I would like to begin by congratulating Kantian Naturalist on his recent post, Solving Wallace’s Problem and Resolving Darwin’s Doubt, which squarely faces the epistemological issues raised by Darwin and Wallace, regarding the reliability of human knowledge. In this post, I’d like to explain why I don’t think Kantian Naturalist’s statement of the problem quite gets it right, and why I believe the solution he puts forward is a flawed one.
Wallace’s problem
Let’s begin with Wallace’s difficulty, which he discussed towards the end of his review of Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology and Elements of Geology, which was published in the April 1869 issue of the Quarterly Review. On page 392 of the review, Wallace expresses his astonishment at the fact that people in all ethnic groups have brains with virtually identical capacities, regardless of their level of intellectual development: “Natural selection could only have endowed the savage with a brain a little superior to that of an ape, whereas he actually possesses one but very little inferior to that of the average members of our learned societies.” Wallace rhetorically asked: “How, then, was an organ developed so far beyond the needs of its possessor?” Wallace applied the same argument to the organs of speech, remarking that “among the lowest savages with the least copious vocabularies, the capacity of uttering a variety of distinct articulate sounds, and of applying to them an almost infinite amount of modulation and inflection, is not in any way inferior to that of the higher races.” Once again, the level of development struck Wallace as biologically superfluous: “An instrument has been developed in advance of the needs of its possessor.” Wallace proposed that just as man has “directed the action of the laws of variation, multiplication, and survival, for his own purposes” when artificially breeding crops and domestic animals, so too, a Higher Intelligence has “guided the same laws for nobler ends… in the development of the human race.”
It is worth noting that the foregoing argument of Wallace’s is a purely biological argument: natural selection lacks foresight, and is therefore unable to account for the development of an organ which will be biologically advantageous in the future, but which (he believed) confers no advantage at present, in many human societies. This argument is quite distinct from Wallace’s philosophical argument, made in the same review: “Neither natural selection nor the more general theory of evolution can give any account whatever of the origin of sensational or conscious life.” The laws of Nature could generate complex bodies through the process of natural selection, but these laws “cannot even be conceived as endowing the newly-arranged atoms with consciousness.” (I am reminded here of Thomas Nagel’s claim, in his now-famous paper, What is it like to be a bat?, that “Consciousness is what makes the mind-body problem really intractable.”) Nor can any law of evolution account for “the moral and higher intellectual nature of man,” in Wallace’s view.
If we examine Wallace’s biological argument, we find that it was answered fairly comprehensively by Thomas Henry Huxley in his 1871 essay, Mr. Darwin’s Critics. First, Huxley pointed out that the so-called “savage” races faced cognitive challenges far more formidable than those faced by people living in “advanced” societies:
…[C]onsider that even an Australian [Aborigine] can make excellent baskets and nets, and neatly fitted and beautifully balanced spears, that he learns to use these so as to be able to transfix a quartern loaf at sixty yards; and that very often, as in the case of the American Indians, the language of a savage exhibits complexities which a well-trained European finds it difficult to master: consider that every time a savage tracks [176] his game he employs a minuteness of observation, and an accuracy of inductive and deductive reasoning which, applied to other matters, would assure some reputation to a man of science, and I think we need ask no further why he possesses such a fair supply of brains. In complexity and difficulty, I should say that the intellectual labour of a “good hunter or warrior” considerably exceeds that of an ordinary Englishman.
Additionally, Huxley contended that there was a strong selective effect favoring individuals possessing “intellectual or aesthetic excellence,” even in the most technologically backward societies:
The savage who can amuse his fellows by telling a good story over the nightly fire, is held by them in esteem and rewarded, in one way or another, for so doing–in other words, it is an advantage to him to possess this power. He who can carve a paddle, or the figure-head of a canoe better, similarly profits beyond his duller neighbour. He who counts a little better than others, gets most yams when barter is going on, and forms the shrewdest estimate of the numbers of an opposing tribe… If we admit, as Mr. Wallace does, that the lowest savages are not raised “many grades above the elephant and the ape;” and if we further admit, as I contend must be admitted, that the conditions of social life tend, powerfully, to [179] give an advantage to those individuals who vary in the direction of intellectual or aesthetic excellence, what is there to interfere with the belief that these higher faculties, like the rest, owe their development to natural selection?
In my humble opinion, Huxley got the better of Wallace in this exchange, leaving Wallace’s argument from the alleged surplus capacity of the human brain in tatters. I am therefore utterly mystified at Kantian Naturalist’s assertion, in his post, that the answer to “Wallace’s problem,” as he calls it, required not only a philosophical revolution (viz. the notion that language is logically prior to thought, and not merely the vehicle by which thoughts are communicated), but additionally, scientific developments in the fields of “niche construction theory, embodied-embedded cognitive science, comparative primatology, and paleoanthropology (none of which were available to Wallace or Darwin).”
As we saw above, Wallace’s philosophical argument against the mind being a product of natural selection rested on the claim that there was a sharp discontinuity between conscious and unconscious creatures, and between humans, with their moral and intellectual capacities, and other animals, which lacked these capacities. Once again, we find that replies were forthcoming from the scientific community, even back in Wallace’s day. In his work, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (London: John Murray, 1st edition, 1871), Charles Darwin argued that the difference between man and the apes was one of degree rather than kind, and that it was dwarfed by the far greater differences in mental capacities between apes and the “lower” animals:
If no organic being excepting man had possessed any mental power, or if his powers had been of a wholly different nature from those of the lower animals, then we should never have been able to convince ourselves that our high faculties had been gradually developed. But it can be clearly shewn that there is no fundamental difference of this kind. We must also admit that there is a much wider interval in mental power between one of the lowest fishes, as a lamprey or lancelet, and one of the higher apes, than between an ape and man; yet this immense interval is filled up by numberless gradations. (Chapter II, p. 35)
Nevertheless the difference in mind between man and the higher animals, great as it is, is certainly one of degree and not of kind. (Chapter III, p. 105)
…[T]he mental faculties of man and the lower animals do not differ in kind, although immensely in degree. A difference in degree, however great, does not justify us in placing man in a distinct kingdom, as will perhaps be best illustrated by comparing the mental powers of two insects, namely, a coccus or scale-insect and an ant, which undoubtedly belong to the same class. The difference is here greater than, though of a somewhat different kind from, that between man and the highest mammal. (Chapter VI, p. 186)
On the whole, the difference in mental power between an ant and a coccus is immense; yet no one has ever dreamed of placing them in distinct classes, much less in distinct kingdoms. No doubt this interval is bridged over by the intermediate mental powers of many other insects; and this is not the case with man and the higher apes. (Chapter VI, p. 187)
I therefore cannot concur with Kantian Naturalist’s assessment that “[w]hereas Darwin thought there was continuity between humans and non-human animals, his evidence is primarily about emotional displays, rather than the genuinely cognitive discontinuity.” Indeed, chapters II and III of Darwin’s Descent of Man can be described as a systematic attempt to prove that the moral and intellectual difference in capacity between man and the other animals is merely one of degree, rather than kind. As a dualist, I am not at all persuaded that the attempt works. But if I were asked who got the better of the exchange between Darwin and Wallace on this point, I would have to say: Darwin.
Notwithstanding this admission on my part, I would like to point out that oft-repeated claims of a cognitive continuum between man and the other animals rest on faulty science. Unfortunately, in Darwin and Wallace’s day, the scientific experiments lending support to the hypothesis of human uniqueness had not yet been performed. Three years ago, I presented the evidence for human uniqueness in a series of essays on Uncommon Descent, which readers are welcome to peruse at their own leisure:
The Myth of the Continuum of Creatures: A Reply to John Jeremiah Sullivan (Part One)
The Myth of the Continuum of Creatures: A Reply to John Jeremiah Sullivan (Part Two)
The Myth of the Continuum of Creatures: A Reply to John Jeremiah Sullivan (Part 3(a))
The Myth of the Continuum of Creatures: A Reply to John Jeremiah Sullivan (Part 3(b))
As Kantian Naturalist correctly points out, Wallace wasn’t the only one with doubts. It turns out that Darwin had doubts of his own about the reliability of human cognition, and it is to these that I now turn.
Darwin’s Doubt
Here’s how Kantian Naturalist summarizes Darwin’s “horrid doubt”:
A closely related problem, however, was squarely faced by Darwin: the question, nicely phrased in his famous letter to Asa Gray, as to whether it is plausible to think that natural selection can have equipped a creature with a capacity for arriving at any objective truths about the world. (It is not often noted that in that letter, Darwin says that he believes in an intelligent creator — what is in doubt is whether natural selection gives him reasons to trust in his cognitive abilities.)
These two questions, Wallace’s Problem and Darwin’s Doubt, are two sides of the same coin: if natural selection (along with other biological processes) cannot account for the uniquely human ability to grasp objective truths about reality, then we must either reject naturalism (as Wallace did) or question our ability to grasp objective truths about reality (as Darwin did).
Call this the Cognitive Dilemma for Naturalism. Can it be solved? If so, how?
It appears that Kantian Naturalist is referring to Darwin’s letter of May 22, 1860 to the American botanist Asa Gray (1810-1888), in which Darwin affirms that, although he does not believe in the necessity of a design in nature, he finds it difficult to believe that everything is the result of “brute force.” After tentatively suggesting that everything results from “designed laws, with the details, whether good or bad, left to the working out of what we may call chance,” Darwin concludes by saying that the whole subject of God’s existence and nature is “too profound for the human intellect.”
However, the phrase “Darwin’s horrid doubt” comes from Darwin’s 1881 letter to William Graham, in which he wrote:
…I have had no practice in abstract reasoning, and I may be all astray. Nevertheless you have expressed my inward conviction, though far more vividly and clearly than I could have done, that the Universe is not the result of chance. But then with me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man’s mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would any one trust in the convictions of a monkey’s mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?
As the Australian philosopher John S. Wilkins points out in a 2010 essay titled, You and me, baby, ain’t nothing but mammals on his blog, Evolving Thoughts, Darwin’s doubt had nothing to do with how we are able to grasp objective truths about the world:
First, let’s dispose of one point: Darwin’s Monkey Mind Puzzle was not aimed at debunking our knowledge of the natural world. He did not admit a fatal flaw in his own metaphysics or epistemology…
Darwin’s “horrid doubt” is whether we can know anything about God, not the world…
The same remarks apply to Darwin’s 1860 letter to Asa Gray: here, once again, Darwin suggests that the human mind is liable to err when it engages in abstruse theological reasoning. Nowhere, however, does he express doubts about the reliability of our reasoning processes, when applied to the natural world.
Our knowledge of the external world: problem solved?
In his 2010 essay, You and me, baby, ain’t nothing but mammals, philosopher John S. Wilkins addresses the question of whether Darwin’s theory supplies sufficient warrant for our belief that our scientific theories (including the theory of evolution) truly describe the world. He concludes that it does, because our theories are carefully constructed on the basis of our observations of not only near objects, but also increasingly distant ones, enabling us to gradually extend the scope of our generalizations:
So to the main point: if evolutionary theory is true, then are we blocked from thinking that it is true? Clearly not. If it is true then there is no contradiction with our beliefs being formed on the basis of evolutionary processes also being true…
When true beliefs are causally relevant to fitness, then we might expect organisms, including those endowed with monkey minds, to be able to track truth. Species that have nervous systems respond to environmental cues that are highly relevant to their fitness: von Uexküll called this the Umwelt. The world of primate common sense is our Umwelt.
Scientific theories bootstrap on this Umwelt; we begin by testing distal claims by ordinary observation, and then extend our theoretical reach by increasingly theoretical, but tested and grounded in our Umwelt, observations, as Ian Hacking argued in Representing and Intervening. Science tracks truth because it is able to rely on some degree of truthlikeness for the observational reports that we can generate in our protoscience.
However, I don’t think this answer will do. The problem with this view is that it assumes that as we refine our observations, we will eventually be left with a single theory which leaps out at us, as it were. In reality, this never happens. Scientists have no way of showing that a given theory is the only way of explaining our observational data. There are always choices to be made between rival theories that can account for the same data, and quite often they are made on aesthetic grounds: we tend to prefer simple, elegant theories. But as Oscar Wilde wittily observed, “The truth is rarely pure and never simple.” Our preference for simplicity, elegance and ease of comprehension is a human projection on Nature – one which would make no sense unless we assumed that Nature was designed to be comprehensible, as many theists do. If an atheist wishes to refrain from making this assumption, then it seems to me that an anti-realist view of scientific truth is the only logical alternative. On this view, we should not say that unobservable or theoretical entities actually exist, but merely that they are useful constructs for helping us to make predictions about future observations. But if that’s correct, then is macroevolution real? Hmmm.
To sum up: it seems to me that Darwin’s theory of evolution gives us good reason to believe in the predictions made by our scientific theories, but little reason to believe that those theories are objectively true, insofar as they postulate theoretical entities which go beyond the limit of our observations. All we can say is that science works.
So, what about Kantian Naturalist’s solution to the Cognitive Dilemma for Naturalism?
Kantian Naturalist thinks he can solve what he refers to as the Cognitive Dilemma for Naturalism, by a two-step process, which he helpfully explains in a comment on his post:
There are two distinct moves here.
The first is a philosophical move, in which we see language as underpinning and making possible, both in evolution and in development, abstract thought, symbolic communication, self-consciousness, and objectivity. (That’s what I’m calling ’embodied discursive pragmatism’.)
The second is a scientific move, in which we understand how language is a result of evolution (more precisely: the co-evolution of language and human cognition).
Kantian Naturalist’s philosophical claim that language is logically prior to abstract thought has attracted a lot of criticism, most of which I think this is unjustifiably harsh. Having studied Wittgenstein’s thinking in some depth at university, I can appreciate Kantian Naturalist’s insistence that language and thought are inter-twined. While I would not say that the former precedes the latter, I would wholeheartedly agree with Kantian Naturalist’s rejection of the naive view that language is merely a vehicle or tool for expressing our thoughts.
Instead, my criticisms will be directed at Kantian Naturalist’s scientific claim that the origin of language can be understood in evolutionary terms: in particular, that niche construction theory may have driven the evolution of language and shared intentionality.
…[T]he construction of a uniquely hominid niche involved obligate cooperative extractive foraging. While extractive foraging is common in primates, and many great apes use tools to extract foods from their environments, humans are cooperative in extractive foraging (and must be so). Adequate provisioning requires that everyone in the group who is able to contribute will in fact contribute to the provisioning of everyone else, through division of labor that involves hunting and scavenging; setting traps for small animals; gathering nuts, seeds, berries and herbs for foods and medicines; cleaning and cooking food, making clothing, weapons; transmitting to future generations the knowledge of how to do all these things through active teaching.
Obligate cooperative foraging involves two important cognitive transformations: displaced reference and joint intentionality. Displaced reference, which put hominids on the road to language, is the capacity to communicate about objects and events that are not perceptually present to (at least) the hearer. Joint intentionality is the ability for two creatures to take an object as their shared object of attention, to know of the other creature that it is also attending to that object and to want them to do so, so that the two creatures can coordinate their actions in order to succeed at a task that neither of them could accomplish alone (or which would take much more time or energy to do so).
Frankly, I don’t buy this story, for several reasons.
First, arguing that language would have been beneficial to human survival, if it arose, fails to explain how it arose. “Why” is not the same thing as “how.” I was shocked to see so many commenters fall into this teleological mode of explanation. Here’s a case in point:
Social groups need to communicate. In a forest niche, vocal communication has advantages over visual communication and signalling.
I could just as well argue that telepathy has great advantages over vocal communication, but that wouldn’t explain how it evolved. In fact, it wouldn’t even tell us whether telepathy could have evolved. We need a mechanism.
Second, there are plenty of animals which engage in niche construction (e.g. beavers), co-operative hunting (e.g. lions) and extractive foraging (e.g. chimps), without the benefit of language. I’m not at all convinced that a lifestyle combining these various behaviors (such as that of our hominin ancestors) would have necessitated the use of language, either. I don’t see why we need language for “gathering nuts, seeds, berries and herbs for foods and medicines,” or for “cleaning and cooking food.” As for cultural transmission of skills to future generations, this is something we observe in non-human animals as well. Making clothing is unlikely to be what necessitated the use of language, as clothing is a relatively recent invention, probably coinciding with the appearance of anatomically modern humans in Africa, around 200,000 years ago. Language, on the other hand, probably goes back at least to the common ancestor of Homo sapiens and Neanderthal man, as Dan Dediu and Steven Levinson have argued at length in their article, On the antiquity of language: the reinterpretation of Neandertal linguistic capacities and its consequences (in Frontiers in Psychology, 4:397. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00397):
The Neandertals had a complex stone tool technology (the Mousterian) that required considerable skill and training, with many variants and elaborations (see Klein, 2009: 485ff). They sometimes mined the raw materials at up to 2 meters depth (Verri et al., 2004). Their stone tools show wear indicating usage on wood, suggesting the existence of a wooden material culture with poor preservation, such as the carefully shaped javelins made ~400 kya [about 400,000 years ago – VJT] from Germany (Thieme, 1997). Tools were hafted with pitch extracted by fire (Roebroeks and Villa, 2011). Complex tool making of the Mousterian kind involves hierarchical planning with recursive sub-stages (Stout, 2011) which activates Broca’s area just as in analogous linguistic tasks (Stout and Chaminade, 2012). The chain of fifty or so actions and the motor control required to master it are not dissimilar to the complex cognition and motor control involved in language (and similarly takes months of learning to replicate by modern students).
Additionally, a 2011 essay by Dietrich Stout and Thierry Chaminade, titled, Stone tools, language and the brain in human evolution (Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 12 January 2012, vol. 367, no. 1585, pp. 75-87) lends support to the view that the Late Acheulean tools made by Heidelberg man required a high level of cognitive sophistication to produce, in addition to long hours of training for novices. This training would have included the use of intentional communication, which the authors characterize as “purposeful communication through demonstrations intended to impart generalizable (i.e. semantic) knowledge about technological means and goals, without necessarily involving pantomime.”
Third, I should point out that the evidence for the extractive foraging hypothesis is not terribly strong. Another popular theory is the social brain hypothesis, but that seems to have problems, too, as does the recent theory that cooking helped big brains evolve.
Finally, I’d like to draw readers’ attention to a quote from writer and columnist A. N. Wilson, a convert from atheism, who argued that materialist accounts of the origin of language are inherently inadequate, in a hard-hitting article titled, Why I believe again (New Statesman, 2 April 2009):
Do materialists really think that language just “evolved”, like finches’ beaks, or have they simply never thought about the matter rationally? Where’s the evidence? How could it come about that human beings all agreed that particular grunts carried particular connotations? How could it have come about that groups of anthropoid apes developed the amazing morphological complexity of a single sentence, let alone the whole grammatical mystery which has engaged Chomsky and others in our lifetime and linguists for time out of mind? No, the existence of language is one of the many phenomena – of which love and music are the two strongest – which suggest that human beings are very much more than collections of meat.
It seems to me that Wilson’s remarks contain a lot of good sense. Language really is a miracle, which cannot be explained from the bottom up, naturally.
What do readers think?
Well, that we don’t have telepathy, and we lost our ability to eat and breathe at the same time to adapt to utilize speech. The mechanics of speech are derived from what came beforehand.
Has Wilson ever thought about this, or anyway, had the knowledge to actually think about it instead of rambling meaninglessly?
I guess that nixes the possibility that a non-verbal human might pick up speech. Oh yeah, unless the same verbalization refers to the same thing over and over again, and referring to it by the same verbalization gets the attention that the human desires. Wilson’s good at blithering, not so good at thinking reasonably about these matters.
What does “collections of meat” even mean? And who ever said that brain is the same as what is most usually called “meat” anyway, muscle?
It’s very superficial, while touching on some genuine questions, which shows how drivel by prominent “names” constantly is given far more credit than it deserves.
Glen Davidson
I simply don’t see the problem. There doesn’t seem to be any argument that really shows that natural selection can’t account for language and abstract reasoning. At bottom they all seem to reduce to some sort of “feeling” that it can’t.
The same would be true for bacteria. Bacteria exist in all environments on the planet, things don’t originate because they are “needed”. Things evolve because first the random accumulation of mutations “produce” them (an enzyme accepting a new substrate, for example), and then they happen to be used by the organism. This is when selection can act on it and enhance it in degree.
There are countless species that can communicate with sounds. And animals have been shown to be capable of various kinds of abstract reasoning and they have theory of mind. Why can’t human speech, thought and communication not simply be a matter of selection enhancing this?
I really don’t see the problem. Please make it apparent to me, because from where I’m sitting it looks like an invented problem. I’m genuinely there are even people who find this puzzling. In fact I find the fact that people find this puzzling, to be puzzling. What is it you think is so different from reasoning about reasoning, as opposed to reasoning about whether the stick you hold in your hand is long enough to reach that fruit?
😀
I believe we originally did communicate via telepathy and that is how language evolved, and speech only came later, after which the capacity for telepathy was gradually lost in most members of the species.
In keiths and Patrick, the ability to read the thoughts of another is stronger than in others who post here.
Speaking of “strength”….
Stronger than football or cooking? Stronger than painting or theater? Stronger than scientific research and parody?
I know a subjective assessment when I see one. (Stronger than that ability??)
From Vincent’s OP:
[quoting a commenter in a previous thread]
Well, not really. Vocal communication is observed. Visual communication is observed. There is no indication that any organisms use “telepathy” to communicate. Evolution works with what there is. If the niche favours communication by sound rather than by light, then alleles that benefit auditory communication will be selected for.
As I said in the previous thread, there is a black hole in our knowledge in the precise time frame over which language developed in humans and proto-humans. We can look at a Homo erectus hyoid bone and infer that it indicates some capacity for generation of complex sounds, perhaps even a language. We can look at cranial capacity and infer there was room for a large brain capable of processing auditory signals and controlling the muscles necessary for speech. It’s not much but much more than nothing.
Pertinently, why do people think theism constites a solution to the question of the reliability of reason? All it has to offer is a bare assertion that could never be believed on anything but blind faith. God made your reasoning generally reliable. How do you know that? You don’t, you just have to believe it on no basis whatsoever. By faith. Warm, abiding, servile, abjective faith.
Besides, it seems to me we actually have plenty of reasons not to always trust our reasoning. In a way, the many strange cognitive biases that plague human reason is the opposite of what you’d expect if we were really made by a perfectly morally good and loving supreme being. They’re the sorts of errors in reasoning that makes us prone to things like discrimination, misogyny and racism, for example. Why the hell would God make human beings prone to errors in reasoning that make us racist?
In fact, someone else put this in much better terms than me over on The Secular Outpost
I will quote him in full:
Rumraket,
In the past, when I’ve pointed this out to theists, they’ve seemed genuinely surprised. They’re typically so focused on attacking naturalism that it doesn’t occur to them to ask whether their theism could survive the same attacks.
And you know how we know this?
Because organisms communicate by sound, thus it must be true.
Ah, the convenience of evolution theory- it is spared the nuisance of ever possibly being wrong.
What he said.
More specifically, why are we pretending that 160 years of biology since Darwin and Wallace simply never happened?
Alan said ” if the niche favors”, do you disagree with the general premise?
I think you wrote a very interesting piece, on which you obviously spent considerable time and effort. Thanks.
I don’t think your remarks regarding Darwin being right so far as instrumental truths but wrong regarding theoretical entities are quite right, but in any case, I enjoyed this thoughtful and scholarly OP quite a bit and hope you will continue to contribute.
newton,
Well, I think even to call it a premise is misleading. All it is really saying is, the humans that are like humans are like humans because it was best suited for them to be like that.
Or the mouse is like the mouse because it was best suited for them to be like a mouse. The ones that were not like a mouse did not survive, because they were not like a mouse.
Is it even possible to say, the shark is like the shark, but actually it would be better suited to not be like a shark?
Rumraket writes:
I’ll answer your question by quoting from a post I wrote for Uncommon Descent four years ago, titled, Are crows capable of reasoning about hidden causal agents? Five reasons for skepticism (September 25, 2012):
I should add that human language possesses a number of highly distinctive properties which simply don’t follow from having a theory of mind and/or being able to “reason” in the sense of solving novel problems (as New Caledonian crows apparently can, with tools). Many of these properties aren’t found in other animals.
First, human language is open-ended and productive: it enables humans to produce a vast range of utterances from a finite set of elements, and to create new words and sentences. Animal utterances in other species lack this property.
Additionally, human language employs grammatical and semantic categories, such as noun, adjective, verb and adverb, or past, present and future, which can be used to express complex meanings. (Re claims that birds are capable of using grammar, please read Dr. Michael Egnor’s article, Are birdsongs language?)
Finally, human language possesses the property of displacement: it is able to refer not only to abstract concepts, but also to imaginary or hypothetical events, as well as events that took place in the past or may happen in the future. There’s some much-disputed evidence that non-human animals remember past events and plan for the future, but there’s no evidence that these animals are capable of communicating about their fantasies or about hypotheticals.
I conclude that human language cannot plausibly be regarded as simply an enhanced version of communication systems that other animals already possess. It is genuinely new.
I hope that helps.
Hi walto,
Thanks very much for your kind words. I’m glad to hear you enjoyed reading my article. Thanks again.
Vincent,
I question your logic here. The ability to communicate one’s reasoning is distinct from the ability to reason itself. For instance, one can lose the power of speech due to a stroke without also losing the power to reason.
The ability to explain oneself certainly counts as evidence of reasoning ability, but the lack of an explanatory capability does not indicate the absence of reasoning.
Rumraket asks:
Belief in a Supreme Being doesn’t guarantee that human reason is generally reliable. Belief in an essentially loving God Who made human beings in His image does.
I don’t think it’s errors in reasoning that make us prone to discrimination, misogyny and racism. Rather, I would say that it’s an over-reliance on associative learning, which is widely distributed throughout the animal kingdom. This kind of learning is not rational. Associative learning can lead us to make correlations between events which are not causally related, and to react to correlations which a rational person wouldn’t. That can be a dangerous thing, but let’s remember that the evolutionary advantages of this kind of learning vastly outweigh the drawbacks. We just have to remember that as rational beings, we need to be aware of its limitations.
I looked through Wikipedia’s list of fallacies, and most of them are not errors in reasoning as such. Many of the informal fallacies simply arise from being over-attached to one’s own point of view – i.e. having a big ego – and resorting to unscrupulous tactics in order to “win” an argument.
Post hoc ergo propter hoc is an informal fallacy that can lead to genuine problems in everyday life. But the root cause here is our over-reliance on associative learning (see my remarks above).
The number of formal fallacies is much smaller. In most of these cases, the problem seems to relate to our difficulty in visualizing the situation clearly – in particular, breaking it down into its constituent sub-cases. This is especially true for the base rate fallacy, as well as various propositional and syllogistic fallacies. In other words, it’s our visualization skills that are at fault, rather than our reasoning. Two hundred years ago, people seldom had to worry about cases like these, in real life. Now, life has grown much more complicated – but in the meantime, we’ve designed computers that can compensate for our cognitive deficiencies and blind spots. If we can do that, then I wouldn’t say we have too much to worry about. We just need to be careful about cross-checking our conclusions, that’s all.
Another thing we can do is train ourselves to overcome our weaknesses – e.g. by taking courses in chess or in deductive logic. We have limitations, but we are not helpless to overcome them.
In some cases, however, our propensity to reach illogical conclusions stems from the fact that we are employing abductive logic rather than deductive logic. But here’s the thing: sometimes abductive logic (or inference to the best explanation) makes sense. Take the fallacy of affirming the consequent: if A, then B; but B, therefore A. Pretty dumb, right? Maybe not.
How about this? If a guy is a terrorist, then we’d expect to see him carrying a bomb. This guy’s carrying a bomb. The inference that this guy is a terrorist is a highly prudent one – especially when we consider that the vast majority of non-terrorists don’t carry bombs. In ordinary life, the best explanation for why someone would be carrying a bomb is that he’s up to no good. relying on abductive reasoning in this scenario would probably save your life. Relying on deductive reasoning would cause you to lose it. In any case, Bayes’ theorem can be used to show why running away from the bomb-carrier makes excellent sense.
In short: we are limited by our reliance on associative learning (which is a product of our evolutionary past), our inability to visualize situations in detail (a limitation which can be overcome by visual training and the use of computers as cross-checkers), and our reliance on abductive logic (which isn’t always a bad thing). Despite these limitations, we are able to reason correctly most of the time. My two cents.
Not really.
Glen Davidson
Hi keiths,
Thank you for your response. You write:
On an individual level, it doesn’t, as your example of the stroke victim makes clear. But what holds for the individual doesn’t hold for the species. If an entire species of animals (including mature and healthy individuals as well as immature and/or sick ones) lacked the ability to explain themselves, should we be willing to impute reasoning to them? I see no reason why we should. And even on the individual level, we would still normally regard the inability to provide an explanation for one’s actions as a sign of the absence of rationality. The stroke victim isn’t a normal case.
You maintain that the ability to communicate one’s reasoning is distinct from the ability to reason itself. I think the only way to show this would be to come up with a good case where the former is impaired while the latter is fully intact, or vice versa. In the case of the stroke victim, however, both seem to be impaired: stroke victims are often inhibited in their executive functions, for instance, making the planning of complicated actions difficult, as well as impairing decision-making.
One thought I had while writing this comment, which warrants a whole new post in itself, if anyone is willing to address the topic, is: does the “ability to reason” refer to a single ability, or to multiple abilities?
Thoughts?
Hi Alan Fox,
Thank you for your comments. I take your point that “Evolution works with what there is,” but I am still of the opinion that if someone wishes to propose a serious hypothesis regarding the origin of language, they really do need to provide a mechanism. I haven’t seen any good ones yet. Language remains a mystery.
Why is this a “problem”?
And thanks for your contributions here. I much appreciate the way you can present and defend your ideas here. At least, it promotes communication even when in disagreement.
I think the mechanism of variation and selection is adequate as a plausible hypothesis. The problem is for a very significant period of time (from the first appearance of H. erectus to the first appearance of modern humans we have scant evidence of how, where, in what numbers, our ancestors were living). I’m pretty sure it was in extended family groups initially but eusociality could have kicked in by 500,000 years ago, requiring complex communication skills. Proto-language could have developed from the kinds of communication modern forest-dwelling apes and monkeys have today. I’m not convinced that drift accounts for the continued evolution of all the morphological features and the communication, language and cognitive skills must have evolved as they did due to selective pressure that we can speculate about but not have evidence for.
Well, I like
Graziano’s[Geoffrey Miller’s]* theory that complex language was partly due to sexual selection. Courtship. It explains our love for poetry, song and humour.ETA *Oops I misremembered. An old OP
Lots of things do.
It’s more or less inevitable for a species appearing after 4 billion or so years of evolution and geologic change.
So not all that unexpected. Was something other than working with the evidence we have expected to do better?
Glen Davidson
It’s worth asking whether magic, which can explain anything, is a more productive hypothesis than known regular processes.
GlenDavidson,
Why is it inevitable? If the first life was a prokaryotic cell how did anything other than bacteria evolve? What is the mechanism(s) that created the diversity from bacteria to multicellular life? Why would we assume random changes that are selected if the have reproductive advantage can create incredible designs like wings, muscles, lungs, hearts, eyes and finally human intelligence and the ability to communicate with language and abstract thoughts?
Where is the experimental evidence that supports the hypothesis that random change and selection can design any complex living function?
Because of the loss of information.
Of course that’s not what you’re “asking” about, you’ve completely ignored the context that should inform the reader that what’s inevitable is that there are mysteries. How could speech be inevitable?
Why don’t you look into that, along with the evidence of rampant derivation, hence, of evolution? Or do you intend to merely deny what has evidence while clinging to what lacks explicit evidence?
Look into it, for once, rather than merely ignoring context and evidence to act as if a claim lacking substantial evidence is the “default”?
Well, see, some people pay attention to the evidence of what happened, without preferring a scenario lacking in meaningful evidence.
Where is the experimental evidence that neutron star collisions occur due to the loss of energy via gravitational waves? Oh right, you don’t mind that evidence, while evolution requires all of the evidence while ID requires none.
Glen Davidson
You think bacteria and other single-cell organisms aren’t complex? It’s complexity all the way down. One thing Torley and KN agree on is that people are wicked special. They obviously haven’t met a number of my relatives.
I am no language expert. I misspell my own name half the time. But I don’t think that language is a mystery at all. In fact, I think it is the inevitable outcome of the ability to use abstract reasoning.
I have travelled quite extensively and I can only speak one language (poorly) but I am always amazed at how well we can communicate with people who do not share our language.
Colewd: “Where is the experimental evidence that supports the hypothesis that random change and selection can design any complex living function?”
It doesn’t exist. Evolution has never claimed to “design” anything.
Darwin said we are only degrees different between us and apes in smarts? while apes are more different then insects! Oh brother.
This is so wrong. The difference between us and apes is so great it makes no difference between apes and insects.
Humans are defined by our smarts.
Language or music are not mysteries.
Its just the evolutionists reject the intelligence of people. If people were that intelligent and had silent intelligent thoughts AND THEN ONLY were given tongues IT would be only weeks before a complex language would be agreed upon.
Language is primitive use of sounds just like animals do.
music is just language with the tones but not the words(themselves pieces of tones).
Music reaches the heart therefore quicker then words since it eliminates interfering word pictures. It gets to the point.
Apes can speak as well as us. ITS ONLY the intelligence issue thats the problem.
Adam spoke right away. Combining thought/spirit into sounds.
Indeed there was no agreement on grunt combinations.
By the way evolutionists sHOULD be saying tones of voice came before worrds.
Words being a later evolved selection of tones in a original language now hidden.
They are screwing up their own ideas. As usual.
walto,
GlenDavidson,
I agree ID has its issues. I was addressing your claim is that we should have expected human evolution because of the 4 billion years to go from simple to complex. My argument is that there is no reason to have expected this massive increase in complexity thus supporting VJT’s argument.
Robert Byers,
“Humans are defined by our smarts.”
Present compancy excepted.
colewd,
“I agree ID has its issues.”
Understatement of the century.
You think this is Huxley getting the better of Wallace huh? I adamantly disagree.
What Huxley is implying is that if you could tell a good story, or carve something beautiful, you had advantages, thus you presumably got laid more by the opposite sex, thus you produced more babies, that also inherited this ability to tell stories and carves things, and thus this explains the evolution of a big brain. Whoa!
Let’s look at this closer, shall we VJ?
First:
Are there people who can tell good stories in society and people who can’t tell good stories? Is one or the other more common? Or isn’t it the fact that there are no more good story tellers than bad story tellers in life? Thus natural selection hasn’t really evolved us all into good story tellers. Nor to good wood carvers either.
Second
Is it your experience that good wood carvers and story tellers really do reproduce more in life than more dumb people? Don’t lots of dumb people in lots of cities, in lots of places have lots of babies? Does Bill Gates have more babies than a redneck in West Virginia that lived next to another redneck in West Virginia. What does your life experience show to you?
Third
Is there really a specific set of genes that makes one a good story teller and one a bad one? Is there something hereditary that makes one a good wood carver and one useless at carving nice things? My father is very good at crafting beautiful things-I am not. Did I not get his genes?
Fourth
Before one can be good at story telling or good at wood carving, one has to have the ability to be good at that right? Where did that ability come from? A random mutation? What random mutation would cause that? Was it one random mutation, or was it a series of mutations, over many generations, each conferring a slight advantage along the way? If it did not happen in one mutation, then what were the small advantages along the way that kept this random mutation accumulating more random mutations to supplement it? The small advantage can’t be story telling right, because we are now assuming it takes several mutations to get to that level, so what are the slightly smaller advantages ONE mutation can make? Slightly less good storytelling? Don’t you see how absurd this notion becomes?
So, why is Huxley’s argument so persuasive?
Also VJ, obviously you don’t have to answer this (as you haven’t so far), but I have asked you in the past, what part of evolution do you believe in, as you often say you accept much of evolution. What is it you accept, you accept Darwinian evolution? Natural Selection? Random mutations? Why is this a question you prefer to avoid?
I very much appreciate Torley’s correction on several factual and conceptual errors I made in my previous post on the subject (such as the confusion of Darwin’s letters to Gray and to Graham). Thank you!
There are two big issues lurking about here. The first is whether a naturalistic explanation of the origins of our cognitive powers is consistent with scientific realism. The second is whether there are good prospects for a naturalistic explanation of the origins of language.
On the first issue, I would first want to figure out what’s the best via media between realism and anti-realism in philosophy of science, and then ask if that position is compatible with broad-strokes naturalism.
Unlike the other naturalists at TSZ, I’m not an instrumentalist about theories; I don’t see theories as just useful devices for generating predictions (and retrodictions). Rather, I think that while the criteria of acceptability involve generating novel predictions that can be confirmed by measurements, we can also say that successor theories really are closer approximations of the real-but-hidden causal and modal structure of the world.
I think there are excellent philosophical reasons to adopt a Peirce/Sellars version of pragmatic scientific realism. The question is whether that’s consistent with a naturalistic explanation of our cognitive powers.
I think it is, and here’s why: what “liberates” us from being trapped entirely within our Umwelt is, precisely, language. And that’s because language allows us to “triangulate” on objects from a multiplicity of diverse embodied/embedded perspectives. The more different embodied/embedded perspectives are brought to bear, the more adequate is our objective knowledge.
The first major hurdle we had to overcome, cognitively speaking, was the evolution of joint intentionality, whereby two cognitive agents share their representations of the situation in order to facilitate some shared action. This requires some form of displaced reference, and I suspect we see this evolving around the Australopithecus–Homo transition.
The second major hurdle, which probably occurs around the time of H. heidelbergensis (based on evidence of language and hunting ability), is the evolution of collective intentionality, where there is a tribe or social group that is acknowledged as the community to which everyone belongs. I would conjecture that it is with H. heidelbergensis that we see the origins of myth and ritual, at least in some sporadic form.
Of course it’s a long way from the myths and rituals of hunter-gatherers to the experimentally confirmed theories of modern scientists, but that story doesn’t seem to invite any gaps calling for supernatural intervention either.
One thing I will say about scientific practices, though: it seems that they could not have emerged until trade and commence had advanced to the point where people became aware of the diversity of myths across human civilizations. At any rate that seems to have been a historically contingent condition for philosophy. And I tend to think that science emerges when the socio-political conditions are right for having a class of people who can mediate between the technical know-how of artisans and craftspeople and the contemplative theorizing of theologians and metaphysicians.
On the second issue, I find that Bickerton puts the problem nicely: the origin of language is not one problem but three, each requiring a different solution. First, there’s the problem of displaced reference, which is beginning of symbolic communication. Second, there’s the problem of distinguishing the universal features of grammar from the culturally specific features of grammar, and giving a biological explanation of the former. Third, there’s the problem of why language are so different from each other. Thus the evolution of language involves both biological and cultural evolution, not one or the other.
I find that rather persuasive; your mileage may vary.
Phoodoo, your final question to VJ has prodded me to ask YOU a related question. You here criticize the notion that story-telling and wood-carving abilities are traits that are selectable through evolutionary means. Do you think it follows that NO traits are so selectable? What part(s) of evolutionary theory are you denying because of your doubts regarding story-telling?
Belief guarantees nothing. Whatever it is you believe does not dictate to reality.
You’re simply asserting what you’re asking others to explain. The reliability of reason. You believe a God made your reasoning reliable. How do you know that a God made your reasoning reliable? Wouldn’t you have to use reason to even get to that? The idea that a God made your reasoning reliable has no basis. It can only be believed on blind faith.
And you scold naturalism for a problem your own position has no way to rationally justify in the first place, and only offers the choice of blind faith in.
walto,
I believe luck is selectable through natural selection.
Those who happen to mate, are those that happen to mate. I think that is about all you can conclude about natural selection. There are just as many dumb people as smart people who mate. Probably more, a casual observation would suggest. Natural selection hasn’t weeded out any of them.
And just as many ugly ones, just as many ones with asymmetrical features, just as many fat ones, just as many thin ones, just as many with good teeth and with bad teeth, and pretty much anyone with a sexual organ can mate.
That is what a scientific study would clearly show.
The argument seems a lot like fifth’s presuppositionism.
walto,
And don’t you think a dumb savage is more likely to have 10 kids, then a clever artist, on average?
The artists should have been out-selected ions ago.
Maybe my question wasn’t clear. Suppose you’re right about all that you put in this post for a moment. What do you think it would imply about Darwinian theory generally? Do you take it to entail something about common descent, for example?
What matters is how many of your offspring survive to reproduce. It is not the gross but the net.
newton,
You don’t think rural savages have lots of offspring that survive? You think dumb people’s children don’t survive as much on average? What is your explanation for the continued existence of just as many dumb people as smart ones then?
You know there is a known link between education and fertility? Educated women have fewer children.
walto,
I think it implies that Darwinian theory is nonsense. The fittest don’t survive, the lucky do.
And that is why surmising the organisms with the deepest eye pits will mate more, then pass on even deeper eye pits, who then they will survive more and have babies with accidental corneas, who will then survive more, and then have babies who will have even better corneas, and more babies, on and on, is just nonsense.
The best story tellers will have babies who are then good story tellers and more babies who are even better storytellers….well, its true that is really good storytelling!
If story-telling is an advantage, evolutionary biologists ought to be out-breeding us all.
phoodoo,
So you don’t think the peacock’s tail is a successful come-on?
And ignoring reproductive success for a moment, do you think no survival advantage is conferred by additional speed or strength, or by acuity of vision or hearing? Sharp teeth and talons or greater cunning don’t help keep both predators and prey alive to procreate?
Huxley was surely mistaken in assuming that the contribution to fitness played by a specific ability accrues solely to the individual who possesses that ability.
It seems to work for Catholics and Mormons
So its your belief that the Catholics and the Mormons are the smartest in their tribes?
If you say so.