lo Rabbit hood again, or ‘It rabbiteth’, analogous to ‘it raineth’. The problem is the same when the child is the linguist and the parents are the natives…Figuring out which word to attach to which concept is the Gavagai problem, and if infants start out with concepts corresponding to the kind of meanings that languages use, the problem is partly solved. (1994, 156)

Pinker then goes on to cite the research of the psychologist Ellen Markman to show that it is indeed the case that children are born with concepts which constrain the types of meanings that words can be given. It is Pinker’s view that Quine’s problem is a problem of UD which is solved by the fact that the concepts that children are born with will place innate constraints on the type of meanings that children can attach to words.

The child psychologist Paul Bloom draws a similar conclusion to Pinker:

These problems of reference and generalization are solved so easily by children and adults that it takes philosophers like Quine and Goodman to even notice that they exist. If we see someone point to a rabbit and say ‘gavagai’, it is entirely natural to assume that this is an act of naming and that the word refers to the rabbit and should be extended to other rabbits. It would be mad to think that the word refers to undetached rabbit parts or rabbits plus the Eiffel Tower. But the naturalness of the rabbit hypothesis and the madness of the alternatives is not a logical necessity; it is instead the result of how the human mind works. (2000, 5)[3].

The Harvard linguist Cedric Boeckx echoes the claims of the above thinkers:

Yet, if you think about it, the Gavagai situation is the one we all faced as children trying to acquire the meaning of words. How did we guess that elephant refers to that big grey animal with a long trunk? Because someone pointed to the animal and said elephant? But how did you know what exactly was being pointed at? Surely the finger couldn’t point at the whole elephant; it was your cognitive bias that interpreted the act of pointing in that way. (2010, 41)

There is a lot of debate in contemporary cognitive science as to whether Pinker et al. are justified in postulating innate concepts to overcome UD. However, when it comes to dealing with people who have profound intellectual disabilities, and have not learned to speak, we really need to be careful not to impose our own ontology onto then. Their way of interpreting the world might be radically different from ours, we cannot be sure that they share the same innate apparatus as us, so we must proceed with caution.

                                                Part 3: The Web of Belief

The approach to the problems of meaning, belief, and desire that I have outlined is not, I am sure it is clear, meant to throw any light on how in real life we come to understand each other, much less how we understand our first concepts and our first language. I have been engaged in a conceptual exercise aimed at revealing the dependencies among our basic propositional attitudes at a level fundamental  enough to avoid the assumption that we can come to grasp them-or intelligibly attribute them to others-one at a time. My way of performing this exercise has been to show how it is in principle possible to arrive at all of them at once.  (Problems of Rationality, p. 166)

When using Davidson’s views on the theory of interpretation we need to be careful not to confuse Davidson’s project with the one I am interested in. My project is primarily a pragmatic one; I am concerned coming up with basic principles which are useful in helping to interpret the behaviour of people with profound Intellectual Disability. Davidson, on the other hand, is concerned with constructing a theory of meaning, and interpretation. Because of our different purposes I use Davidson’s project as needed and dismiss what is not useful to my project. This is no criticism of Davidson’s project as he intended his theories to deal with entirely different problems.

One proviso I should make at the outset is that Davidson limits himself to verbal communication alone. This is because of his belief that we are not justified in attributing propositional attitudes to non-linguistic animals. I will not be following Davidson in this. There is ample evidence from ethno-science that animals without complex language can think using propositional-attitudes.

In his 1987 “A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs” Davidson makes the following claim:

We may say that linguistic ability is the ability to converge on a passing theory from time to time-this is what I have suggested and I have no better proposal. But if we do say this, then we should realise that we have abandoned not only the ordinary notion of a language, but we have erased the boundary between  knowing a language and knowing our way around in the world generally. A passing theory is really like a theory at least in this, that it is derived by wit, luck, and wisdom from a private vocabulary and grammar, knowledge of the ways people get their point across, and rules of thumb for figuring out what deviations from the dictionary are most likely. There is no more chance of regularising or teaching, this process than there is of regularising or teaching the process of creating new theories to cope with the new data in any field-for that is what this process involves ( A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs p. 107)

I think that he is correct on this point, and I think it contradicts a lot of his other claims about the necessity of language in order for a creature to have propositional attitudes. On the Davidsonian picture in his “A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs” having a language isn’t a black and white issue, where we can say a person has a language can be considered a sliding scale. I think this is accurate. Do we say a person with Broca’s aphasia has language, or does a person with Wernicke’s aphasia have a language? To a certain degree we can answer yes to the preceding questions and to a certain degree no. Everyone agrees that a deaf person who uses sign language has a language, but what about a person who can use gestures to communicate their needs but who has not mastered the complex sign language that most of their peers do. Again we can answer yes and no to these questions.

Consider Lamh a type of sign language used by children or people with intellectual disabilities. This sign language uses a few basic symbols some of which can be combined with each other; these symbols help the children communicate their basic needs to each other. Now in an obvious sense Lamh is not a language. It lacks the recursive ability to combine a finite amount of symbols into an infinite series; it lacks the complex and grammars typical of the world’s languages. The words used in the language lack the sometimes complex ambiguous context sensitive features of typical language, they lack some of the productive morphological features we find in ordinary language words, and the words are not really compositional. So there is a clear sense in which we can argue that Lamh is not a language. Lamh clearly isn’t an internal generative procedure which we use to link sound and meaning.  So it isn’t a language in the sense that Chomsky uses the term.

Lamh is on the other hand an attempt to communicate using signals. A person using Lamh is using the signal with the intention that the person they are communicating with shares the same meaning of the term that they do, and hence will understand them. A person with profound intellectual disability who cannot use Lamh can still try to communicate by indicating objects in the world and saying yes and no if people interpret them correctly or incorrectly. Likewise, a person who cannot move their bodies but who can understand what others are saying to them can assent and dissent to what is being said to them has a language. So, my more expansive use of language is more intuitive than Chomskies, in that it captures all intentional attempts at communication with others. My definition is not really at odds with Chomsky, people can define the word ‘language’ as they please, using language in my expansive way makes sense for my project because it nicely captures the various different communicative abilities of people with different forms of aphasia[4].

So I think that given Davidson’s (1987) definition of language, his statement that only of creatures with a language can we sensibly attribute propositional attitudes, becomes less controversial. Anybody that is engaging with the world and others, using intentional signals, in however limited a way, has a language on this Davidsonian model[5].

With the preliminaries out of the way we can now begin to outline the model for interpreting people with profound intellectual disabilities. Davidson notes correctly that when we are trying to understand linguistic utterances we need the locutions of intentional action, belief, desire, meaning, hopes, wishes, attempts etc.  These intentional locutions are the background conditions which are needed in order for speech to occur. For Davidson, meaning, belief, and desire are three interlocking terms which cannot be reduced to the other. I think that Davidson is correct on this general point. When we try to interpret the behaviour and communicative intent of people speaking to us we must help ourselves to these interlocked concepts.

Davidson grounds his Unified, Theory of Thought, Meaning and Action, on Ramsey’s decision theory. Ramsey’s Bayesian Decision Theory relies on two basic intensional notions: belief and preference.  This Ramsey picture tries to make sense of behaviour by assuming that people being interpreted are rational agents who act in their own best interests. We assume that a person attaches a value to a particular course of action, which is calculated by the outcome that will be achieved by performing an action, and the likelihood that the action will achieve the desired outcome. We do not have to make the assumption that the subject is consciously working out this formula, we only need to assume that the brain is doing the relevant calculations. Ramsey’s Bayesian Decision Theory typically operates in the form of getting subjects to gamble on certain outcomes and judging their beliefs and preferences based on how they choose. This method is a bit complex for the task of interpreting the behaviour of people with intellectual disabilities. So I suggest instead of using gambling we can use the simpler Davidsonian method of testing for assent and dissent to various propositions spoken about the external world.

Davidson correctly notes that “A sentence held true plus interpretation is equal to a belief” (ibid p. 156). So if a rabbit passes by and I say (1) ‘rabbit’ and my client assents, we can conclude that he believes that ‘(1)’ is true. Now to say that a person holds (1) True, means that they believe that (1) is true. If they believe that (1) is true then it follows that they understand the meaning of (1). So, here we can see how we can get meaning and belief out of someone assenting to a sentence. However, if I spent the day with a client questioning him, and determined a list of sentences which he held true, and which sentences he held false, I would have a lot of data but very little theory to explain the data. I would be able to derive meaning and belief from evidence of what environmental factors cause a client to hold a sentence true. Obviously this process is still subject to the massive Underdetermination that we discussed earlier. But we have little choice but to impose our ontology onto the child at the beginning as we begin to interpret what sentences they are assenting to. So, for example, we must assume that they assent ‘Rabbit’ as in ‘a particular rabbit’ as opposed to rabbit as in ‘undetached rabbit part’, ‘particular instance of universal rabbit hood’ etc. As we move into assessing how the various sentences they assent to connect to each other we will remove some indeterminacy. However, at the end of any process of interpretation some indeterminacy will remain.

As we saw above our process of interpretation will involve some degree of imposing our rationality unto the people we are interpreting. So should not interpret people as accepting contradictions, or denying the law of identity etc. Again there are instances where people do accept contradictions, for example, in dreams people report accepting contradictions and breaking the law of identity. The psychologist and logician Matte Blanco takes this to indicate at a deep unconscious level we follow different logical laws. However, outside, of these esoteric examples people typically follow the same logical laws. Anyway we have little choice when we begin to interpret our clients but to accept that they are using the same logical laws as us.

It is best to think of our process of interpreting our clients as uncovering what Quine calls their web of belief. The person we are interpreting has an interconnected set of sentence like beliefs which are related to each other in terms of logic entailment. Sentences which are at the interior of the web are our deepest held truths which we are most wedded to, while sentences at the periphery are our more speculative beliefs. Since these sentences are all indirectly connected to each other, changing the truth value of any sentence will have consequences for the rest the web of belief. We assume that the person holds a web of belief which is somewhat like ours at the core, in terms of ordinary enduring middle sized objects (trees, mountains) and logical laws obeyed.  The core of the web of belief can equated with what Davidson calls a prior theory. Davidson correctly notes that when interpreting the behaviour of another we might not be able to make these principles definite but we can at least form heuristic rules of thumb.

When trying to explicate another person’s web of belief, an important piece of evidence to be discovered, is the degree to which a subject will believe that one sentence supports another.  So, for example, suppose a subject accepts that sentence (1) The cat is on the mat. Is true. Then an important step is to ask the subject to what degree they think (2) The mat is under the cat. Supports (1) Or to what degree does (3) The cat likes sitting on the mat. Support (1). By understanding how much a subject thinks a series of sentences support or do not support another sentence we can assign numbers and understand the degree to which a person believes the original sentence to be true. In the next blog I will demonstrate how to calculate degrees to which people think one sentence supports another and how this can be used to help in interpret people with profound intellectual disabilities.

Call for Workshops.

Fodor and Piattelli’s (2011) book “What Darwin Got Wrong” has been savagely reviewed in the literature. I share this negative view of the book though I do think that it is far superior to Nagel’s (2012) “Mind and Cosmos”. Fodor and Piattelli at least try to engage with the technical literature on evolutionary theory while Nagel makes no attempt to meet this basic requirement.  That said I still am not convinced that the empirical evidence or conceptual evidence provided by Fodor and Piattelli supports their radical conclusion. In this blog I will summarise the arguments in “What Darwin Got Wrong” and show where I think they go wrong.

The book has two different parts. Part one is a review of biological evidence which purports to show that Natural Selection plays a much smaller role in biology than is admitted by proponents of Darwinian theory. To show this they review evidence from the Evo-Devo revolution in biology, internal constraints in biology, laws of form etc. In the second part of the book they give a conceptual argument which they claim shows that the theory of natural selection is inprinciple incapable of explaining what it purports to explain. Both parts of the book are logically independent of each other and can be assessed seperately. They begin their book by comparing the theory of natural selection (TNS), with B. F. Skinner’s theory of learning by operant training (OT). Fodor and Piattelli in effect argue that Skinner’s theory and Darwin’s theory have the same logical structure, but while nobody today believes Skinner everybody believes Darwin. They argue that since the TNS is subject to the same weakness as OT people should reject the TNS in the same way they reject OT.

Before discussing their claims about TNS I want to make some quick points about their claim that OT is accepted by nobody. This is not really true, behaviourism is largely lampooned by the cognitive science community. However outside of this community it is still to some degree accepted. Behavioural techniques are very effective for helping autistic children who are having difficulties learning language. Furthermore a lot of the arguments used against behaviourism in particular those which originate from Chomsky have not stood the test of time. Firstly because Chomsky did not really understand what the claims made by behaviourists amounted to. Secondly because a lot of poverty of stimulus arguments used to discredit behaviourism have been discredited.  I have discussed Chomsky and behaviourism in detail in an earlier blog so won’t go into it here. I merely want to note that Fodor and Piattelli’s views on OT are really a caricature of the position, I will argue that the same is true of their views on evolutionary theory.  Firstly I will make clear exactly what the analogy between OT and TNS is for Fodor and Piattelli.

The first point of comparison they make  is in terms of what they call population thinking. They claim that a way to think of TNS is as a theory of how phenotypic properties of populations change overtime in response to ecological variables (pg3). They define OT in a similar way ‘OT is plausibly is also plausibly viewed as a black box that maps a distribution of traits in a population at a time ( a creatures behavioural repertoire at that time),  together with a specification of relevant environmental variables (viz. The creature’s history of reinforcement), onto a succeding distribution of traits).

They argue that the TNS and OT have 6 basic untenable feature in common: (1) Iterativity: ET provides no bounds on the type of phenotype possible OT provides no bounds on the variety of behavioural profiles which can be created through conditioning.(2) Environmentalism: ET and OT abstract from endogenous variables, claiming that the phenomenon of evolution on the one hand and psychology on the other are largely the effects of environmental causes (3) Gradualism: ET argues that new phenotypes emerge gradually, OT argues that learning is a gradual process of stimulus response conditioning (4) Monotonicity: ET and OT are one factor theories. For ET selection does all the work. For OT conditioning does all the work. (5) Locality: Both ET and OT are local processes and are insensitive to mere hypothetical contingencies (6) Mindlessness: ET doesn’t postulate God to do the work and OT doesn’t postulate Mind to do the work.

Fodor and Piattelli argue that the evidence they provide in the two parts of their book shows that evolutionary theory as defined according to  the above six principles cannot do what it purports to do. I will argue that they are simply misrepresenting evolutionary theory. There is no reason to hold evolutionary theory to principle 1, 2 or 4.

The first part of Fodor and Piattelli’s book is the biological argument. As I mentioned before the truth of this part is logically independent of the truth of part two. Part one is divided in to four chapters. The four chapters are as follows: (1) Internal Constraints: What the new biology tells us, (2) Whole genomes, networks, modules and other complexities, (3) Many contraints, many environments, (4) The return of the laws of form. I will now consider the evidence he puts forth in part one. It is important to note that the arguments in part 1 only purport to demonstrate that NS does not play as big a role as theorists like Maynard-Smith, Dawkins and Dennnett think it does.  This part does not make any claim that NS is an incoherent concept, that particular claim is supposedly justified in part 2.

Chapter one: Internal constraints: The authors begin this section with a claim that standard Neo-Darwianists are environmentalists by definition. By this they mean that standard Darwianian theory thinks that changes to a phenotype are largely driven by environmental contingencies. Their primary aim in this section is to show that contemporary wet biology is telling a story of innate constraints which are at odds with the neo-darwinian story. It is worth noting that the authors they cite in this section do not agree with the use Fodor and Piattelli make of their work ( Fodor and Piattelli acknowledge this point). Furthermore, most neo-darwianians would deny that they are environmenalists in Fodor and Piattelli’s sense. So they would argue that Fodor and Piattelli are attacking a strawman. To this Fodor and Piattelli reply by citing a variety of neo-darwianians who do indeed seem to support strict environmentalism.

Bearing all of this in mind lets now review the evidence they cite. The first thing they cite is the concept of Unidimentionality. Unidimentionality is supposedly standard story in the neo-darwinnian theory. On this picture NS plays the primary role in the theory of evolution, the role of internal sources of variance, and internal constraints is said to play only a marginal role. To prove this point they cite Earnest Mayr’s book ‘Animal Species and Evolution’ as an example of such ultra-selectionist attitudes. Fodor and Piattelli claim that discussions of the evolution of the eye nicely illustrates the neo-darwinian emphasis on NS as the primary source of design in species. It was claimied by most neo-darwinian theorists that the evolution of the eye emerged several times independently and convergently across species. In his Darwins Dangerous Idea Dan Dennett referred to the evolution of the eye as a nice trick, something that was bound to be selected in any form it occured in. Dawkins has made similar claims. Fodor and Piattelli pointed out that the discovery of master genes for eye development (Pax 3, Pax 2, Pax 6, and Dach) across vastly different classes and species has shown the neo-darwinain view to be incorrect. The next topic they consider is beanbag genetics. Here they basically argue that selection for a particular gene rarely, if ever occurs, and this is because of the convoluted packing of genes in chromosomes. Their critique of beanbag genetics is a pointless because nobody believes it anyway.

One of the key factors they believe counts against the neo darwianan view is the existence of Internal Constraints and Filters. The discussion of internal constraints and filters involves an appeal to results in the evo-devo revolution. Again it is worth noting that most people working in evo-devo consider themselves a part of neo-darwinanism and would not accept the conclusions drawn from their work by Fodor and Piattelli. According to Fodor and Piattelli, the standard neo-darwinian picture abstracts away from the all effects of development on visible traits (p.27). They stress that the evo-devo revolution shows that this development not only cannot be abstracted away from, it is key to the process of evolution. The argue that it has been shown in the lab (1) phenotypic convergence is, more often than not the result of developmental constraints, (2) Also they cite the fact that experimental evidence (Ronshaugen 2001), has shown that terminal forms can differ in massive ways as a result of slight variations in the regulation of the same gene complexes/or the timing activation of such complexes (pg 30). This shows that contrary to neo-darwian claims evolution is not primarily driven by exogenous factors but by internal developmental constraints. The spend the rest of the chapter outlining a series of facts which they claim further develop their point. Throughout section 1 they are merely attacking a strawman, because most evolutionary theorists do not deny what they are claiming. Though it is true that a lot of pop science is guilty of making claims of the type they critique.

In chapter two and three Fodor and Piattelli argued  that there are internal constraints which limit the importance of selection, and they considered how if at all selection could operate given these limits. They claimed that in response to the evidence reviewed in chapters two and three neo-darwinists have  expanded its scope and invoked other kinds of natural selection. This chapter is an attempt to provide more problems for neo-darwinianism. The first problem they consider is the phenomenon of adaptation without selection, Fodor and Piattelli summarise the point  as follows:

“The point to keep your eye on is this: it is possible to imagine serious of alternatives to the traditional Darwinain consensus that evolution is primarily a gradualistic process in which small phenotypic changes generated at random are then filtered by environmental constraints. This view is seriously defective if, as we suppose, the putative random variatons are in fact highly constrained by the internal structures of evolving organisms. Perhaps it goes without saying that if this internalist story is true, then less work is left for appeals to natural selection to do.” (What Darwin got Wrong p. 54).

They provide eight pieces of evidence which they think support their conclusion:

(1)   Gene Regulatory Networks: Building from the work of E. H. Davidson (2006), they argue that gene regulatory networks are at work in the development of the organism. These gene regulatory networks are modular in nature (in other words they form compact units of interaction which are seperate from other similar units). The important point about these regulatory networks is that they are supposedly responsible for the development of the bodily structures of animals. This happens because large effect mutations acting on conserved core pathways of development. They claim that this process makes it virtually impossible to argue that particular isolated traits are selected for.

(2)   Entrenchment: They claim that this acts as an engine of development and evolutionary change, and as a constraint (ibid p.43). Some evolutionary factors may be highly conserved and protected against change. They offer very little evidence of their views at this point merely a promsary note to develop the point in the next chapter.

(3)   Robustness: This is the persistence of a trait of an organisism despite developmental noise, environmental change or genetic change. This robustness is important for the stablility of phenotypic change despite genetic and non-genetic variation. They site the work of Wagner (2008) which claims that it is only the additive component of genetic variation which responds to selection.  Fodor and Piattelli argue this fact should make people wary of accepting the neo-darwinian view that selection is the primary vehicle of phenotypic variation.

(4)   Master genes are our ‘Masters’: They make the now well established point that many genes are indissociably controlled the same ‘master gene’. Therefore if a mutation effects a master gene (and is viable) it will effect all of the genes the master gene controlls aswell. They link this to Gould’s famous paper on spandrels. They briefly discuss how the evolution of language may not be explicable interms of a simple adaptative story in terms of selection for communication. Using facts about master genes they argue that language may have been a free-rider, which was selected because some mutation in the master gene Otx. They claim that this story is not even considered because of alligence to an ultra adaptationist model. I do not agree with this claim there has been ample debates on this topic. See Hauser, Fitch and Chomsy 2005 and reply by Jackendoff and Pinker 2006. However evaluating this debate would take a long discussion of linguistics which is beyond the scope of this discussion.

They go on to further discuss things like developmental modules, coordination, morphogenetic explosions, plasticity and the (non-transitivity) of fitness. All of these facts are well known in the literature and it is unclear to me at least why they believe these facts pose a major problem for evolutionary theory. They do pose a problem for the caricature of evolutionary theory they present at the beginning of their book but not for evolutionary theory as it is actually practiced.

They also consider ‘Laws of Form’ as an argument against the standard Neo-Darwinian Story. They discuss the work of thinkers like Stewart Kauffman, Stuart Newman, and Lewis Wolpert who have all discussed the important topic of laws of form and self-organisation. Fodor emphasises how this research shows that we need to discover what forms are possible for an organism to take before we attack the question of how selection can act on these possible forms. These constraints on possible forms are shown in things like non-genomic Nativism discussed by people like Cherniak. Cherniak details computational constraints on brain anatomy which he claims are derived from physics for free; hence we do not need natural selection to explain some of the structure of the brain. Fodor and Piattelli also discuss the work of James Marden who has detailed physical constraints on possible animal locomotion. Their discussion of laws of form is extremely interesting but again it is hard to see that it really poses any problem for the standard neo-Darwinian picture. There really is nobody, and I mean nobody who denies that there are physical constraints at work in evolutionary theory. They are correct to note that pop evolutionary writers sometimes ignore these physical constraints and focus entirely on selection. So, if Fodor and Piattelli were merely warning against this type of mistake, then their point would be well made, but it should be obvious that their arguments do not have any bearing on neo-Darwinian theory when construed correctly.

As can be seen by my discussion of part 1 of their book they offer some interesting empirical research which does indeed cast doubt on some extremely weak pop-evolutionary theory, however it leaves actual neo-Darwinism untouched. Ultimately part 1 of their book can be dismissed as a largely successful attack on a straw-man. The second part of What Darwin Got Wrong is much more controversial in this part they attack Natural Selection arguing that it is an incoherent concept. Their argument in part 2 is a conceptual argument and has drawn a lot of criticism from both philosophers and scientists. Even Tom Nagel who largely agrees with Fodor and Piattelli’s argument in part 1 of the book thinks that part 2 is a bad argument. So Fodor and Piattelli cannot even rely on Nagel who thinks there is a lot wrong with the Neo-Darwinian materialism to support their more radical claims. I am not very impressed with their argument in part 2 of the book, I will firstly summarise it before offering some criticisms.

Their argument centres on the distinction between selection and selection-for. If an organism has two traits T1 and T2 which are co-extensive, for example, T1 is the heart pumping blood and T2 is the heart making thump thump noises, anytime T1 is selected T2 will be selected as well. We as theorists know that it is obviously the heart pumping blood which is selected and not the thump thump sound. The thump thump sound is merely a free-rider and isn’t the object of selection. Fodor and Piattelli note that since the traits are co-extensive then there is nothing “mother nature” can do to distinguish between them. From this fact they draw the conclusion that selection-for does not occur. They argue that only way such selection-for could occur is if “Mother Nature” has a mechanism which it can use to distinguish between such co-extensive traits. Since there is no plausible account of such a mechanism they argue that we must conclude that selection-for does not occur.

The standard reply to this argument is one of incredulity. It is perfectly true that “Mother Nature” does not select for trait x over trait y: firstly there is obviously no such thing as “Mother Nature”, secondly selection-for is more of an explanatory heuristic than something we expect to find in nature. It is evolution 101 that selection-against is what occurs not selection-for; random mutations which don’t have survival value will not be passed onto the next generation (so in this sense are selected-against), whatever isn’t selected against we sometimes describe as a trait which has been selected-for. The point is we do not need the selection-for concept to make sense of evolutionary history, selection against is enough, we can describe this process well enough using statistical models of what traits tend to survive in what environment.

To this Fodor and Piattelli would reply that the concept of selection-for is used all of the time in evolutionary theory (in particular by evolutionary psychologists). In an appendix at the end of “What Darwin Got Wrong” they provide 28 quotes from 14 different philosophers and evolutionary psychologists who are appealing to selection-for despite the fact that Fodor and Piattelli think they have shown that the concept does not do any explanatory work.

It is worth stressing again Fodor and Piattelli are not denying that there is a fact of the matter as to whether the heart pumping blood, or the heart making thump thump noises is selected. Rather they are merely asserting that since we have no plausible mechanism that “Mother Nature” can use to select for trait 1 as opposed to trait 2 then Evolutionary Theory as currently conceived cannot explain what it purports to explain.

They think that Evolutionary Theory is really just a form of historical explanation. This is nothing wrong with historical explanations per se. Calling something a historical explanation doesn’t amount to a claim that the subject matter of evolutionary theory cannot give us true theories. In historical studies we can discover facts of the matter about who the first president of America was, what year did the French revolution occur in etc. Likewise Fodor and Piattelli argue that we can discover facts of the matter about the genealogy of the species using naturalistic observations and historical explanations. They just believe that the theory of natural selection is not a strong enough tool to support the type of nomological explanations typically found in the natural sciences.

It is really difficult to know what to make of Fodor and Piattelli’s claims on selection-for. It seems to amount to nothing more than pointless hair-splitting. All of the theorists whom they quote from do indeed use selection-for in their various different theories. However their views can be trivially re-described in terms of selection against and therefore avoid the criticisms which Fodor and Piattelli bring to bear. Furthermore, Fodor and Piattelli’s distinction between historical sciences and the hard sciences is a bit antiquated and may have made sense a hundred years ago but science is much more pragmatic and problem based these days and their distinction his little relevance that I can see.

Overall, I think that all their book did, was point out some over simplifications which are given in some popular evolutionary explanations, but they have not really done any damage to evolutionary theory properly conceived as far as I can see. I will return to how Fodor’s incorrect view on the nature of the mind lead him to his strange views on evolutionary theory when I discuss how methodological dualism applied to the mind is infecting Nagel, Fodor and Plantinga in their thinking on evolutionary theory in the forth blog of this series.

Philosophy of Mind and Evolutionary Theory

“But I agree with Alvin Plantinga, that unlike divine benevolence, the application of evolutionary theory to the understanding of our own cognitive capacities should undermine, though it need not completely destroy, our confidence in them. Mechanisms of belief formation that have selective advantage in the everyday struggle for existence do not warrant our confidence in the construction of theoretical accounts of the world as a whole. I think the evolutionary hypothesis would imply that though our cognitive capacities could be reliable, we do not have the kind of reason to rely on them that we ordinarily take ourselves to have in using them directly-as we do in science…The evolutionary story leaves the authority of reason in a much weaker position.” (Nagel: Mind and Cosmos pp. 27-28)

In the last fifteen or so years three prominent philosophers have in different ways challenged contemporary evolutionary theory, or rather they have questioned whether evolutionary theory as it is currently conceived can explain what it purports to explain. These three theorists; Nagel, Plantinga, and Fodor[1] all have different ideas of what exactly is wrong with evolutionary theory. However in all three cases a big part of what informs their critique is the theory of mind that the theorists accept. Over the course of four blogs  I will discuss and critique Nagel and Plantinga’s arguments and demonstrate the flaws in their theories. I will then discuss Fodor’s different criticisms show where he goes wrong in his interpretation of evolutionary theory.  Finally I will trace their erroneous views on evolution to their incorrect theories on the nature of the mind. I will demonstrate that the methodological dualism which has long infected psychology is now spreading to evolutionary biology. With this in mind I will discuss the importance ridding our theory of the mind of all traces of methodological dualism. In this my first blog on the topic I will restrict myself to Nagel. My next blog will be a discussion of Plantinga.

Nagel’s critique of evolutionary theory relies heavily on an appeal to his intuitions, there are two problems with this approach; (1) people’s intuitions on various topics vary radically (See my Dennett and The Typical Mind Fallacy), (2) Nagel appeals to them in areas where we have independent evidence that the intuitions are faulty. Throughout ‘Mind and Cosmos’ he speaks about the idea of natural selection turning one species into another as being improbable. He also speaks of it being improbable that life could have emerged from non-life from purely chemical/physical processes in the time that the earth has existed. Now as I have said before if he is using improbable in a technical sense he needs to provide us with the math. Because he provides no math to support his claim I presume he isn’t using probability in a technical sense. I think that he is rather using probability in an intuitive sense. Anybody who has taken classes in probability, statistics, or in psychology will know that our intuitive sense of probability is not that reliable. So given this fact we have reason to doubt that Nagel’s intuitive sense of the improbability is an accurate guide to reality. This is the sense in which I think that his intuitions are not sufficient to cast serious doubt on Evolutionary Theory. Some of his other arguments that Evolutionary Theory cannot account for Consciousness, Cognition, Morals and Value also rely on intuitions as well so it may be worth looking closely to see if there is a reason to cast a doubt on these intuitions as well.

I have made no secret that I am not a fan of ‘Mind and Cosmos’, however if pushed I would argue that the strongest argument in the book is the argument that evolutionary theory cannot account for the emergence of Cognition. So it may be worth keying in on this argument to see what it amounts to. Nagel argues that there are two main problems concerning cognition which pose difficulties for the theory of evolution. (1) The likelihood that the process of natural selection should have generated creatures with the capacity to discover by reason the truth about a reality that extends vastly beyond initial appearances. (2) The difficulty of understanding naturalistically the faculty of reason that is the essence of these activities.

Nagel first deals with problem 1 in four pages (Mind and Cosmos p. 74-78), where he makes two citations: a paper by philosopher Sharon Street on value realism, and a book by Sober and Wilson on the evolution of unselfish behavior. Nagel concludes that it may be possible to tell a vague just so story about the evolution of reason even if the story sounds a bit implausible. This just-so story he argues will have difficulties explaining how we have evolved brains which are capable of understanding the complex mathematics used in quantum theory. Firstly I should say that Nagel is correct it is indeed difficult to construct an accurate theory of this; though I am not really sure what follows from this fact other than that science is difficult. He also mentions that explaining how language evolved is extremely difficult:

“ An important aspect of this explanation will be that we have acquired language and the possibility of interpersonal communication, justification, and criticism that language makes possible. But the explanation of our ability to acquire and use language in these ways presents problems of the same order, for language is one of the most important normatively governed faculties. To acquire language is in part to acquire a system of concepts that enables us to understand reality… (ibid. p. 72)

He grudgingly concedes that it is possible to tell a just-so story implausible as it may sound that explains the evolution of language and our ability to understand complex mathematics.

As I have already said Nagel is correct to point out these difficulties. However I do find his tone here extremely irritating. He speaks constantly of telling just so stories to explain this or that. This implies that evolutionary theorists are pretty much constructing ad-hoc stories some of which are not even particularly plausible. However this is a gross caricature of what evolutionary theory is all about. Anyone who was following recent debates between Chomsky-Hauser-Fitch vs Pinker-Jackendoff on the evolution of language can attest to this. Theorists are not just creating ad-hoc stories rather their theories are constrained by and can be refuted by empirical data from a variety of different sources. So, for example, when discussing the evolution of language data such as the physiology of the human vocal tract is considered, genetic data is considered, archeological facts are considered, facts from neurology and developmental psychology are considered, comparative data from other species are considered, detailed facts about the structure of the language faculty are considered as well. Theorists like, Chomsky, Pinker, Tomasello, Jackendoff etc. have all had to modify their theories about the evolution of language as we have learned more from all of the above disciplines. It should be obvious to anyone who has actually tried to understand these issues that Nagel’s talk of vague just-so stories is unfounded. Dan Dennett once criticized Nagel’s view that we could never understand what the subjective experience of a bat is by criticizing Nagel for not even trying to do so. Dennett’s point is that if you admit defeat from the outset of course you will not succeed. I think that a similar point can be made about Nagel’s views on the origins of cognition. Nagel claims that we MAY be able to tell a just-so story about the evolution of cognition, but his tone implies that even if we do it won’t have much scientific standing. I agree that the story he told in his four page consideration of the evolution of cognition is a vague just-so story, however that is because he does not consider any of the relevant scientific facts. When one bothers to look into the empirical facts a different and more interesting scientific picture emerges than Nagel is bothered to consider.

Nagel’s second difficulty with the evolution of cognition is more substantial. He notes that when we tell an evolutionary story about the origin of our reasoning capacity, we are forced by the logic of evolution to treat these reasoning capacities as fallible products of our evolutionary history. So we must admit that while our reasoning capacities are mainly reliable we cannot say that they have universal application. They were forged in the contingent conditions of the various ancestral environments so they may not be equipped to work in all environments. So, to take a clichéd example, while our intuitive logic may be useful in some domains, it is not really able to deal with the strange facts about quantum physics. However, Nagel notes that any modifications that we make to our reasoning systems because of some new discovery will itself rely on our reasoning capacities, so we will be assuming that our reasoning capacity has universal validity even in the act of critiquing it. This kind of meta-reasoning ability which applies to everything he argues is not compatible with an evolutionary explanation which would have only equipped us with reasoning which is valid for the particular environments that our ancestors evolved in.

Now there are various different responses which we can make to Nagel’s conundrum. Firstly the fact that we must use our reason to critique our reason is true and important. So, for example, when someone like Graham Priest tries to argue against the law of non-contradiction he does so by beginning with our standard logic and using this to develop a logical system which the thinks is more accurate, the same is true of Jan Brower when he argued against the law of excluded middle as a law of logic. They had to presuppose some logical system which they thought had universal validity to develop their own logical laws which the felt were more accurate than the original three laws of thought. So I think that Nagel is correct on this point. However the fact that we must presuppose that our reasoning is at some level valid when critiquing our reason is a fact about our human psychology. This shows that to some degree our thought processes are limited by the type of creatures we are. Because we are creatures created by natural selection we must admit the logical possibility that our reasoning processes are not universally valid. They seem universally valid to us because of the type of creature that we are, however we have no guarantee that actually are. And if they are this would be the result of a type of cosmic coincidence not something that was selected-for, as there is little reason to think that a universal reason would be selected.

Nagel would probably reply to this that my whole story presupposes a universal logic because I am relying on the notion of logical possibility. I would reply to Nagel, that rather I am relying on my own cognitive capacities which are generally reliable. The reliability of human cognitive capacities are shown by pragmatic success that their employment leads to in our interactions with the world on a day to day basis.

Having discussed what he considers the two main problems evolutionary theory has to explain cognition he then proceeds to discuss the nature our cognitive abilities and how they may have evolved. He makes the following point:

“In light of the remarkable character of reason, it is hard to imagine what a naturalistic explanation would look like” (Ibid p. 86)

Now we saw above that Nagel’s discussion of the evolution of language which he thinks is a key component of our thinking took him only four pages, and he considered virtually no scientific data when discussing the issue. So it is little wonder he cannot imagine a naturalistic solution, he puts virtually no effort into doing so. I cannot imagine how to build an airplane; this is because I know nothing about the engineering of the machine, not because there is some problem in principle with building an airplane. On this issue I think Nagel would be well advised considering Dennett’s advice “Don’t confuse a failure of imagination with an insight into the nature of reality”.

Again Nagel appeals to his lack of imagination to argue that a reductive account of reason is extremely unlikely. He claims that rationality is necessarily a feature of the functioning whole conscious subject (ibid: p. 86), he goes on to argue that we cannot even conceive of rationality as being composed of countless little atoms of rationality. He then baldly states that a computer cannot be rational because it lacks the necessary understanding. Such a computer could account for behavioral output but it could not account for understanding. Now given the fact that computational theory of mind has had such incredible success in modeling embodied cognition, vision, and language one would think that Nagel dedicates a few chapters at the very least to support his controversial claim. This is however not the case, rather Nagel simply dismisses the computational theory of mind in a single paragraph on p. 86. With his casual dismissal of any hope for a computational theory of mind out of the way Nagel argues that we must draw the conclusion that reason is an emergent property of the whole functioning conscious organism. Nagel then says that because a causal explanation of an emergent property is extremely difficult to imagine we may need to appeal to a teleological explanation.

Now this mode of arguing is extremely cavalier, he dismisses any hope of a computational account of rationality which gives us an excellent chance of giving a reductive evolutionary explanation in a single paragraph. He then uses this rejection of the computational theory of mind to argue that we need to appeal to a teleological principle for which there is virtually no independent evidence. Unless Nagel can provide some evidence to show why the computational theory of mind cannot work one wonders why his argument should be taken seriously.

The only reason he offers to support his claim that the computational theory of mind cannot work is the claim that computers cannot understand, though they do behave as though they have understanding. He offers no evidence to support this assertion. Presumably what he has in mind is Searle’s Chinese Room argument which purports to show that we cannot derive our semantics from our syntax. This thought experiment has been discussed ad-nauseum in the literature. While the thought experiment has some sympathizers it is far from a conclusive proof. In fact it is subject to a simple objection, the thought experiment is an intuition pump which relies on getting us to focus on the person in the room manipulating the symbols (who has no understanding of the meaning of the symbols), as opposed to the whole system where the understanding resides. Whether one accepts this systems objection, it clearly shows that the Chinese room argument doesn’t really conclusively establish anything. Rather it merely appeals to our intuitions that a machine cannot have understanding. Now such a flimsy thought experiment is hardly sufficient to show that a reductive computational account of reason is impossible, and given that Nagel’s  alternative emergent teleological position has no independent evidence to support it I see no reason why we should not continuing to work on computational models.