In his interesting (2007) book ‘An Essay on Names and Truth’ Wolfram Hinzen tried to construct an internalist theory of meaning. His book contains excellent critiques of traditional attempts to deal with meaning such as Russell’s theory of descriptions, and points to various weaknesses in philosophers attempts at referentialist semantics. Hinzen’s position is interesting and nuanced, even if his answer to the traditional question of where meaning begins is shrouded in mystery. However some of his criticisms of philosophers who hold alternative philosophical views amount to nothing more than strawman. In this short blog-post I will discuss Hinzen’s critique of Dennett’s attempt to naturalise meaning, and show that Hinzen is wildly misrepresenting Dennett’s views. I will then proceed to compare Dennett’s actual position with Hinzen’s views on meaning.

Hinzen’s internalist account of concepts has been hailed as nothing short of a Copernican Revolution in philosophy by Cedric Boeckx. It is certainly true that Hinzen’s views on concepts do run against the externalist approach favoured by most philosophers of language. Nonetheless, despite the fact that Hinzen’s views are not dominant it is a bit of a stretch to label them as revolutionary. Hinzen’s views on the nature of concepts are basically just a combination of the views of Fodor and Chomsky on concepts. The way he brings the ideas together is novel and interesting but not the stuff of some wild paradigm shift.

Hinzen argues that concepts are atoms without internal structure, and that these atoms can be combined in novel ways using the syntactic operation merge. Now a basic concept that cannot be analysed further is obviously one that cannot be explained in any other terms than itself. Thus the meaning of the concept CAT is simply cat; there can be no further constituents to the concept. While thinking of concepts as atoms with no internal structure is extremely counter intuitive there are some good (but not overwhelming arguments for the position).

Traditionally when philosophers wanted to cash out what concepts were they attempted to do so interms of definitions, the idea being that each concept could be explicated in terms of its unique definition. Of course not all concepts can be definitions you need some basic concepts to define the others in terms of. A solution to this problem was to argue that some concepts are primitives and that all other concepts are defined in terms of these concepts. Thus on the empiricist side of things people like Hume argued that our primitive concepts could be cashed out in terms of sensory ideas, and more complex concepts could be constructed using these sensory primitives. On the rationalist side of things, people like Sue Carey argued that we have innate basic concepts like causation, agency, object etc and all other concepts can be derived from this basic list of inventories.

Fodor, of course, had serious difficulties with this solution he argues that concepts cannot in principle be cashed out interms of definitions. Firstly concepts compose but definitions do not, therefore concepts cannot be definitions. Secondly, despite years of searching concepts don’t seem amenable to definitions (except in a trivial sense). Based on facts like the preceding ones Fodor argues that concepts cannot be cashed out interms of definitions.

Another route to explicating the internal structure of concepts is to argue that concepts can be cashed out in terms of their inferential role. Famous exponents of this view are Bob Brandom and Paul Boghossian. Fodor argues that the view that concepts can be cashed out interms of inferential roles is not coherent. To make this argument he notes that inferential role semantics is typically married to pragmatism about concepts.

Fodor’s argument against Inferential Role Semantics as sketched in his LOT 2 is pretty simple. The argument is as follows:

• Inferential Role Semantics claims that we can explain what a concept means by showing the inferential role it plays in our language.
• But Inferential Role Semantics is circular. We can see this by looking at it in relation to the concept AND; if we try to define AND in terms of its inferential role we need to presuppose a precise meaning of AND to do so. Therefore our supposed inferential role definition of AND is circular.
• Inferential Role Semantics theorists claim that Fodor’s argument against Informational Role Semantics doesn’t work because it gives primacy to ‘Knowing-that’ over ‘knowing-how’.
• But Information Role Semanticists do the opposite. They in effect conjoin Inferential role semantics with Pragmatism.
• According to Fodor this won’t work, Pragmatism does not distinguish between the ideas of fitting and guiding behaviour. Whereas Inferential Role Semantics wants to explain the meaning of concepts like AND in knowing that terms. The two programmes are incompatible.

“In short, pragmatists have a choice between analyses of rule-following that are too weak and analyses of rule-following that are circular. This is, I think, a bona fide dilemma; there is no way out. The long and short is that you can’t hold both that its definition-in-use has a privileged role in a semantics for ‘and’ and also that grasping ‘and’ requires no more than reasoning in a way that accords with its definition-in-use. Rule-according reasoning isn’t sufficient for rule-following reasoning. I repeat for emphasis: You aren’t following R unless R is the intentional object of one of your mental states.” ( Jerry Fodor ‘LOT2 p. 38)

“In particular, the definition-in-use story about concept individuation wants certain Gentzen style rules of inference to be constitutive of AND. But, according to concept pragmatists, what’s required for AND possession is just being reliably disposed to make valid conjunctive inferences; which rules you follow in making the inferences (indeed, whether there are any rules you follow in making them) isn’t relevant to whether you have a grasp of AND. (ibid p. 39)

• Fodor concludes that Informational Role Semantics and pragmatism cannot be conjoined. One of them must be given up. He argues that Informational Role Semantics is false because as we have seen above it is circular even in its attempts to define simple concepts like AND. Whereas because he thinks that pragmatists cannot account for the compositionality of concepts that is a non-starter as-well.

Based on the above considerations Fodor argues that basic concepts cannot be explicated in terms of either definitions, or definitions-in-use. So Fodor concludes that basic concepts cannot be explicated further in terms of definitions; instead he argues they are atoms which don’t break down.

Hinzen doesn’t deal with the weakness of inferential role semantics instead he works on critiquing attempts to explicate concepts interms of definition, and he critiques attempts to explicate concepts interms of a relation of reference to a mind independent world. On the area of definitions he raised Fodor’s point that concepts like KILL cannot be explicated interms of the internal structure CAUSE TO DIE, because KILL and CAUSE TO DIE behave differently in syntactic constructions. Hinzen shows various different ways that KILL and CAUSE TO DIE behave both semantically and syntactically and draws the following conclusion:

“This is evidence that a word like kill is not only syntactically but also semantically simple- it is an atom-contrary to a phrase like cause to die, which does exhibit syntactic and semantic structure” (Wolfram Hinzen ‘An Essay on Names and Truth’ p. 75)

After establishing to his mind that atomic concepts have no internal structure Hinzen points out that this will leave us with serious difficulties in explicating what atomic concepts actually are:

“So, what is the essence of an atom? Clearly, the content of any concept C is essential to it, whatever notion of content or meaning one has (e.g. a referential or use theoretic one): concepts are semantically individuated. This is simply to say that without meaning house, the concept of a house, whatever it is, would not be the concept it is. I take it as undeniable that, again, whatever one’s notion of meaning, one will concede that our concept of a house means house and not horse, say, chair or Piccadilly.” (ibid p. 77)

Hinzen fully admits that this is a circular definition but he argues that there is no other non-circular way of explicating what the essence of our atomic concepts are. He even goes as far as to argue that if atomic concepts are to be analysed in terms of anything other than themselves then that analysis will belong to the relational explication of the concept not its intrinsic aspects. He then proceeds to analyse attempts to explain meaning relationally and show where these accounts go badly wrong. These attempts to explain meaning in terms of a word-world relation are badly wrong according to Hinzen. His criticism referential semantics is largely derived from Chomsky’s criticisms of attempts to cash out meaning in terms of reference (See Chomsky 1986, Chomsky 2000).

These Chomskian arguments centre on concepts like LONDON, BOOK, BANK etc which have curious and sometimes contradictory properties which suggest that they cannot be explicated in terms of referring to mind independent entities. Chomsky has famously argued that if we use a term in language, the use of the term does not automatically commit us to the ontological existence of the entity supposedly referred to by the term. 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 Chomsky mentions how our ordinary concepts reflect intricate and surprising constraints on how we can interpret the world. 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 lens 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 a 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. ( Chomsky ‘New Horizons in the Study of Language and Mind’ 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.

In effect Hinzen’s project can be read as a sceptical attempt to rid linguistics of semantics and leave it to work primarily with syntax and pragmatics. He takes on board Fodor’s argument against definitions being incapable of demonstrating any internal structure in lexical atoms, and he uses Chomsky’s arguments to show how concepts cannot be explicated interms of word-world relations. He doesn’t develop any arguments against inferential role semantics which is a big oversight given how dominant the school is in contemporary philosophy of language. But we have seen that in his ‘Language of Thought2’ Fodor constructed a compelling argument against inferential role semantics. So let us assume for the present that Fodor’s arguments against definitions, and against Inferential Role Semantics are sufficient to show that human have atomistic concepts with no internal structure.

That leaves it very difficult to cash out what the nature of concepts is. Fodor tried to overcome this problem by developing a causal theory where concepts lock on in a law like manner to aspects of the mind independent world. But of course Hinzen is convinced by Chomsky’s sceptical arguments against the possibility of developing a word-world relation type semantics. Again let us assume that Hinzen is correct to follow Chomsky in his semantic scepticism. We are then lead to a situation where it is pretty much impossible to say what the nature of these atomic concepts are. Hinzen makes the uninformative proposal that we can say that the concept DOG essentially means dog (where the meaning dog cannot be cashed out in terms of a mind independent entity).So while Hinzen has used some pretty strong arguments to critique traditional conceptions of the nature of concepts and the nature of reference; what he has left in place is a mystery instead of an explanation.

Hinzen’s theory amounts to appealing to concepts, the nature of which is unknowable, these concepts despite appearances do not change as we learn more about the environment, and though we can use these concepts for certain purposes how we do so is shrouded in mystery. When all a theorist has to offer is a veil of mystery in place of a theory then a hard sell is necessary. Hinzen’s hard sell involves caricaturing people who hold opposing philosophical views to make his theory look comparatively superior. To put words in Hinzen’s mouth one can imagine him defending his mystery mongering as follows: “Sure my theory may amount to nothing but an appeal to a mystery, but that’s not surprising, we are after all angels not gods, there are bound to be things we cannot understand. Anyway at least my theory is more coherent than its nearest competitor take Dan Dennett’s silly views…”. My view that Hinzen caricatured Dennett as a way of making his own theory look comparatively good is obviously only speculation, but I am hard pressed to think of any other reason he would misrepresent Dennett so badly.

Hinzen critiqued Dennett’s views on the naturalisation of meaning; arguing that they were wildly out of step with what we know about language and how it works. Dennett’s mantra in a nutshell is “don’t expect more determinacy of meaning than reality allows”. Dennett uses frogs as a way of illustrating his point about meaning and its level of determinacy. Frog’s eyes are triggered by moving flies, and when a moving fly is registered frogs will catch them with their tongues and eat them and he argues that there is no fact of the matter as to what the frog intends when he swats at the fly:

“And to the extent that there is nothing in the selective environment that uniquely singles out a particular class of occasions, there is also no fact of the matter about what the frog’s eye report really means.” (Dennett: Intuition Pumps p.257)

“Suppose scientists gather up a small population of frogs from some fly-grabbing species on the brink of extinction, and puts them under protective custody in a new environment-a special frog zoo in which there are no flies, but rather Zoo keepers who periodically arrange to launch little food pellets past the frogs in their care. To the keepers’ delight, the system works; the frogs thrive by zapping their tongues for these pellets, and after a while there is a crowd of descendent frogs who have never seen a fly, only pellets.” (ibid p.258)

Dennett notes that what happens to the frogs in his thought experiment, happens all of the time in evolution. It is a case of exaptation where a particular piece of machinery is selected for a different function. To make the case clearer Dennett supposes that in the new environment, variation in pellet detecting ability meant that certain frogs were more likely to survive than other frogs. He further argues that there was no particular moment when we are justified in saying that this is the point where what the frog’s eye report means changes. He argues that there is no fact of the matter about what a frog’s eye report means, and that it is a mistake to think that there is some determinate meaning encoded in the frog’s brain in terms of some kind of mentalese. The meaning of the black dots on the frog’s retina isn’t determined by some central meaner in the brain, rather it emerges gradually through shifts in environmental conditions. He argues that without the “indeterminate” variation in the triggering conditions of the frog’s eyes, selection for a different function would not be possible (ibid p.257).

Dennett thinks that the case of frog’s  indeterminacy of meaning is the same as the case with humans. We can interpret human’s behaviour by adopting the intentional stance, just like we can interpret human behaviour interms of the design stance or the physical stance. The intentional stance is particularly useful in helping us interpret human behaviour, but it is still just a stance, for Dennett there is no such thing as intrinsic intentionality.

Hinzen thinks that Dennett’s stance-stance approach when looked at closely commits Dennett to absurd and unacceptable consequences. In his ‘Darwin’s Dangerous Idea’ Dennett constructed a thought experiment where a person (Oscar) was unknowingly transported to another a planet Twin Earth which is identical to ours in most respects except they have creatures (schmorses) which look and behave the same way as our horses do but have a different internal structure. When for the first time Oscar sees what he thinks is a horse he says ‘Lo a horse’ and the intuition typically being pumped is that in this situation Oscar has said something false, because what he is referring to is actually a schmorse. But Dennett argues that there is another way to think about the issue. He argues that a person’s concept of a horse may actually be more relaxed. That what a person means by horse, involves bare perceptual features such as its shape and general behaviour, (this person may be completely ignorant of the biology). Since the schmorse has the same perceptual features and general behaviour as what Oscar means by horse, when Oscar says ‘Lo a horse’ he is right according to his own lights (though not by the lights of the scientific community). On Dennett’s view since our concepts are more messy and indeterminate than the rigid definitions of natural science concepts, then there may be no fact of the matter of precisely what Oscar means. Based on these facts Hinzen draws the following conclusion about Dennett’s position:

“The implied answer to this rhetorical question is that there is no fact of the matter: there is no more determinacy to be had here anymore than in the case of the frog. As long as a horse is used to denote both horses and schmorses, it can mean both. Depending on the environment we place you in, the meaning of your words shifts, and can mean as many things as it can take up functional roles, which is indefinitely many (schmorses, lorses, whorses, Trojan ones, reincarnations, etc.) If there really is nothing in our concept of a horse, there is nothing from preventing the word from meaning anything. So if it came to be used to refer to horse skins, riders of horses,  or landscapes behind horses, there would be nothing to prevent us from saying  it does not refer to that. It follows that Dennett cannot mean anything other by the word ‘horse’ than what is effectively a phonetic label.” (Hinzen: “An Essay on Names and Truth” p.88)

Here Hinzen is engaging in a gross caricature of Dennett’s views. The views attributed to Dennett are indeed absurd; the only difficulty for Hinzen is that Dennett doesn’t hold anything like those views. Here are Dennett’s actual views on the topic:

“What you mean by the word “horse” (your private mental concept of a horse) is something like one of those equinish beasts that we Earthlings like to ride, an epithet anchored in your mind by all your memories of horse shows and cowboy movies. Let us agree that this memory matrix fixes the kind of thing to which your concept of horse applies… Nothing forces us to suppose that your concept of a horse wasn’t more relaxed in the first place rather like your concept of table. (Try telling the story of Twin Earth with the suggestion that the tables there aren’t really tables, but just looks like tables and are used for tables. It doesn’t work does it?). Horses and schmorses may not be the same biological species, but what if you, like most earthlings have no clear concept of species, and classify by appearance: living thing that looks like Man O War. Horses and schmorses both fall into that kind, so, when you call a Twin Earth beast a horse, you’re right after all. Given what you mean by “horse,” schmorses are horses- a non Earthly kind of horse, but a horse just the same. Non-earthly tables are tables. It is clear that you could have such a relaxed concept of horses and you could have a tighter concept, according to which schmorses are not horses, not being the same earthly species. Both cases are possible. Now, must it be determinate whether our horse concept (prior to your move) meant the species or the wider class? It might be, if you are well read in biology, for instance, but suppose you are not. Then your concept- what “horse” actually means to you- would suffer the same indeterminacy as the frog’s concept of fly (or was it all along the concept small airborne food item?)” (Dennett ‘Darwin’s Dangerous Idea’ p. 411)

Above we see Dennett arguing that Oscar’s concept of horse centres on perceptual features of the creature, and on functional roles that the creature plays in society; he also argues that the concept is anchored to our entire memories of sightings and behaviours of the creature. But Hinzen somehow ignores all of these claims of Dennett and manages to interpret Dennett as believing that Oscar’s concept of ‘Horse’ is non-existent and all ‘Horse’ amounts to is a phonetic label. This interpretation of Dennett is beyond the pale interms of inaccuracy, Dennett clearly isn’t arguing that Horse is just a phonetic label, he is saying that it expresses a concept which may not have the precise features of the scientific concept of horse.

Hinzen could possibly defend his interpretation of Dennett by saying that his intentional stance position is not robustly real enough, and since the ‘as if’ concepts we attribute Oscar can be changed willy nilly, Dennett really is committed to the strange view that ‘horse’ is nothing other than a meaningless label. But again, this would be too badly misjudge Dennett’s position. The intentional stance approach isn’t an anything goes stance. The stance is constrained by pragmatic constraints and computational constraints. In his ‘Real Patterns’ Dennett makes the following point:

“Gregory Chaitin’s valuable definition of mathematical randomness invokes this idea. A series (of dots or numbers or whatever)  is random if and only if the information required to describe (transmit) the series accurately is incompressible: nothing shorter than the verbatim bit map will preserve the series. The a series is not random-has a pattern-if and only if- there is some more efficient way of describing it…of course, there are bound to be other ways of describing the evident patterns in these frames, and some will be more efficient than others-in the precise sense of being systematically specifiable in fewer bits. Any such description, if an improvement over the bit map, is the description of a real pattern in the data.” (Dennett: ‘Real Patterns’ p. 293).

As the above quote shows very clearly, Dennett is not committed to some arbitrary anything goes position on intentional ascription. He has a precise model of when we are justified in using the intentional stance. There is no textual evidence in Dennett’s position to support Hinzen’s interpretation of him, on any sensible reading of Dennett he doesn’t hold the views that Hinzen ascribes to him.

Aside from his misinterpretation of Dennett’s views Hinzen’s discussion of concepts in terms of negative evidence against dominant approaches to semantics is well argued (aside from the oversight of ignoring inferential role semantics). But his positive conception of concepts is empty and offers no real explanation of what the nature of concepts actually are.

E.J. Spode’s recent article for 3am: Magazine http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/tom-wolfes-reflections-language/ continued the angry tone of Chomsky’s disciples anytime Chomsky is criticised.  Spode’s article was funny and accurate at times his comparing Wolfe with Trump was pretty on the money. Wolfe does lay it on way too think with his the poor little guys being crushed by big bad socially connected intellectuals. And Wolfe’s pretence to be a defender of the so called little guy, can I suppose be fruitfully compared with Trump pretending to be a man of the people. One of the really strange aspects of the article was the author pretending Wolfe’s book was given an easy ride and a load of good reviews until the brave E. J. Spode came along to tell the truth and expose the book for its failings. I have read every review I could get my hands on and as far as I can see the book was almost (aside from a few puff pieces) universally panned. I have criticised Wolfe’s book very heavily myselfhttps://kingdablog.wordpress.com/2016/09/21/tom-wolfe-chomsky-everett-and-the-evolution-of-language/ .  So Spode’s pretence to be the lone voice of reason is a bit weird; as pretty much everyone agreed with him that the book was poorly researched.

            When he starts talking about Chomsky though Spode goes completely off the rails. Personally, though I disagree with Chomsky about a lot, I think he is one of the most important thinkers of the last hundred years. But the way Spode talks about him is veering towards a kind of cult worship. This quote from Spode is bizarre:

“He came to us with that gift. He did not ask us to believe him, nor did he insist that we engage in that project ourselves. He simply told us what his project was and invited us to join him. And all we as a culture could do in our upscale magazines and newspapers and blogs was shit all over the man and clog the conversation with an endless stream of transparent gibberish from obvious charlatans. This is why we can’t have nice things.”

That has to be the most cringe worthy pieces of sycophantic hero worship I have read in my entire life. He portrays Chomsky as analogous to Moses coming down from the mountain top with the ten-commandments to find the natives worshiping craven gods; it’s just overblown nonsense. Chomsky is a scientist who has a brilliant theory that other people don’t accept because they do not find the evidence sufficient. This biblical nonsense of Chomsky coming to us with a gift, which us ungrateful mortals with our fallen nature didn’t accept; isn’t science; it is the talk of cultish acolytes.

The rest of the article had very little argumentative structure and seemed to want to refute Everett by calling him names. He didn’t even attempt to engage with Everett and try to understand where he was coming from. His reasoning seemed to be that Everett is a buffoon, as only a buffoon could be silly enough to disagree with the great Chomsky. Everett is portrayed as a fool who is beneath the dignity of the great man to even debate with; so this duty was passed down to the disciples. Spode imagines Chomsky hearing about Everett’s discovery in the following way:

“Chomsky is working at his computer when a student rushes in.
Student: “Professor Chomsky! They’ve discovered an Amazonian tribe that has a language without recursion!”
Chomsky (slowly turning from his computer): “Can they learn Portuguese?”
Student: “Well… yes.”
Chomsky slowly turns back to his computer.”

Spode seems to think that because the Piraha can learn Portuguese then that is the end of the subject; Chomsky is right, let’s switch our brains off and go home. But as any child would recognise immediately the fact that the Piraha can learn Portuguese is neutral on the issue on whether Chomsky is correct that an innate domain specific language faculty is responsible. Likewise the evidence is neutral as to whether Everett’s theory of language being a domain general cultural tool is the correct story. The truth is that the Piraha debate on its own won’t settle the issue of whether Chomsky’s theory is correct or not. There are multiple factors that need to be considered. Poverty of stimulus arguments ( I have discussed this issue herehttps://www.academia.edu/27279064/POVERTY_OF_STIMULUS_ARGUMENTS_AND_BEHAVIOURISM_CHOMSKY_AND_QUINE_ON_LANGUAGE_LEARNING ) and the ample evidence against them, impossibility arguments and the empirical computational models which purport to show that impossibility arguments do not work, evidence and counter evidence from children with Williams Syndrome, so called Specific language Impairment etc ( https://www.academia.edu/9988559/Williams_Syndrome_and_the_Language_Instinct ) . There are debates on whether children receive corrections and whether they can make use of these corrections etc. There is mountains of evidence out there that need to be considered to adjudicate the issue but Spode ignores this evidence and instead constructs an imagined scenario that involves blatant question begging about the issue. If Piraha can learn Portuguese then Spode seems to reason we will assume without argument that this demonstrates that Chomsky is correct.

As his review went on it got nastier and nastier in tone and the arguments made less and less sense. At one point he chastises the brilliant anthropologist Barbara King for making the obvious point that there is no evidence that Everett is racist:

“Does it occur to King that by joining the parade of those primitivizing the Pirahã, she has added her support for a dominant discourse too? – a very old colonial narrative that, to borrow the words of Geoff Pullum, perhaps hides “our buried racist tendencies?” Perhaps yes, as she rallies to defend Everett: “The racism charge is plainly baseless; in his books Everett portrays the Pirahãs as clever people.” Well. That settles that.”

Now at this point we have left the realm of science. Spode is claiming that if a scientist discovers a language that is structured differently than say English; if we discover it is less complex then we are being racist. In effect he is asking us to stipulate a priori that all languages are equally complex, to eschew any empirical research into the matter and just stipulate the issue. As a person who is interested in understanding the nature of language I will stick to empirical research and let Spode stipulate matters how he wants. The fact is though that Everett didn’t argue that the Piraha language was inferior to our own language, instead he argued that it was a tool that developed differently because of the different cultural practices of the Piraha.

Other charges from Spode involve chastising Everett for changing his mind about the structure of the Piraha language as he learned more about the subject. Incredible though it seems, Spode seems to think that modifying your views in light of new data is a bad thing and is evidence that Everett is a charlatan. This is a strange position to hold. Chomsky’s views on linguistics have changed over the years, his current views on the Minimalist Programme involve much less machinery to explain our linguistic competence than he allowed for example in his standard theory phase. Is this evidence that Chomsky is a charlatan? Personally I see it as evidence that Chomsky is a flexible scientist who is changes his views on language as he learns more, and I think the same is true of Everett. Why Sprode treats Chomsky changing his mind differently than Everett changing his mind is anyone’s guess, it may having something to do with Chomsky being Moses and giving us a gift despite our fallen nature.

Overall Spode’s discussion of Everett’s views is entirely unbalanced. He focuses on Pesetsky et al. paper ignoring Everett’s reply to their paper or the countless other papers written on the issue. Treating one paper as an indisputable source on a debate is unadvisable to say the least. Spode didn’t even go into Pesetsky et al’s paper in any detail preferring to slander Everett by association. So he set about naming a few cases of anthropological theories of remote tribes which have been proven false, seeming to believe that guilt by association is sufficient to refute Everett. This guilt by association is extremely poor practice. Imagine a critic of Chomsky pointing out that the lead author of the paper Everett was criticising ‘Hauser, Chomsky, Fitch 2002’ was subsequently sacked from his job for falsifying data in an experiment. Marc Hauser was indeed sacked for falsifying data. But this has no bearing on the paper he co-authored with Chomsky and Fitch. And it certainly has no bearing on Chomsky and Fitch in general. Only a despicable charlatan would try to slur Chomsky because of things his colleagues have done. Imagine saying that because Chomsky has worked closely with Jerry Fodor for years that he is responsible for Fodor’s views on evolution. This would be absolutely absurd. There is no reason that people should be attacked for things colleagues have done or believe. And the exact same thing should hold for Everett. By all means criticise his theories but this incessant name calling and attempts to convict him of mistakes that people he is not even connected to is absurd. People like Spode need to get used to the fact that legitimate scientists like Dan Everett, Michael Tomasello, and Alexander Clark disagree with Chomsky on the nature of language. They then need to address the issues in a balanced manner instead of continuing this pointless attempt to slur anybody who disagrees with the great man.

http://s3.amazonaws.com/academia.edu.documents/48868382/Some_thoughts_on_Hofstadter_and_Carey_on_Division.docx?AWSAccessKeyId=AKIAJ56TQJRTWSMTNPEA&Expires=1474691354&Signature=V%2FkFBK20DvOaF%2F2484lF9l1Zpz4%3D&response-content-disposition=attachment%3B%20filename%3DImplicit_Ideas_Naive_Analogies_and_Pictu.docx

Tom Wolfe’s new book ‘Kingdom of Speech’ has been almost universally dismissed by both linguists and evolutionary theorists alike for its misrepresentation of the respective subjects. The book has been slammed as a poorly researched hatchet job on intellectual giants Chomsky and Darwin. I find myself in agreement with a lot of the criticisms of Wolfe’s book. But before proceeding to criticise him I have to confess (guiltily) that I enjoyed the book. If it were a work of fiction I would recommend it. I thought it was well written; some people have a problem with Wolfe’s style of writing, but I enjoyed it. The book had drama, excitement, and flowed well. Unfortunately however the book was not a work of fiction; it was a work on intellectual history; in particular the history of the theory of evolution, and the history of attempts to explain the evolution of language. As a scholarly work it failed completely.

Wolfe’s book was filled with bad misrepresentations of the subjects he discussed (Darwin, Chomsky, and Everett), and he showed little understanding of the theories that any of these theorists held. Even when he was sympathetic to people; like he was to Everett, he still managed to misrepresent their views.

Wolfe isn’t the first artist[1] to try his hand at intellectual history and be burned. Years ago Yeats and Goldsmith tried their hand at intellectual history and biography when writing about the life and thought of philosopher George Berkeley. Berkeley scholar Luce dismissed Yeats biography of Berkeley as fantasy. Some could argue that Wolfe is guilty of similar fantasies. When discussing Yeats and Goldsmith’s biographies of Berkeley; David Berman made the following point:

“There can be little doubt that Berkeley sat for Luce’s biographical portrait, given its judicious use of his correspondence and other hard evidence. Goldsmith was well known for mixing truth and fantasy. Similarly Yeats’ judgements are often based on intuition, as when he asserts that with Berkeley ‘we feel perhaps for the first time that eternity is always at our heels or hidden from our eyes by the thickness of a door’- an assertion which must prompt the question: is this biography or poetry? And yet for all that, more than a suspicion remains, as I have tried to show, that there was a deeper Berkeley which neither Latham nor Luce has captured. But of whom Goldsmith and Yeats have caught a glimpse”  (David Berman ‘Berkeley: Idealism and the Man’)

When reading Wolfe, the challenge is to disentangle where he is engaging in fantasy, and where he has perhaps caught a deeper glimpse than the scholars. The idea of an artist capturing a deeper glimpse of a person’s nature probably seems like mysticism. But it is not really that wild. We read fiction because of the insights it gives into how people behave. There is even evidence that reading fiction can increase empathy http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/novel-finding-reading-literary-fiction-improves-empathy/. Chomsky admits as much himself:

“It is quite possible-overwhelmingly probable, one might guess- that we will always learn more about human life and personality from novels than from scientific psychology” (New Horizons in the Study of Language and Mind)

It is not I submit, implausible that a writer of literary fiction may have insights into a person’s personality that more straight biographers lack. We accept this fact readily enough with psychotherapists. We understand that their hours of emphatic work with patients for months on end may result in an understanding of the human condition that goes deeper than the average person’s. It is for this reason that psycho-biographies are widely read.

Wolfe as brilliant literary writer uses his talents to try to reconstruct the inner worlds of his subjects on issues where there is scant documentary evidence. Much has been made about Wolfe’s discussions of Darwin’s feelings of guilt, and his rage when he received Wallace’s letter. Unlike a lot of critics, I think his account of Darwin’s feelings when he received Wallace’s letter has a certain degree of plausibility to it. In an age where scientists are sometimes portrayed as super human saints, a suggestion that Darwin may not have been happy that another guy had written up his theory of evolution before he published his seems almost sacrilegious. In the popular press we regularly see comments like the following one by Krauss “Scientists are really happy when they get it wrong, because it means there is more to learn” https://www.reddit.com/r/philosophy/comments/4k3iu4/rationally_speaking_lawrence_krauss_another/. This pretence that scientists don’t have human emotions and are rational saints is just silly. Science has good institutions to keep its practitioners straight; and they usually work well. But there is no reason to think scientists themselves are above normal human ambitions and behaviour. There are times in the book where Wolfe is speculating about the motives and thoughts about Darwin, and Chomsky in ways that seem somewhat plausible. The truth is we don’t truly know what Darwin felt when received Wallace’s letter. Wolfe’s, speculation on Darwin’s feelings have a degree of plausibility to them, and at least may prompt people to think in a new way about the history of thought.

However despite the book being well written, and offering more than the standard scientists are hyper rational gods trope, there is much that is badly wrong in his account of the history of ideas. Firstly his discussion of Chomsky and Everett gives a misleading picture of the state of play in linguistics. Wolfe portrays Linguistics as a field dominated by Chomsky; and Everett as a lone warrior fighting against this hegemony. This is a false picture. There are lots of theorists who strongly disagree with Chomsky on the language faculty. There is evidence from a variety of sources which contradict Chomsky’s postulation of a language faculty. As we learn more and more about performance data ( Pullum and Schulz 2002, Hart and Risley 1995, Sampson 2002, Choinard and Clark 2002, Everett 2016, Tomasello 2015), and more and more about domain general computational procedures ( Pefors 2016, Lappin and Clark 2013),  key claims made by Chomsky are being undermined. So Wolfe goes badly wrong in portraying this as a battle between two scientists. Many many scientists disagree with Chomsky’s views on language acquisition. In the 80’s there was a schism in linguistics known as the linguistic wars where Chomsky’s students e.g. Paul Postal and George Lakoff development of generative semantics split the subject apart. Today people who agree with Chomsky about the existence of a language faculty disagree with Chomsky about its architecture and how it evolved e.g. Pinker and Jackendoff. Philosophers like Fiona Cowie who partially support Chomsky’s linguistic Nativism have criticised many aspects of his theory. The list goes of disagreements could go on forever. So Wolfe’s tale of a two man battle for the soul of linguistics is over simplistic to say the least. Wolfe is not however incorrect to note that Chomsky has got an unusual amount of sway within linguistics. Nor is Wolfe wrong to document the disgraceful behaviour of Chomsky’s inner circle towards Everett. For a discussion of this angry war of words see http://chronicle.com/article/angry-words/131260 . I think Wolfe does a good job of characterising the sometimes aggressive and dismissive tone Chomsky takes towards those he disagrees with:

“As Chomsky grinds through Skinner for twenty thousand words, he uses the expressions “empty,” “quite empty,” “quite false,” “completely meaningless,” “perfectly useless,” and the like repeatedly…plus “vacuous…complete retreat to mentalistic psychology”…”mere paraphrases for the popular vocabulary” (appears on the same page as “perfectly useless,” “vacuous,” and “likewise empty”…”serious delusion”… “of no conceivable interest”… “play acting at science”…This is simply not true”…no basis in fact”…”very implausible speculation”… “entirely pointless and empty…As for any random figure of note who persisted in challenging his authority, Chomsky would summarily dismiss him as a “fraud” a “liar,” or a “charlatan”. He called B. F. Skinner, Elie Wiesel, Jacques Derrida, and “the American intellectual community” frauds. He called Alan Dershowitz, Christopher Hitchens, and Werner Cohn liars. He pinned the charlatan tag on the famous French psychiatrist Jacques Lacan…and he would pin another later on…” ( The Kingdom of Speech p. 97)

Wolfe discusses these aspects of Chomsky’s sometimes authoritarian attitude accurately. But the whole discussion is marred by his misrepresentation of the history of the discipline.

Possibly the strangest aspect of the book is that Wolfe attacks both Chomsky and Darwin as though they were two sides of the same coin. Darwin and Chomsky couldn’t be more different in terms of their approaches to science. Chomsky is a pure theorist in the mould of a theoretical physicist while Darwin was very much a data driven scientist. They would seem to have little in common other than being responsible inventing a new discipline.

While, Wolfe’s understanding of the intellectual history of both generative grammar and evolutionary theory could be considered a bit sloppy, with an occasional insight every now and then, his discussion of the science of evolutionary theory is wildly inaccurate. In an interview for NPR he actually said that Humans should not be considered animals and that language did not evolve. This is a bizarre statement, one that flies in the face of pretty much all empirical evidence. And in case one thinks that it was a throw away comment that doesn’t reflect Wolfe’s actual views as expressed in the book here is a direct quote from ‘The Kingdom of Speech’:

“There were five standard tests for a scientific hypothesis. Had anyone observed the phenomenon-in this case, Evolution-as it occurred and recorded it? Could other scientists replicate it? Could any of them come up with a set of facts that, if true, would contradict the theory (Karl Popper’s “falsifiability” test)? Could scientists make predictions based on it? Did it illuminate hitherto unknown or baffling areas of science? In the case of Evolution…well…no…no…no…no…and no.” (Tom Wolfe ‘The Kingdom of Speech’ p. 27)

These bizarre claims strain credulity; it is hard to believe that Wolfe believes them, this is the type of logic one sees from creationists and flat earth proponents. Your average school child who is unencumbered by blind ideology would see the falsehood of these statements immediately. In his piece for the Washington Post Jerry Coyne attacks these four claims noting that we have seen evolution in real time and via observation and by looking at the order of fossils. Evolutionary theory could be falsified by finding a rabbit in 400 hundred million year old sediments.  Coyne goes on to note that evolution does make predictions (he points to Darwin’s prediction that humans originated in Africa). And he notes that obviously evolutionary theory does help to solve biological problems in subjects like embryology.

Coyne’s replies are largely correct. But I would question his (and Wolfe’s) naive falsification views. If a rabbit was supposedly found in 400 million year old sediments I don’t think people would necessarily consider evolutionary theory refuted. There is such an incredible amount of evidence for the theory of evolution that one observation simply wouldn’t be enough to refute it. In the case of such an incredible find; the scientist’s credibility would be questioned; and variety different explanations would be offered. But it is doubtful an entire theory would have been dismissed because of an anomaly. This is common place in the history of science. So, for example, George Berkeley had legitimate criticisms of Newton’s notion of absolute space[2], and of the calculus of the day[3]. But scientists didn’t respond by rejecting Newton’s theory; how could they? The theory was the only theory at the time which could explain the relevant facts. They just had to live with certain anomalies until a better theory came along. Chomsky himself never tires of noting that Galileo didn’t drop his theory because it couldn’t account for the reason people didn’t fly off the surface of the earth. The same would be true of the theory of evolution it has incredible explanatory scope and despite what Coyne claims one observation wouldn’t be sufficient to refute it. Contrary to what Wolfe seems to think this is no real objection to evolutionary theory; in fact no scientific theory is refuted in such a clear cut manner by a single observation.

Coyne correctly noted that we have seen evolution in real time. He also should have noted that Wolfe implying that a failure to observe evolution directly is a refutation of the theory is ridiculous. Even if we could not directly observe evolution it would not hurt the theory in the slightest. We don’t directly observe Dark Matter, but we have good theoretical reasons to justify the postulation of it. It is just obvious that explanatory theories don’t need to have every aspect of them observed directly in order for us to say that on balance of evidence we are justified in believing that the theory is true. Wolfe seems to be operating on some kind of crude kind of positivist conception of science; that there is no real reason take seriously. Ultimately I think Coyne does a good job of critiquing this aspect of Wolfe’s views, not that a professor of biology is needed to refute Wolfe’s strange views on evolutionary theory.

Wolfe is a hugely popular writer whose sales will probably eclipse those of all other popular expositions of linguistics. In the popular mind because of the work of Tom Wolfe people may associate criticism of Chomsky; with denial of the truth of evolution. Wolfe has in a sense lined up Chomsky’s critics with crypto creationists. This is a disaster, and in the long run I think Wolfe’s book will likely win more supporters for Chomsky’s theory of linguistics; which is a pity because the evidence is badly at odds with Chomsky’s speculations.

In a sense Wolfe’s strange and completely unsupported views on Darwin and the theory of evolution have reversed the usual dialectic in the debate. It is typically Chomsky and his followers who have been perceived as having a problem with Darwin. Pre 1990 Chomsky was always sceptical about explaining the evolution of language. The quotes below give an inkling of his views pre 1990:

“In the case of such systems as language or wings it is not easy even to imagine a course of selection that might have given rise to them” ( Chomsky 1988 p.167)

“It is perfectly safe to attribute this development (of innate language structures) to “natural selection”, so long as we realize that there is no substance to this assertion, that it amounts to nothing more than a belief that there is some naturalistic explanation for these phenomena (Chomsky 1972, p. 97)

Chomsky’s views at the time were extremely sceptical about whether natural selection could account for the evolution of language. As his theories about the structure of the language faculty became less clunky and awkward he began writing more and more about the evolution of language. But at one point of his views on the evolution of language were so sceptical sounding that Dennett devoted a substantial portion of his “Darwin’s Dangerous Idea” (a section titled Chomsky contra Darwin) to a criticism of Chomsky’s views on the prospects of explaining the evolution of language. Likewise in his The Language Instinct Pinker critiqued Chomsky’s sceptical views on explaining the evolution of language. Circa 1995 Chomsky was known as a scientist who had serious problems with the theory of evolution.

Furthermore some of Chomsky’s close colleagues shared his sceptical views on whether evolution through natural selection could explain the origins of language. Two close colleagues of Chomsky’s; Jerry Fodor and Massimo-Piattelli-Palmarini wrote a book ‘What Darwin Got Wrong’, that erroneously argued that natural selection is an incoherent concept that doesn’t do the work evolutionary theorists think it does. Furthermore in his ‘Mind and Cosmos’ Chomsky’s fellow Mysterian Tom Nagel view used his Mysterianism  about consciousness as premise in his argument that the Neo Darwinian conception of life is almost certainly false. Given the sceptical views on evolution held by some of Chomsky’s fellow Mysterians, and the claims that natural selection is an incoherent concept by Chomsky’s close colleagues, along with Chomsky’s early comments on evolution, a naive critic could be forgiven for holding the false view that Chomsky has some problem with the theory of evolution.

Any critic who actually reads Chomsky’s will know that Chomsky has no problem with evolutionary theory, and has been working for the last 15 years or so to develop an evolutionary account of language. He has authored and co-authored many peer reviewed papers on the evolution of language since 2002, and recently co-authored a book on the topic. So despite superficial appearances to the contrary Chomsky’s linguistic project is entirely consistent with the theory of evolution.

The important point to note is that as a result of popular science books like ‘The Language Instinct’, and ‘Darwin’s Dangerous Idea’, in the eyes of the general public Chomsky is often viewed as having serious problems with evolutionary theory. Wolfe though may have turned this popular narrative on its head. Wolfe’s book will probably out sell either Pinker’s or Dennett’s and there is a danger that his bizarre views on evolutionary theory will be attributed to Dan Everett. Wolfe peddles the line that Everett has shown that language is an artefact something culturally constructed and hence something non-biological. Wolfe argues that because language is an artefact it is non biological and represents a hard and fast line between man and beast. None of these conclusions follow on Everett’s picture. Saying that language is culturally constructed is not to deny that biology plays a role. Furthermore, contrary to what Wolfe thinks, far from presenting some hard and fast gap between man and beast, Everett’s gradualist picture of the evolution of language offers no hope to those who want to deny that humans are animals.

Early in ‘The Kingdom of Speech’ Wolfe recollects how he stumbled upon a paper co-authored by Chomsky[4] ‘The Mystery of Language Evolution’ where Chomsky spoke about how aspects of the evolution of language remained mysterious to this day. Wolfe seized upon this. The fact the best researchers into language since Darwin were not able to explain the evolution of language must mean something. To Wolfe what this meant was that language was special; it couldn’t be explained in evolutionary terms; it was the thing that set humans above all other animals. This mode of reasoning is absurd. Chomsky pointing out that there are some aspects of the evolution of language that we don’t understand is not as Wolfe puts it a white flag; it is a call to work harder in developing your theory. And of necessity any theory that you develop won’t be complete.

Dan Everett’s paper ‘Grammar Came Later’ (2016) is clear evidence that Everett disagrees with Wolfe’s view that language cannot be accounted for in evolutionary terms. Everett, like Chomsky, has an evolutionary account of how language evolved. His views on the evolution of language differ from Chomsky’s in that Everett thinks that language developed over a much longer period than Chomsky does. Chomsky places the evolution of language at around 50,000 years ago when a random mutation gave us merge, whereas Everett thinks that language developed over a much longer period.

Everett notes some key facts about our evolutionary history. Over 3 million years ago a new type of ape arrived on earth called Australopithecus. According to Everett (ibid p. 30) Australopithecus could recognise iconicity. To support the claim that they recognised iconicity, Everett pointed out that they collected pebbles shaped like a human face, he cites the example  of Makpansgat Manuport. Everett goes on to note that up to 2.7 million years ago we have evidence of an icon shaped like a phallus called the Erfoud Manuport. (ibid p. 38).

Everett, following Peirce, notes that the movement from index, to icon, to symbol, is one of the key features of our linguistic capacities (ibid p.17). So the fact that Australopithecus was using icons 3 million years ago is clear evidence of the beginnings of linguistic tools being developed. Obviously the use of an icon is not a linguistic practice but it is evidence of cognitive capacities which may have offered an entering wedge into language.

According to Everett there is evidence that language of some sort has been around for 1 million years. 2.6 million years ago Homo-Erectus used crude tools Oldowadan tools (Language Came Later: p. 38) Acheulean tools were developed around 1.76 million years ago (ibid. 39). Homo Erectus immigrated from Africa to Europe around 900,000 years ago, Everett is surely correct that it very unlikely that such a feat would have been possible without some kind of language. Surely some kind of complex communication would have been necessary in order for boats to be built.

There is evidence that symbols were invented 550,000 years ago (ibid. p. 37). 300,000- 400, 000 years ago Homo-Heidbergensis used spears (ibid. p.35); this is evidence for culture. According to Everett compositionality was created by language use, and compositionality preceded recursion.

Everett’s picture of how we developed language begins with all animals having Indexes, Icons first emerged 3 million years ago with Australopitheicus, while we have evidence for Symbols up to 550,000 years ago. Everett notes that because symbols are arbitrary they require culture. This is because the meaning of the symbol must be stipulated by convention. And conventions are only possible within a culture.

With the capacity to use indexes, icons and symbols we have the beginning of language but it is not a real language until we add grammar into the mix. Hockett (1960) famously argued that language involved a duality of patterning involving. The duality involves (1) Syntagmatic: Linearity of symbols (which are constructed culturally through conventions) and (2) Paradigmatic: Using symbols for events and things initially to fill analogous positions in different syntagmemes. Everett goes further and argues that language is a triality of patterning because gesture plays a key role in the evolution of language. One of the key concepts in relation to gesture is the influence of ‘growth points’. Growth points are the points where speech and gesture are (a) synchronized (b) co-expressive (used at the same time in gesture and speech), (c) Jointly form a ‘psychological predicate’ (by psychological predicate he means when news worthy content is differentiated from context), (d) present the same idea in opposite semiotic modes (by opposite dynamic modes he means that the gestures are dynamic, created adlib and not conventionalised). (ibid p. 55).

Everett argues that if we add to the concept of growth point the theory of Meads loop we can explain how gesture would have contributed to developing language. He defines Meads Loop as follows:

 “One’s own gestures are responded to by one’s own mirror neurons in the same way that mirror neurons respond to the actions of others. Thus bringing one’s own actions into the realm of the social and contributing crucially to a development of a theory of mind-being able to interpret the actions of others under the assumption that they have minds like we do, and think according to similar processes” ( ‘Grammar Came Later’ p. 58)

Growth Point’s evolution from Mead’s Loop is the prerequisite for compositionality (ibid p. 58). Thus on this picture we get compositionality from communication not from a mutation which gives us recursion that we use to develop compositionality. So utterances combined with gestures are originally holophrastic and through reuse and gestural focusing on specific components of the holophrastic phrase get analysed into more detail leading to grammatical rules. (ibid p.60)

Everett notes that gestures, prosody, body positioning, eyebrow raising, have the joint effect of pointing out what aspects of the holophrastic utterance are salient, less salient and non-salient. With the utterance thus decomposed (as well as other utterances previously decomposed) people can take these components and associate meaning to them. It is a short step to construct novel new sentences once these various meanings are decoded. Hence you derive compositionality from social utterances, and gesturing.

He goes on to show how beginning with this basic process we can explain how morphology, phonology and syntax developed. I will not here go into the finer details of Everett’s theory, as my goal here is a description not to outline every aspect of his theory. Even after as brief a description as I have sketched here it should be obvious that Everett’s theory of the evolution of language is at odds with everything Wolfe proposes about language. Despite Wolfe treating Everett as the hero of his book there is nothing in common with their views on language evolution. Everett has a theory that purports to show how language has evolved; Wolfe on the other hand thinks that no such theory is possible, Wolfe is even sceptical about the truth of the theory of evolution.

In some respects Chomsky’s views on the evolution of language should be more congenial to someone like Wolfe who wants a hard and fast line to distinguish man from beast. Everett gives us a gradualistic approach that moves from capacities that all animals share to human specific capacities.  He takes us through a slow process where our linguistic capacities are developed through a long cultural process; Chomsky, on the other hand, gives us a nice cut off point where a mutation gives humans a computationally perfect linguistic capacity that provides concrete barrier that separates man from the rest of the animal kingdom.

Now obviously Chomsky’s position which postulates random mutations which created merge approx 50,000 years ago (the faculty of language narrow), and a faculty of language broad which is an adaptation created by the tinkering processes of natural selection provides no real comfort to Wolfe. Ultimately evolution does the job of the “creation” of language.  Whether Chomsky is correct, or Everett (or the many other theorists), there is no theory in the offing that is non-evolutionary. Wolfe let wishful thinking dictate how he interpreted the data.

[1] Wolfe has spent as much of his life writing journalism as he has writing literary fiction. But even his journalistic writing has an artistic feel to it.

[2] See Berkeley ‘De Motu’ and Karl Popper’s ‘Berkeley as a precursor to Mach and Einstein’.

[3] See Berkeley ‘The Analyst’.

[4] Chomsky et al (2014) ‘The Mystery of Language Evolution’.

EXTRA-MURAL LECTURES ON  EXPERIMENTAL PHILOSOPHY

The main subject of this course of lectures, on the History, Theory and Practice of Experimental Philosophy, is the direct experimental method in philosophy. The course begins, however, by looking at the history of this method, not only in the classic Empiricist philosophers, such as Locke, but also as it was used by those, like Descartes, who are usually described as Rationalists, and how it was importantly challenged by Kant’s transcendental method, which led, in the late 19th century, to the divorce between philosophy and psychology, when philosophy ceased to being experimental  and became  and became analytical or linguistic. Some discussion is also given to the difference between the direct experimental approach in philosophy and the recent form of experimental philosophy, sometimes abbreviated as X-Phi, whose approach is sociological rather than psychological.
From history, the course then moves to the central element of experience and experiment, where the focus is on a number
of do-able experiments, one of which Bertrand Russell called this ‘famous argument’, namely the three containers of water experiment, most fully developed by Berkeley in his Three Dialogues of 1713. Another area of experimentation is on taste and smell, more specifically the tastes of coffee. However, even more important are the experiments concerning mental images and the connections that can be drawn from these and mental types.                                                                                                               Probably the main guiding principle of the course is that philosophy can still be done in the fruitful way of the great philosopher-psychologists, from Descartes to William James, namely in the arm-chair, but not primarily through conceptual or linguistic analysis, but in the experimental or experiential way, which, it is argued, issues in the recognition that different people have different basic yet opposed types of experience, from which different typologies can and should be developed. Where this comes out most clearly in a theoretical way is in the history of philosophy, most importantly in the division between dualists, like Descartes, and monists, like Spinoza, but also in the key sensory division between visual types, like Berkeley, and those who were tactual, like Russell. Less important but still instructive is the typology of sour and bitter tasting and tasters, which draws on actual hands-on coffee tastings in the later part of the course, which those attending the course are invited to participate in.
More information about the content of the course can be found a workbook on the subject, written by the lecturer, entitled ‘A Manual of Experimental Philosophy’, which is available from Books Upstairs, in D’Olier St, or from the lecturer.

Lecturer: Prof. David Berman

Register in advance by post, to the Executive Officer, Department of Philosophy, Arts Building, Trinity College, Dublin 2 enclosing a cheque/draft/ postal money order made payable to Trinity College no. 1 account. Your receipt will be your ticket for the series. Registration might also be possible on the morning of the first lecture. But note that the number of places is limited to 25.

The cost for the ten lectures is €90. Concession rate (€60) is available to students, unemployed persons and those in receipt of a social welfare pension.

There will be ten lectures beginning on Saturday, 24 September 2016, 10:00 am – 11:15, in the Philosophy seminar room, 5012, Arts Building, Trinity College, Dublin 2.

For further information contact Prof Berman, Philosophy Department, Trinity College Dublin, the University of Dublin, Dublin 2, T: 01 896 1126, E: dberman@tcd.ie<mailto:dberman@tcd.ie> or Ms. Una Campbell, Philosophy Dept, Trinity College Dublin, T: 01 896 1529,ucmpbell@tcd.ie<mailto:ucmpbell@tcd.ie>

In a footnote of this ‘Origins of Objectivity’ Tyler Burge criticised Pylyshyn’s theory of vision. Burge argued that though Pylyshyn’s experimental work was very important Pylyshyn was to some degree misinterpreting his own experiments. Since Burge’s book was published Fodor and Pylyshyn[1] have written a book ‘Minds without Meanings’ where they further develop their direct reference theory.  In this blog-post I will consider their new book in light of the criticisms made by Burge and evaluate to what degree F and P’s claims stand up to critical scrutiny.

In some aspects the debate between F and P and Burge is an updated and more tractable version of the Quine/Wittgenstein point that ostensive definition requires a lot of stage setting. A lot of philosophers/psychologists think that the stage setting can be provided by innate constraints on interpretation. While others think that culture sets the stage in some ways. At a more fundamental level; the level of perception F and P seem to think that FINST can pick out objects independent of any stage setting; hence they argue that FINST do the job by locking on to distal objects. This provides their foundation as they move out towards more complex conceptual capacities. They present a variety of pieces of experimental evidence to support their claim. They note the following:

“One of the main characteristics of visual perception that led Pylyshyn (1989, 2001) to postulate FINSTs is that vision appears not only to pick out several individual objects automatically, but also to keep track of them as they move about unpredictably by using only spatio temporal information and ignoring visible properties of individual objects… Pylyshyn and his students demonstrated in hundreds of experiments (described in Pylyshyn 2001, 2003, 2007 and elsewhere), that observers could keep track of up to four or five moving objects without encoding any of their distinguishing properties (including their motion and the speed or direction of their movement.” (‘Mind’s Without Meanings pp. 100-102)

They note that in these various object tracking studies some factors do somewhat effect subject performance. The first factor that affects subject performance is the distance between the objects. The second factor is the amount of time objects stay close to each other (ibid p. 105).

Tracking continues unimpaired even when objects disappear behind a screen. Now as far as I can see this fact seems to support a view of that objects files are subject to constraints like object permanence. But F and P don’t draw this obvious conclusion and seem to think that object files are empty and are little more than indexes.

In his ‘Origins of Objectivity’ Tyler Burge criticises F and P’s interpretation of the experimental data on perception:

“In the psychological literature, some authors have taken the indexes in tracking multiple moving objects to represent ‘visual objects’, or two-dimensional ‘visual patterns’  that are ‘reliably associated’ with physical objects, or ‘proximal counterparts of real physical objects’, or ‘proximal features that are precursors in detection of real physical objects. The representa are taken not to be physical bodies or any other environmental entities. I believe that this way of thinking is confused and deeply mistaken about what is being studied. The experiments apply to visual systems that can represent three-dimensionally shaped bodies in three-dimensional space. The representational content of the perceptions is explained, under perceptual anti individualism and in scientific practice, by reference to the perceptual system’s evolutionary relations to bodies and other environmental entities, not merely to proximal counterparts of bodies.” ( Burge: ‘The Origins of Objectivity’ pp 453-454)

Above we can see a paradigm explanation of anti-individualism by Burge. Despite being critical of Millikan and her notion of proper function Burge largely agrees that we need to understand perception in light of proper function. Burge just adds the further proviso that perception isn’t just to be explicated in terms of proper function; understanding veridicality conditions is the key to understanding perception. Burge to some degree relies on the work of Pylyshyn who has done dozens of experiments of perceptual tracking of multiple objects. However, Burge doesn’t agree with Pylyshyn’s interpretation of the experiments. He has criticised Pylyshyn for being ambiguous as to whether the objects of indexical like representations are proximal or distal. Burge obviously thinks that the distal interpretation is the correct one and he thinks that ambiguity about this distinction has led Pylyshyn into making incorrect interpretations of his experiments. Pylyshyn has argued that indexes don’t have to be accompanied with the encoding of any property and Burge strongly disagrees with this interpretation. Burge makes the following point:

“One cannot perceive a particular without perceiving it by way of some general, repeatable grouping capacity to attribute properties, relations kinds verdically” (ibid p. 455)

Burge’s criticism seems on the face of it to be intuitively correct. Pylyshyn offers no realistic story as to how we pick out particulars except speaking of locking on to causal patterns in the environment. It is worth discussing F and P’s arguments in a bit more detail to see if they can handle Burges criticisms. F and P explicate their point as follows:

“So the empiricists were right that there is a robust sense in which theories of perception are at the heart of theories of mind world semantic relations; the relevant  causal relation between a symbol and its referent is relatively direct; perceptual processes are by and large  ‘data driven’ (or to further the computer analogy rather precisely, these processes are “interrupt driven” rather than being initiated by test operations to inputs…) Causal interactions with things in the world give rise to sensory representations, and sensory representation give rise to perceptual beliefs.” (Fodor and Pylyshyn ‘Minds Without Meaning pp. 87-88)

Burge strongly disagrees with F and P on this point and has argued that the computer analogy of something being “interrupt driven” fails. He notes that there is no need to regard “interruption” as referring to anything. Burge claims that if “interruptions” are supposed to refer to distal particulars , it is as unclear how they do so as it is how indexes (or context bound singular applications) can do so, in the absence of perceptually representing the object as being of a certain sort or as having certain properties ( Burge ‘Origins of Objectivity’ p. 455).

Burge’s claim of course directly contradicts F and P’s argument in chapter 4 of their ‘Minds Without Meanings’:

“In short, we think the causal chains that support the reference of mental representations to things-in-the-world are of two distinguishable kinds: the first kind connects distal objects that are within the perceptual circle to perceptual beliefs; the second kind connects distal objects that are outside the perceptual circle to mental representations via causal relations of the first kind” ( ‘Minds Without Meanings’ p. 88)

The main point of disagreement between F and P and Burge is on whether reference within our perceptual circle occurs directly without picking out properties, relations etc. Pylyshyn takes his experimental work to show that such direct reference within the perceptual circle occurs. Pylyshyn’s experimental work centres on what is known as a visual index (( also known as a FINST (fingers of instantiation)). Pylyshyn parses FINST as mental representations which are similar to demonstratives like this and that and he notes that they also resemble proper names, computational pointers, and deictic terms (ibid p. 91). People can track objects extremely fast (once the cardinality is no greater than four), without making mistakes. This ability is not influenced by shape[2], or colour or whether the observers are pre-cued as to where the objects will appear (ibid p.93) When the cardinality is greater than four, subjects require shape, colour and location to track the objects. Furthermore it takes much longer for a subject to track cardinalities greater than four. F and P outline a picture where three distal objects are registered by the eye and this results in three separate object files being created which represent the objects and are used to track the object. This grabbing process involves bare particulars being picked out. Though later on things like properties, colour, etc can be added to the object files. F and P stress that the property assignment occurs after the indexes have been picked out (if at all).

Philosophers like Andy Clark argue that these objects are picked out by specifying a location. But F and P disagree with this claiming that experimental data shows that people can distinguish between objects even if the location of the relevant property tokens is the same for the two of them (ibid p. 96). They go on to note:

“The visual system cannot apply property-at-location encoding without first identifying the object to which the properties are ascribed; so it cannot escape individuating objects before it decides which properties belong to which objects” (ibid p. 97)

So on the picture sketched by F and P objects are indexed directly. Of course while they offer evidence that properties are not necessary to pick out objects; they have offered little evidence that to say how exactly the objects are picked out.

Paul Churchland in his 2012 book ‘Plato’s Camera’ raises two main problems with the Indicator Semantics of F and P and these problems are directly relevant to the concerns raised by Burge. Churchland outlines the first problem as follows:

“Specifically, each perceptual concept, C,  is said to acquire or enjoy its semantic content independently of every other concept in its possessor’s repertoire, and independently of whatever knowledge or beliefs, involving C, its possessor may or may not have. This semantic atomism is a simple consequence of the presumed fact that whether or not C bears the required law like connection, to an external feature, that makes its tokenings a reliable indicator of that feature, is a matter that is independent of whether other concepts its possessor may or may not command, and of whatever beliefs he may or may not embrace. Such semantic atomism is entirely plausible…if our prototypical examples of ‘reliable indication’ are the behaviours…such as the thermometer and the voltmeter… But a problem begins to emerge…when we shift to the typical application of our observation terms…face cookie, doll and sock. The problem is simple. There are no laws of nature that comprehend these things qua faces, cookies, dolls or socks. All of these features, to be sure have causal effect on the sensory apparatus of humans, but those effects are diffuse, context dependent, high-dimensional, and very hard to distinguish, as a class, from the class of perceptual effects that arise from many other things. ( ‘Plato’s Camera pp. 95-96)

Obviously in ‘Plato’s Camera’ he outlines connectionist models showing how they can handle learning complex facts. One of the jewels in his explication is how connectionist models can learn to recognise faces through Cottrell’s mature face network. Churchland notes that the upshot of these connectionist models is that there is an irreducibly holistic factor in learning. So he argues that his multidimensional models show empirically that Fodor and Pylyshyn are wrong in thinking that conceptual atomism is true in any interesting sense. For Churchland the empirical facts indicate that beyond trivial thermostat type stuff conceptual atomism is impossible. In other words, he argues, that thermostat, voltmeter type stuff is not really an example of having a concept; and when we move to actual concepts we are stuck with the holism of connectionist models. He offers a slogan “no representation without at least some comprehension” (ibid p. 97)

Churchland’s second problem with Indicator Semantics is as follows:

“All of this serves to highlight what Indicator Semantics is inclined to suppress and is ill equipped to explain, namely, that one and the same objective domain can be, and typically will be differently conceived or understood by distinct individuals and cultures at the level of our spontaneous perceptual comprehension” (ibid p. 102)

This is the problem we began with; ostensive definitions require a lot of stage setting. Churchland thinks connectionist models provide this stage setting. Clark (2016) thinks Bayesian learning can provide the stage setting. Tyler Burge on the other hand opts for innate domain specific constraints, to solve the stage setting problem. The debate between these thinkers to some degree centres on whether their learning theory is sufficient to explain objective reference and conceptual capacities. Because Clark and Churchland do not attempt to deal with developmental facts of when children begin to perceive objects, how they perceive these objects and how their conceptual understanding of the world develops their models remain untested. In this sense Burge’s learning theory has a serious advantage over its rivals in that it at least tries to account for the salient facts. That said it is at least possible that when they use their different approaches on actual developmental data Churchland and Clark’s models may accurately describe the process of objective reference and development of conceptual capacities. If this were to happen then their approaches would have an advantage over Burge’s because their approaches are more easily integrated with neuroscience while Burge’s approach involves an irreducible psychological aspect.

This state of affairs would appear to leave F and P in an extremely untenable position. Their use of FINST is well supported experimentally, though the indexes don’t seem to be as encapsulated and automatic as F and P seem to want us to believe. Furthermore there seems to be no way we can interpret the FINST as picking out one object over many alternative models. F and P however argue that direct reference is not the only process at work that compositional constraints on the way concepts can come together will rule out the many alternative interpretations of concepts (ibid p. 128-131). Unfortunately, they don’t manage to provide any evidence to support this conjecture. Ultimately they are left with a kind of hopeful monster. They think that direct reference is necessary in order to have a naturalistic theory of mind, and they argue that FINST provides this direct reference. However the empirical data indicates that while the FINST does have a certain amount of autonomy it is certainly not entirely isolated from all comprehension.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Burge, T. 2010. Origins of Objectivity. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Carey, S. 2009. The Origin of Concepts. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Churchland, P. M. 2012. Plato’s Camera: How the Physical Brain Captures a Landscape of Abstract Universals. Cambridge MA: The MIT Press.

Clark, A. 2016. Surfing Uncertainty: Prediction, Action and the Embodied Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Fodor, J and Pylyshyn, Z. 2015. Minds without Meanings: An Essay on the Content of Concepts. Cambridge MA: The MIT Press.

[1] Henceforth F and P.

[2] Pylyshn notes that shape can have some effect when the shape is something familiar like a square.

See below an annoucement on a series of talks to be given in TCD this month by Professor Berman on the topic of the logic and credability of after death existences. Berman is an extremely interesting and engaging lecturer. Those interested in attending will find details below.

“I am writing to announce that I plan to give six additional extra-mural lectures on ‘The Logic and Credibility of After-death Existences’,  to begin on  20 February 2016.  I have been encouraged to do so by many of those who did the course in 2015, also by those who were unable to join that course because of the quota I set, and also by an increasing number of other persons who have contacted me, asking whether I am planning to put the course on again this term.

What I am proposing is not to give again the original course of nine lectures*, but rather to continue with six additional lectures, in which I aim to review and revise the subject, but also deepen and extend what I have to say on various topics. For this reason I would advise anyone who didn’t do the original course to buy a copy of my workbook, ‘The Logic and Credibility of After-death Existences’ (available from me or Books Upstairs), upon which most of the original lectures were based.

Here I might also say a word about how I plan to deepen and extend the course; which I plan to do in two ways, both of which were touched on in the original course.  The first way can be described as the method of direct experience, which would be largely based on my workbook, ‘A Manual of Experimental Philosophy’ (which is also available from me or Books Upstairs), the second can be described as philosophical typology, especially distinguishing the monistic type, like Hume and Schopenhauer, who do not desire personal immortality, from those like Plato and Berkeley, who do.

As before the lectures are to take place in the Philosophy Department seminar room, 5012, in the Arts Building,  on Saturday mornings, from 10:00 to 11:30.  The first lecture is to be on Saturday, 20 Feb. 2016,  and extend over the next five weeks, to Saturday, 26 March 2016.  As before, I am setting a quota of 25 persons.

Those who wish to attend the new course, can do so by post, enclosing a cheque/draft/ postal money order made payable to Trinity College no. 1 account, to the Executive Officer, Ms Una Campbell, Department of Philosophy, Arts Building, Trinity College, or call into the Philosophy Department Office, and pay directly.  It might also be possible to pay and the course on the morning of the first lecture, outside the seminar room 5012.  But, as mentioned above, places are limited to 25.

The cost for the six lectures is €50.  A concession rate (€35) is available to students, unemployed persons and those in receipt of a social welfare pension.

Those wanting additional information can contact me at dberman@tcd.ie or 01 8961126.

I might also mention that I plan to give some talks on coffee tasting, on Sunday mornings at Gurman’s coffee house in the Stephens Green centre, which would involve actual tasting and empirical experience of various coffees, so going further than just talking about direct experience, hence a way of illustrating the experiential method in a hands-on way.  For information on similar talks I have given at the same venue on coffee and tea tasting, see my web-site:   coffeetastingandphilosophy.wordpress.com

*There is a summary of the 9 lectures in the TCD brochure of extra-mural lectures, p. 37, and on my web-site (see above), Review, Sept. 2015, number 4.”

“An experiment with a panoptic  system would suffice to find out;  different things could be taught to different children in different cells;  we could teach no matter what to no matter which child, and we would see the result. In this way we could raise children in completely different systems, or even systems incompatible with each other; some would be taught the Newtonian system, and then others would be got to believe that the moon was made of cheese. When they were eighteen or twenty, they would be put together to discuss the question” (Psychiatric Power p. 78)

When one reads the words of Foucault describing Bentham’s imagined Panoptic System  one thinks of Applied Behavioural Analysis (henceforth ABA). Bentham of course was one of the fathers of utilitarianism and ABA seems to implicitly adopt the approach a utilitarian approach to ethics e.g. a cost/benefit calculation. When one reads about Bentham’s tightly controlled environment with bodies under constant observation and control one is put to mind of ABA practitioners following around clients with clickers recording behaviour x or y and trying to change the contingencies of reinforcement.

Bentham, of course meant his Panoptic System as a positive way of achieving control and hence decreasing violence and suffering in prisons, and he felt that the Panoptic system would be useful in hospitals, schools etc. Foucault on the other hand saw the Panopticon as a tool of oppression used to gain control over people’s bodies. He viewed psychiatric power as typically operating implicitly to gain control of the bodies of others:

“It seems to me that generally, and here again in a particularly subtle, clever form, Leuret provided the formula of something very important in the system of psychiatric treatment of the time. Basically it involves establishing the patient in a carefully maintained state of deprivation: the patient’ existence must be kept just below a certain average level…The interesting thing about this is that this work is not just imposed because it is a factor in order, discipline and regularity but because it enables one to slip in a system of reward. Asylum work is not free; it is paid, and this payment is not a supplementary favour but at the very heart of the function of work, for the remuneration must be sufficient to satisfy certain needs creation created by the underlying asylum deprivation: insufficient food, absence of extras (tobacco, a dessert, etcetera, must be paid for). For the system of remuneration imposed with work to function, one has to have wanted, to have needed, and to be deprived. So, these remunerations must be sufficient to satisfy the needs created by the basic deprivation and, at the same time, sufficiently low to remain below, of course, normal and general remunerations.” (ibid. p. 153-155)

Again there are some parallels to ABA where when a child is being trained to behave in a particular way x a system of reinforcements are put in place. Food is typically a good reinforcer and it works best as a reinforcer when the child is hungry so it is best to try to implement the reinforcement schedule when the child is slightly hungry. So here we see a system similar to the one Foucault mentions where a state of deprivation is used to help shape the behaviour of a particular subject. Though there are parallels between Foucault’s description of psychiatric power and the behaviour of ABA practitioners; Foucault never actually discussed ABA as a treatment. In recent times however, ABA has come under fire by a variety of different schools of thought for being an unethical and coercive practice.

ABA is the most successful treatment we have for helping people with Autism and/or intellectual disabilities achieve functional communication and manage challenging behaviour. ABA is rigorously tested and is proven to work better than its rivals; yet it has its critics. There are those who oppose it strongly because of its use of punishment (for example mild shocks), some of these critics do not think such punishment is ever justified even if it can be shown to be the lesser of two evils. If it were shown that the use of mild shocks could help a child stop engaging in life threatening self-injurious behaviour some critics argue that this still would not justify the use of any kind of punishment.

Other critics argue from the point of view of neuro-diversity claiming that ABA is a form of coercion which tries to mould children into societal norms taking away the child’s unique way of experiencing the world. The neuro-diversity movement argue that neuro-typical people use the fact that they exist in greater numbers, and the fact that they have greater power, to try and force people with different kinds of mind to conform to this social pattern. In these circles, ABA is sometimes portrayed as the enemy which is most responsible for this coercion.

Critics from a neuro-diversity perspective and critics of the use of punishment are not arguing that ABA is not successful on its own terms rather they are arguing that the treatment should not be used because of ethical concerns. Claims like these are in the normative domain and proponents on both sides of the dispute sometimes do not make clear their underlying philosophical assumptions which guide their differing intuitions on the ethical status of ABA. This isn’t helped by the practice of behavioural analysts when discussing ethics pretending their underlying philosophical positions do not exist:

“Although the Code of Ethics for Behavior Analysts has been around for some time, where the present volume makes its strongest contribution is in its formulation of over 100 case descriptions of practice situations requiring the application of the pristine statements found in the Code of Ethics into real life contexts. These case descriptions cover the spectrum of behavior analytic practice, and the exegesis accompanying these illustrations is elegant, sparse (in the laudable parsimonious sense), and understandable. There is no discussion of lofty theoretical principles pertaining to ethical decision making, and in my view this is a good thing.” ( Review of Ethics for Behavioral Analysis p. 148)

The above attitude invariably leads one into trouble when debating on ethical issues; as Dan Dennett has correctly noted, there is no such thing as philosophy free science but rather science which uses unexamined philosophical baggage. In a debate between Foucault and people like Bentham it is clear what the underlying philosophies are and the merits of each philosophy can be argued about looking at the pros and cons of each system. This avoids mere question-begging and merely assuming that one’s system is superior and ignoring the alternative system. But when ABA defenders argue with their critics there is some times not enough consideration given as to whether the ethical assumptions they are making are justified. parsimonious sense), and understandable.There is no discussion of lofty theoretical principles pertaining to ethical decision making, and in my view this is a virtue.” (‘A Review of Ethics for Behaviour Analysts’ Baily and Burch p. 148) parsimonious sense), and understandable.There is no discussion of lofty theoretical principles pertaining to ethical decision making, and in my view this is a virtue.” (‘A Review of Ethics for Behaviour Analysts’ Baily and Burch p. 148 parsimonious sense), and understandable.There is no discussion of lofty theoretical principles pertaining to ethical decision making, and in my view this is a virtue.” (‘A Review of Ethics for Behaviour Analysts’ Baily and Burch p. 148)

In a recent exchange in the Facebook group ‘ABA Ireland’ a critic of ABA and a defender of ABA were having a heated discussion on the ethical status of ABA. The defender of ABA argued that the use of mild punishment is sometimes justified because this punishment would decrease negative, possibly life threatening behaviour. For a behaviour analyst there is a responsibility to try and decrease negative behaviour with non-punishing procedures such as positive or negative reinforcement; however punishment is justified in cases where neither positive nor negative reinforcement is likely to work. A behaviour analyst will have to justify claims about the likelihood of punishment decreasing certain more damaging behaviours in an objective manner. What should be obvious to anyone with a bit of philosophical training is that behaviour analysts are using a type of utilitarian calculus to justify their interventions. Utilitarianism is well respected philosophical position on ethics, one that is highly worked out and sophisticated. Nonetheless, it should be acknowledged that utilitarianism is just one philosophical position amongst others; its chief rival being Deontology. Now while thinkers like Sam Harris have tried to repackage utilitarianism as the scientific position on ethics few people have taken him seriously. The reason being that Harris simply assumes from the outset that utilitarianism is the best way to judge what is or is not ethical and hence he is guilty of simply begging the question against his opponents who do not accept his starting point. When behavioural analysts debate with critics of ABA they typically begin with the assumption that utilitarianism is the correct way to judge ethical issues; though they typically don’t state this, if their interlocutor doesn’t accept this unstated assumption then a lot of talking past each other occurs. In these debates it would be better to perhaps discuss the types of ethical systems that they are subscribing to and judge the validity of these ethical systems before jumping straight into first order debates.

In the discussion I mentioned above one of the critics of ABA  replied angrily to the admin that no matter what way you look at it ABA involves coercion; he seemed to think that coercion or control of any kind was intrinsically bad. Now with competing philosophies like the defender of ABA’s utilitarianism or the ABA critics seeming to appeal to some kind of categorical imperative e.g. “coercion is always intrinsically a bad thing to engage in even if it has pragmatic justification” we will need to move the debate up a notch or two to see if we can gain any traction in the debate. But this is not typically done in such discussions.

Because philosophical positions aren’t clearly staked out in some discussions does not mean that ABA practitioners do not take ethics and their duty of care seriously. There is a massive literature on ABA ethical practice and a variety of different sources are used to ascertain what the best course of action to take on a given occasion is:

“In cases in which withholding or implementing treatment involves potential risk, Peer Review Committees and Human Rights Committees play distinct roles in protecting client welfare. Peer Review Committees, comprised of experts in behaviour analysis, impose professional standards to determine the clinical propriety of treatment programs. Human Rights Committees, comprised of consumers, advocates, and other interested citizens, impose community standards to determine the acceptability of programs and the extent to which a program compromises an individual’s basic rights to dignity, privacy, and humane care; appropriate education and training; prompt medical treatment; access to personal possessions, social interaction, and physical exercise; humane discipline; and physical examination prior to the initiation of a program that may affect or be affected by an individual’s health status. Professional competence aided by peer and human rights review will ensure that behavioural treatment is delivered within a context of concern for client welfare.” ( Ron Von Houton et al p.323 )

Above we can see the meticulous attention to detail and a real concern for client welfare. An important point to note are that one of their major sources of ethical advice given to ABA practitioners is from peers who accept the same roughly utilitarian ethic that is common for ABA practitioners. So these peer review committees will not satisfy people who do not accept the working assumptions of ABA practitioners e.g. members of the neuro-diversity community.  In the 2013 book ‘Ethics and Neuro-Diversity’ C D Herrera argues that one man’s “objectionable symptom” is another man’s positive trait or ability or a sign of uniqueness to be cherished. So he clearly won’t be happy with a utilitarian ethics which supposedly focuses on changing “symptoms” as opposed to cherishing a person’s unique way of being in the world.  The other source of information comes from Human Rights Committees, which consist of concerned citizens, advocates etc are supposed to provide a community standard from which to judge the ethical standards of the treatment. But given the diverse views on ethics that different communities have one struggles to see whether ABA proponents are proposing a type of relativism where each community has its right to impose its own idiosyncratic standards or whether they think all communities will invariably end up championing the same ethical system. Psychologist Susan Friedman has discussed the importance of social standards being considered in her paper ‘What’s Wrong With This Picture: Effectiveness is Not Enough’. She argues as follows:

“Within the field of applied behaviour analysis, there is a 40-year-old standard that promotes the most positive, least intrusive behaviour reduction procedures (also known as the least restrictive behaviour intervention, LRBI). This standard is upheld in public federal law protecting children (IDEA, 1997), and the Guidelines for Responsible Conduct for Behaviour Analysts (Behaviour Analyst Certification Board, 2004). According to this federal and professional standard, procedures with aversive stimuli are more intrusive and would be recommended only after less intrusive procedures have been tried.” (Friedman ‘What’s Wrong With this Picture: Effectiveness is Not Enough’ p. 2)

She notes that effectiveness is an important criterion to use to judge whether a particular treatment should be implemented. However, she notes that effectiveness alone is not sufficient; we also need to factor in Social Acceptability. On the issue of social acceptability, or what she at other times calls humaneness, she thinks of paramount importance is selecting the technique which is least intrusive and most effective. This is a key ethical consideration in ABA and involves using things like functional analyses to assess our ABCs (Antecedent-Behaviour-Consequence) if we can discover that a particular behaviour is typically caused by a particular antecedent (e.g. screaming is always preceded by being in a noisy environment) we can change the antecedent without engaging with an intrusive reinforcement programme. If we cannot change the behaviour by changing the antecedent we will use some kind of reinforcement schedule (either positive or negative) to try to extinguish the behaviour (while factoring in dangers like extinction bursts), if this is not effective negative punishment may be used. A last case scenario is positive punishment. And with positive punishment only certain types of punishments are permitted such as mild shocks in extreme cases. In cases where mild shocks are implemented it needs to be established that other less invasive techniques will not work. And any such treatment will be assessed using assessment from peer committees, and human rights committees will have to be consulted.

The use of stronger than mild shocks; shocks that could cause real suffering to people using behavioural analysis will not be permitted. Friedman appeals to social acceptability/humaneness effect as a reliable way of avoiding the use of such severe punishments. And by and large we have societal laws, and societal norms, that prohibit such unwarranted behaviour. Behavioural analysts working with their own code of ethics, and those of the society they work within, should by and large avoid the use of what we would consider excess punishment.

However it is important to note that societal laws and norms change over time and vary widely. Different cultures vary widely on what they accept as moral or immoral behaviour. Furthermore particular cultures values change over time to the point where from the vantage of contemporary moral standards past behaviour of our culture may seem barbaric (e.g. Women not being allowed to vote, Slavery being acceptable etc.). Steven Pinker’s book ‘The Better Angel’s of our Nature’ attempts to evaluate our propensity for violence and attitudes towards violence from hunter gather times up until today.  Pinker has had a lot of criticism about his accuracy in describing the lifestyles of hunter gathers; but most scholars agree that his description of the changes in levels of violence throughout the period from when humans began domesticating animals,  to the industrial revolution up until the present time is pretty accurate. Pinker establishes a shocking picture of how human attitudes towards violence have changed throughout history.

Anthropologists are forever discovering different attitudes towards morality in different cultures. With these variations in culture and history one wonders how ABA practitioners can cope with these differences. If human rights committees in different cultures have different standards of ethics; then what is the response of ABA practitioners to be? Use different types of punishments depending on the culture they are practicing in? Or hold with fixed ABA ethical principles and refuse to operate in countries which don’t meet these standards. I prefer the second option; though it is not without its problems it is strange that Friedman doesn’t seem to even contemplate let alone try to solve ethical conundrums related to cultural differences.

Difficulties with dealing with supposed community consensus aside defenders of ABA don’t really consider any real objections to their utilitarian position. In his blog-post ‘On Ethics part 2 Massimo Pigliucci’s  considers a variety of criticisms of utilitarianism: (1) There are alternative ways of working out the utilitarian calculus and there is no logical way to distinguish between them (2) It does damage to our intuitions e.g. it tells us that our children’s happiness count for no more than a strangers does. (3) It is very difficult to decide what the overall consequence of an action is; what exactly is the scope of ‘OVERALL’ the entire set of events till the universe dies? (4) It has problems with rights e.g. the harvesting of organs of one healthy person to save four dying people[1]. Pigliucci’s list is by no means exhaustive and contemporary utilitarians have replies of various qualities to the above criticisms. Again one is left wondering how ABA ethicists don’t even seem to consider objections to utilitarianism in their ethical discussions. It seems that a lot of them are guilty of taking on board philosophical baggage without examining it thoroughly.

Connected with this issue is a strange reliance on the notion of rights in considerations of their ethical approach. The notion of rights loom heavy in Van Houton et al’s paper ‘The Right to Effective Behavioural Treatment’:

 “Improvement of functioning may take several forms. First, it often will require the acquisition, maintenance, or generalization of behaviours that allow the individual to gain wider access to preferred materials, activities, or social interaction. Second, it may require the acquisition of behaviours that allow the individual to terminate or reduce unpleasant sources of stimulation. Third, improved functioning may require the reduction or elimination of certain behaviours that are dangerous or that in some way serve as barriers to further independence or social acceptability. Finally, as a member of society at large, an individual has a right to services that will assist in the development of behaviour beneficial to that society…Indeed, a slow-acting but non restrictive procedure could be considered highly restrictive if prolonged treatment increases risk, significantly inhibits or prevents participation in needed training programs, delays entry into a more optimal social or living environment, or leads to adaptation and the eventual use of a more restrictive procedure. Thus, in some cases, a client’s right to effective treatment may dictate the immediate use of quicker acting, but temporarily more restrictive, procedures. (Von Houton et al p. 383)

As can be seen above Van Houton et al seem to argue for a notion of human rights. Throughout the paper they list 6 basic human rights which should inform any behavioural intervention:

1. An individual has a right to a therapeutic environment.
2. An individual has a right to services whose overriding goal is personal welfare.
3. An individual has a right to treatment by a competent behavioural analyst.
4. An individual has a right to programs that teach functional skills.
5. An individual has a right to behavioural assessment and ongoing evaluation.
6. An individual has a right to the most effective treatment procedures available. (Van Houton et al pp 381-384)Rights based approaches to ethics are typically the area defended by deontologists. Thus a thought experiment typically used to point some unintuitive approaches to utilitarianism is the Famous Trolley Problem. The problem has many guises the simplest one is the fat man version. You are standing on a bridge and you see a train below you hurtling towards five people who are tied on the track below. There is a fat man standing beside you who you could push off the bridge and because of his great bulk you know he will stop the train when the train hits him. So do you push him over the bridge? By doing so you will save the lives of five people even thought you will be killing one. On a simple cost benefit calculus you kill the fat man. But most people react that killing the poor fat man is unjustified as the poor fat man has a RIGHT to decide if he wants to be sacrificed to save the people below him[2].            I suspect that when the bugs are worked out what will remain is a kind of loose pragmatism. This loose pragmatism is best to deal with disputes with people of the neuro-diversity movement. When neuro-diversity proponents defend the right to have a different way of being they have a point when it comes to those who are high-functioning. But from a point of view of children who are low functioning and engaging in self injurious behaviour there is little alternative but to apply the techniques of ABA (the only techniques we have that work). However when defenders of neuro-diversity argue that any technique that causes pain should be banned it is at this point that a switch to meta-levels of discussing overall ethical theories and the arguments pro or con these theories is the best approach. Merely begging the question against each other and assuming ethical systems are correct will lead to nowhere.
7.             Now what is interesting is that ABA practitioner’s seem to want to defend a type of utilitarianism at the same time as defending a rights based approach. These approaches are not necessarily inconsistent (see for example the work of Thomas Scanlon) but it takes a lot of work to make them work in tandem. ABA practitioners seem to operate a utilitarian type view when working on their own peer review system and a rights based approach when dealing with what Friedman called the social acceptability of humane factor. This marriage is not as I have argued above an entirely happy one and it is one where there is scope ABA practitioners to make their overall views more explicit.
8.  

[1] Pigliucci’s list is actually directed against consequentialism but they go through against utilitarianism as well.

[2] Interestingly philosopher Joshua Green discovered that psychopaths typically take the sacrifice the fat man approach. Note this obviously doesn’t prove that utilitarians are psychopaths.

“And just as the presence of a verbal report is the best evidence that someone was conscious of something, the absence of verbal report is the best evidence he was not (barring forgetfulness, deception, or mental dysfunction)” (Anxious: p. 150)

Joseph Le Doux is a neuroscientist who has worked on emotions for many years and has made some brilliant advances in the field. While his work within neuroscience has had a huge influence, it has also had a massive influence outside of the discipline in areas like philosophy of mind, psychoanalysis, psychiatry etc. When psychoanalysts and neuroscientists decided to create an interdisciplinary school called neuropsychoanalysis to bring insights from both disciplines together, Le Doux’s work was turned to as providing a nice bridge between both disciplines. For a time Le Doux was even a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Neuropsychoanalysis. Neuropsychoanalysts like Solms, Turnbull and Zellner regularly cite approvingly the work of Le Doux. Furthermore psychoanalyst and philosopher Marcia Cavell in her ‘Becoming a Subject’ uses Le Doux’s research into memory as a way of providing empirical support for psychoanalysis.

Given that Anxiety is a key psychoanalytic area of research a reader with a background in psychoanalysis may expect ‘Anxious’ to deal with some psychoanalytic theories of Anxiety and perhaps provide a bridge between psychoanalysis and neuroscience. While Le Doux does briefly discuss Freud and some existential analysts the book largely stays clear of psychoanalytic theories. In fact there is a strong behavioural bent to the book with heavy emphasis on the role of Pavlovian conditioning in anxiety and scepticism about claims that animals have emotions in the way humans do. When Le Doux discusses consciousness his explanation is similar to the lingua-formal views of Dennett and Jackendoff. From a psychoanalytic point of view it is interesting to note that Le Doux is heavily critical of Panksepp’s claims that all mammals share a similar emotional system. Panksepp is closely involved with Neuropsychoanalysis and a lot of psychoanalysts rely heavily on his work when trying to draw a bridge between the two disciplines. In this respect I think it is very important to evaluate what effects Le Doux’s claims will have on psychoanalysts who use Panksepp’s work as a way of building a bridge between the two disciplines.

Le Doux criticises Darwin’s theory of emotions and the various different emotion theories which we have inherited from those influenced by Darwin. He calls this the standard view and cites Jaap Panksepp’s basic emotional systems: Seeking, Rage, Fear, Care, Panic, Play etc as the modern exemplar of the standard view. Panksepp by studying brain physiology and animal behaviour argued that these basic systems play a role in humans as well as animals. Thus mammals like rats, dogs, and humans share similar basic emotions. Le Doux, on the contrary, argues that the evidence in these cases is consistent with animals engaging in instinctive behaviours but doesn’t necessarily show that non human animals are experiencing the human emotions Panskepp attributes to them. Le Doux notes that the evidence clearly shows threats do release innate behavioural responses and physiological patterns, but the attributing to animals reacting in these ways feelings of fear is an interpretation. He instead champions the view that fear in humans are psychological constructions that strongly depend on our linguistic abilities.

This view is one that Panksepp, and those in Neuropsychoanalysis influenced by him strongly disagree with:

“A plethora of evidence indicates that a non-thinking core-consciousness is generated by extensive sub-neocortical circuits, emanating from brain areas as low as the mid brain. These non-cognitive, non-verbal brain functions are the foundation for our mental existence. They are the seat of the primal, the biological soul-the core self. As already briefly noted, an impressive amount of data indicates that the neo-cortex cannot generate or sustain consciousness on its own. When various sub-cortical structures are damaged, consciousness is simply eliminated. However, when the cortex is damaged early in life, both animals and humans maintain an effective emotional presence in the world. Clearly neocortical skills in processing information entering the brain through sensory portals gradually provide many additional tools of consciousness-the experiences of fine grained vision, acute hearing, to various language skills, and even an appreciation of the nebulous nature of causality- but these neuro-mental treasures are not essential for raw affective consciousness itself. For these reasons we disagree with the feedback and read-out theories that envision affective experience and consciousness in terms of cognition and language.” (Panksepp: ‘Affective Neuroscientific View of Human and Animalian MindBrains’ p. 162)

“When studying animals, we make the assumption that emotional feelings go along with their emotional behaviour because there is no reason to believe (no evidence to the effect) that they do not-and we are therefore comfortable in asserting that by studying the neural correlates of behavioural manifestations of fear, maternal behaviour, addiction and so on, in humans and other animals, we also have a window into studying the subjective affect associated with those states” ( Solms and Zellner: ‘Freudian Affect Theory Today’ p. 135)

It is not a surprise that people like Solms and Zellner agree with Panskepp over Le Doux. One of the primary reasons that Panskepp’s work has been so influential in Neuropsychoanalysis is because in many ways it seems to back up some central claims of Freud. In Solms and Zellner (2012) they note that Freud’s second layer of affect corresponds to Panksepp’s basic emotion systems. Freud, like Panksepp theorised that we have innate behavioural and physiological responses to various aspects of our environment and that these responses are represented in the subject in the form of pleasurable and unpleasurable experiences. They note that there are some differences between Freud and Panksepp, for example,  Panksepp’s theory is more explicit and worked out than Freud’s sometimes vague formulations, and it avoids Freud’s untenable appeal to Lamarckism.  Nonetheless they argue that if Freud’s theories are suitably modified by Panskepp’s discoveries then psychoanalysis is shown to be in pretty good shape in light of modern neuroscientific discoveries. They note for example that Panksepp’s ‘SEEKING’ system is extremely similar to Freud’s concept of ‘Libidinal drive’. They also link Panksepp’s ‘PANIC’ and ‘CARE’ systems with Bowlby’s emphasis on the importance of Attachment to a care giver for the developing child. Given the fact that they rely heavily on Panksepp’s views as a way of updating and improving Freud the following assessment from Le Doux will be troubling for them:

 “The main difference between my view and Panksepp’s is therefore, whether subcortical systems are directly responsible for primitive emotional feelings or instead are responsible for nonconscious factors that are integrated with other information in cortical areas to give rise to conscious feelings. What Panksepp calls cognitive feelings, are I maintain, what feelings are. The subcortical states are, as he also says at times, “truly unconscious” and thus not feelings at all. They are, in my view, nonconscious motivational states.” (Anxious p. 150)

What Le Doux calls nonconscious motivational states is essentially just physiological processes and behaviour it leaves out entirely the actual affects. Panksepp (as well as Solms) defend dual aspect monism a position which emphasises that there is only one substance the physical world, but it can be viewed from two different aspects: from the point of view of first person experience or from third person science. Panksepp notes that while the man on the street will attribute emotional feelings to animals they would be surprised to see that thinkers like Le Doux seem to deny this. He correctly notes that Le Doux’s view equates consciousness with the neo-cortex in particular the language centres of the brain (ibid p. 162), and he thinks that empirical data from neuroscience refutes Le Doux on this matter.

I think that Panksepp’s characterisation of Le Doux is basically correct; but Le Doux may not agree with me on this. Le Doux is careful not to explicitly claim that animals do not have emotions, rather he makes the weaker claim that we have no compelling evidence to think they have other than by an argument from analogy with humans. He claims that while it is possible that animals have emotions we have no clear evidence that they do and furthermore even if they do we have no clear evidence that their supposed emotional feelings are anything like ours. He goes on to offer a variety of considerations which he thinks should give us pause for thought before uncritically attributing emotions to non-human animals. He notes experimental evidence that indicates that people can be shown pictures of threats in a manner that stops them consciously perceiving the threats, and these people report no feelings of fear. Nonetheless their amygdala is lit up by the stimulus and there are physiological responses, such as sweating, increased heart rate, elevated pupil size etc. He takes this to be evidence that humans can have automatic physiological responses to threats which are not accompanied by conscious feelings (Anxious p. ix). He notes we have no reason to think that non-human animal’s innate behavioural responses are conscious as opposed to being variants of the nonconscious physiological response to threats we see in humans in experimental settings. He further argues that if we say that animals have consciousness like humans we will run into a problem of deciding where to draw a line; he asks rhetorically where do we draw a line are cockroaches, worms, and crayfish capable of experiencing anxiety or are they just unconsciously implementing mechanisms to avoid danger? He argues that the simplest solution is to assume that we have inherited the ability to detect and respond danger from animals and not feelings like fear. He notes that if we agree that the ability to detect and respond to danger does not require consciousness then we will not have to debate whether and which creatures from worms to dogs have conscious feelings of anxiety. He concludes as follows:

 “The evolutionary function of this ancient capacity is not to generate emotions like fear or anxiety, but simply to help ensure that the organism’s life continues beyond the present…Survival circuits do not exist to make emotions (feelings). They instead manage interactions with the environment as part of the daily quest to survive” (ibid pp 43-44)

I think it is interesting to note that while Le Doux begins by stating that he is not denying that animals have feelings like fear, happiness etc his arguments end up reaching the stronger conclusion that evolution has fitted us out with an evolutionary ancient ability to detect danger as opposed to feeling fear. He later goes on to argue that feelings of fear are connected to our conceptual capacities:

“Ultimately, feelings like fear require that we somehow have the concept of fear, based on words and their extended meanings, in our minds…Animals obviously cannot label and interpret survival circuit activity in ways made possible by human language. They may experience something, but it is incorrect, in my opinion, to assume that their experience is the same as, or even similar to, what a human often experiences when a defensive survival circuit is active in his or her brain.” (ibid p.46)

Note in the above passage we have a bit of slippage. He equates feelings of fear with having the conceptual abilities derived from the public meaning of words; yet he later makes the weaker claim that we should be sceptical of claims that non-human animals have feelings similar to ours. It seems that the logical conclusion from his first claim should be that since non-human animals do not have public shared meanings they do not experience fear at all. So clearly Le Doux’s claim that he is not asserting that non-human animals do not have emotional feelings is at odds with the general tenor of his arguments which do indeed make this strong claim. This tension persists throughout anxious on the one hand he seems to want to deny that animals have conscious experiences, then he implies that he is only making a weaker claim that we cannot know if they have feelings. His disavowals aside I think his own arguments commit him to the view that non-human animals do not have emotional feelings. Hence his serious disagreement with Panksepp’s theory of a basic emotional systems shared by all mammals. Another curious feature of Anxious is the casual way Le Doux attributes propositional attitudes to non-human animals which is at odds with his careful treatment of attributing consciousness to non-human animals. The quote below is instructive:

“Specifically, when animals engage with their environments in daily life, they rely not only on innate responses and conditioned reactions, but also on goals, values, and decisions, each of which involves complex cognitive processes but which do not necessarily require conscious awareness of these processes…But scientific practice, at least in my view, cautions us, in the absence of rigorous and compelling evidence, to avoid the attribution of conscious feelings to animals on the basis of our intuition, no matter how strong, that animals should have such feelings” (ibid pp47-48)

Note Le Doux’s stringency in deciding whether to attribute conscious states to non-human animals but his casual manner of attributing goals, values, and decisions to non-human animals. Debates about whether animals have concepts, intentionality etc are massive at the moment with both scientists and philosophers debating the issue vigorously. Philosophers and scientists like Chater, Hayes, Dummett, and Davidson have all presented arguments that we are not justified in attributing concepts to animals while others such as Stich and Fodor have argued that they do have concepts[1]. As we saw above Le Doux argues that that to have a feeling of fear requires having a concept of fear which he thinks is somehow derived from public language which animals do not have. Yet if he argues that an animal can have goals, make decisions, and have values this seems to imply that it has some concepts independent of public meanings. Why a non-human animal can have goals and not fears is not specified. It is possible that Le Doux just means that non-human animals have as-if intentionality which we attribute to animals because it helps predict and control their behaviour but they have no real intentional states outside of the attributions of language users. It is hard to know precisely what he means but on a simplest possible reading it seems that he is inadvertently treating intentionality attributions to animals with less care than he treats attributions of consciousness to animals.

Le Doux is heavily critical of Panksepp’s theory of universal basic innate emotions shared by all mammals. Given the emphasis neuropsychoanalysts place on the supposed fact that Panksepp has provided justification of key Freudian concepts; Le Doux’s criticisms of Panksepp will have consequences for neuropsychoanalysis. Obviously I cannot here go into the entire Freudian theory and evaluate every aspect of his theory which Panksepp seems to support, and how Le Doux’s criticisms will effect these concepts. Instead I will focus on a psychoanalytic treatment of anxiety which is built upon Panksepp’s work and I will discuss how if Le Doux is correct his criticisms will bear on the project. Finally I will evaluate whether I think Le Doux’s criticisms of Panksepp stand up to critical scrutiny.

In 2012 Yoram Yovell gave a talk to the neuropsychoanalytic foundation called ‘Anxiety: One or Two? He began his talk by discussing attachment theory and some of the ways it is studied. He described a typical experiment as follows: At 12 months a child is observed playing for 20 minutes, the mother leaves the room and the child’s reaction is recorded and analysed. The mother and child are together in a room with many toys to interact with. There is a stranger in the room (usually a woman), the stranger doesn’t interact with the child. The mother and child play together for a while then without warning the mother gets up and leaves the room. Usually the child begins to cry when this happens. Then the stranger come and tries to console the child by playing with him. The mother returns. Then the stranger leaves. Then the mother leaves this time leaving the child all alone. The child fends for himself.

Yoram argues that test is close to a biological variable in that the behaviour of the child in this experiment is highly predictive of the child’s behaviour later in life. Ainsworth mentioned 4 main types of attachments (Yoram only discusses 3)

1. Secure Attachment: When the mother leaves the child cries and protests. But when the stranger comes the child plays with the stranger and is happy. Upon the mother returning the child runs and hugs the mother and plays with her.
2. Insecure Resistance: After the mother leaves the room the child becomes very upset and is not consoled by the stranger. After the mother returns the child hugs the mother but is even more upset and cries hysterically.
3. Avoidance: The mother leaves the room the infant goes on playing doesn’t look upset. When engaged by the stranger the baby plays with her. But later on when the mother returns the child ignores the mother and continues playing with the stranger.

Yoram notes that all three patterns of attachments are considered normal. The child’s behaviour in these experiments are highly predictive of future relationships. Having outlined the experimental paradigm he goes on to discuss Freud. Freud argued in these situations the child feels physical pain when the mother leaves. He asks what is the source of this physical pain which distinguishes it from other types of anxiety? He argues the threat of the loss of an object triggers the anxiety and he distinguishes this type of anxiety from what he called pure anxiety which occurs when the stimulus that provokes it is not a beloved object. Freud’s view of anxiety was that it can originate from several different sources. It manifests itself in two different ways painful anxiety and non painful anxiety these are caused in different ways. Separation anxiety and fear of loss of love is what causes painful anxiety.

Yoram noted that Melanie Klein expanded on Freud’s views on anxiety. Her discussion of anxiety, like Freud’s broke anxiety into two key types:

1. Paranoid Anxiety: Fear of Annihilation.
2. Depressive Anxiety: Fear of loss of a beloved object or lover.

Yoram argues that when we look at the history of psychoanalysis we see that there are two main positions on anxiety. Many psychoanalysis believe that anxiety manifests itself in many ways but is one thing e.g. Bolwby, Rank, Winnicott, Kohut. However Klein and her followers Meltzer, Segal, etc believed that there were two different types of Anxiety.

Yoram thinks that this dispute can be clarified by looking at pain, anxiety, and object loss from a neuropsychoanalytic point of view. He discusses Japp Panksepp’s four distinct emotional command systems which we share with our fellow mammals. The Fear System and The Panic System are related to Anxiety according to Yoram. He points out that from a point of view of neuroscience there are similarities between human and animal emotional systems.

1. The Fear System is an ancient system that is found in reptiles. It appears to be an all purpose alarm system that warns of existential threats snakes, predators etc. Fight or flight system. With an emphasis on flight. It is triggered by the lateral nuclei of the amygdala. The central and lateral nuclei of the amygdala are involved in the fear system and the medial nuclei, and basil nuclei are involved in the rage system. The activation of these systems can be inhibited by benzodiazepine drugs e.g. ativan.
2. The Panic System: It is concerned with Anxiety, Pain and Loss. This system is newer than the Fear System. It mediates attachment relations for organisms. Yoram notes that the Panic System maps on very beautifully to Bolwby’s Attachment System. It mediates the fear the child develops when separated from his mother. It is connected to the thalamus, the ACC and. Its actions can be inhibited by the SSRI antidepressants Prozac, as well as by narcotics.

He notes he has worked on narcotics as anti depressants and that one interesting finding is that narcotics are potent anti-depressants and they are the strongest known pain medications. He argues that the contemporary evidence indicates a common overlap between the registering physical pain and social pain (this is similar to Panksepp’s Panic System). This is very relevant to Freud’s linking of Pain to Separation Anxiety.

He goes on to argue that the Anterior Cingulate Cortex is important in separation anxiety and in physical pain. Cingulotomies are sometimes done on people with conditions that are so painful that even narcotics do not work in relieving pain; they are also sometimes done as a last resort to help people with intractable depression. In Panksepp’s terminology people who got cingulotomies underwent a legion in the Panic System which helped them deal with their symptoms. A consequence of cingulotomies are reduced concern for social connection, less caution in social interaction. It makes you (a) less anxious of social rejection (b) less dependent on social bonds (c) it does not touch fear of fire, fear of heights etc.

Yoram further claimed that you can have a lesion in the Fear System without having a lesion in your Panic system, and we know this because of Damasio’s patient S. She had her amygdala destroyed because of a genetic disorder. She lost the ability to recognise fear and anger on other people’s faces. The same lack of recognition of Fear and anger in all modalities sound, stories etc. But S could recognise all other emotions in people. She lost the ability to tell suspicious people from trustworthy people. She wanted to form a connection with anyone who was interested in talking to her. She inappropriately hugged and touched people who she had little reason to trust. As a result she was taken advantage of a lot over this. She had the ability feel loss and pain at being mistreated but still maintained a need to form connections to these people. She lost the fear of all other daily activities snakes, fires, etc.

Yoram notes that based on descriptions by people like Freud and Klein we seem to have two different types of Anxiety. (1) Depressive Anxiety (2) Paranoid Anxiety. Based on lesion studies we can see that one of these systems can be damaged without damaging the other. The two systems respond to medications differently; the fear system responds to Benzodiazepine while the Panic system responds to endorphins, narcotics SSRI’s so people like Klein and Freud were correct in hypothesising that there were two types of anxiety.

In his talk Yoram obviously didn’t go into all of the technical details of the techniques used to discover the neurophysiological details of the so called FEAR SYSTEM and PANIC SYSTEM. A substantial amount data was drawn from studies of non-human animals and these studies assume that non-human animals have emotional systems very similar to ours. This assumption is of course the very one that Le Doux is calling into question. The obvious point to make is that since Yoram above was relying on studies of brain damaged humans then his hypothesis is not at odds with Le Doux’s view. It is theoretically possible that the brain damaged systems of the people Yoram discussed are systems are not the innate emotional systems that Panksepp discussed but are systems that have developed partially through humans conceptual and cultural systems. In this case the evidence he presents would not be at odds with Le Doux’s views. At this moment in time all the evidence we have indicates that all mammals share the same general neural architecture and that damage to either the FEAR or the PANIC system results in patterns of behaviour consistent with Yoram’s data. The only difference is that in the case of humans we have linguistic reports to go along with the behavioural data. Ultimately while it is theoretically possible to make data presented by Yoram, Solms, Panksepp consistent with Le Doux’s theoretical framework there seems little need to do so, as the evidence is not on Le Doux’s side.

Le Doux offers a variety of different arguments against the attribution of feelings like anxiety or fear to other mammals. He notes phenomena like people having physiological and behavioural responses consistent with fear in certain experimental settings but who report having no subjective feeling of fear. Dennett who holds a similar view makes the same argument about people with blind-sight. But these arguments only tell us that it is theoretically possible that animals are have physiological and behavioural consistent with fear but no subjective feeling of fear; but the argument does not give us any reason to believe that this sceptical scenario obtains. It is true that it is a logical possibility that such a scenario obtains, just like it is logical possibility that solipsism is true, or scepticism about other people having minds is justified. But in all these cases we need more than a mere logical possibility to justify the claim that animals do not have feelings we need some empirical evidence to convince us that this is the case.

Le Doux does offer some arguments to support his scepticism. He argues, for example, that if we claim that mammals are conscious then we end up with a problem of saying where the dividing line is between which creatures are consciousness and which ones are not. He asks us rhetorically do earthworms have anxiety? He has a point we really do not have a good handle on where the dividing line between conscious and unconscious processes are. Obviously we have a good handle on what Le Doux calls creature consciousness e.g. being awake or alert.  The difficulty arises when we consider mental state consciousness, e.g. to be aware that one is experiencing something ( ibid p. 150). He thinks that creature consciousness involves being awake and alert, responsive to sensory stimuli, execute complex behaviours, solve problems and learn from past experience. Mental state consciousness has all of the features of creature consciousness but has further features such as (1) Awareness that a stimulus is present (2) Awareness that one’s self exists, (3) Awareness that it is oneself that is sensing, behaving, and solving problems ( Anxious p. 147).  Le Doux though notes that when we try to decide which creatures have mental state consciousness we are bombarded with possibilities. Some possibilities being:

1. Only humans have consciousness.
2. Only primates have consciousness.
3. Only Mammals have consciousness.
4. Some invertebrates have consciousness.
5. Consciousness is biological information all living creatures including plants and unicellular creatures have consciousness.
6. Anything that integrates information in a particular way (cell phone, internet) has consciousness. ( Anxious: 148)

Those familiar with the literature will be aware that there are a variety of competing positions from outright panpsychism to eliminativism about consciousness. The truth is at the moment there is little to decide between positions like Deacon’s which argues that autogens may have proto-sentience and rivals like Integrated Information Theory which speculate that sentience may be possible for even smaller units. At the moment we can only really say for certain that humans and creatures with a similar physiology to our own (other mammals) have consciousness. Whether creatures further from us on the evolutionary scale have consciousness is something that is more difficult to tell[2]. But an epistemological boundary which makes it difficult to draw the line about which creatures are conscious should not be used as an excuse to draw an arbitrary boundary which states that only language using creatures have consciousness. At the moment we have no reason to doubt that mammals are consciousness and therefore I don’t think Le Doux’s book really poses any challenge to Panksepp’s work.

[1] For a good introduction to this topic see Kristin Andrews (2015) ‘Animal Minds’.

[2] For evidence that fish have the ability to feel pain see Victoria Braithwaithe’s ‘Do Fish Feel Pain?’ (2010)