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?
GlenDavidson,
Glen you need to read carefully. Your whole response is out of context because you read ID guys when I wrote anti ID guys.
LoL. I love you walto, but not in the way David (allegedly) loved Jonathan.
It would be unreasonable to expect of Glen that he abstain from affirming the consequent as if formal logic had anything to do with reasoning.
Got it, thanks.
Doesn’t really look like the world will be turned upside down. Here’s an abstract from a paper given during the first session:
I mean, of course, many things have changed since Darwin’s time and the theory will continue to be refined. The details have not been ironed out and even some of the underpinnings are likely to evolve. I doubt any of the backers of evolutionary biology would contest any of those claims. That’s not what Erik or phoodoo are saying, I don’t think.
Hey, I thought you were going to consider whether you might have misinterpreted what you read. One step forward, two steps back. Let me remind you of a couple of things:
1. Common descent and the origin of variation are two separate things. Common descent could be true and our ideas of alleles being fixed by natural selection could be false (though I doubt they are), so evidence for the latter is not evidence against the former. I thought you had finally acknowledged that, but apparently not, or you have backslid.
2. At one point you had agreed on common descent of all paleognath birds. I would hate to lose that hard-won concession, but it seems that you have dismissed that too.
Kantian Naturalist,
There are more assumptions than just this KN. There is also the assumption that EVERY part of the complex functions that are employed by organisms was not only useful enough to spread throughout the entire population, and was not only highly preserved in the population, BUT ALSO was added to by further unplanned abnormalities in gene copying, and slowly sculpted to more and more perfection, through the use of copying abnormalities.
Put those three giant assumptions in one big bundle and call them the mother of all assumptions, and maybe you might understand why some have a problem with that assumption.
Neither Patrick nor Alan nor Neil will have happened to have read your post.
If Colewd responds negatively, they will have read that.
Glen did not claim anyone was ACTUALLY delusional. Plus, his post had a lot of other really good stuff in it that was on topic.
Moreover, Glen never claimed to have good reasons for his claim, or even that others ought to see his claim as being reasonable.
After all, who needs logic in order to reason?
Vincent,
This is silly. As Glen and Patrick have noted, you are actually trying to redefine “reasoning” so as to exclude the New Caledonian crows.
But “reasoning” already has an established meaning in English:
The New Caledonian crows are thinking about, understanding, and solving problems in a logical way.
They are reasoning.
Whether this conflicts with any religious preconceptions of yours is irrelevant to its truth.
No idea why Dr. Torley has reservations to the idea that animals are reasoning. He has been more forthcoming earlier http://www.uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/the-immateriality-of-animal-consciousness-why-im-agnostic/
Some quotes:
“Full disclosure here: my Ph.D. thesis in philosophy was on the subject of animal minds, and I should point out that I have written several articles on Uncommon Descent (see here, here, here and here), pouring cold water on recent scientific studies purporting to show that non-human animals possess rationality and a sense of self. ”
“Most cat and dog owners would vigorously contend that their pets view them as companions, and that cats and dogs can empathize with their owners when they are feeling sad, lonely or unwell. Recent psychological studies lend support to this claim, although they are far from conclusive. That being the case, one might reasonably suggest that perhaps these animals possess a primitive concept of “person” or “individual,” and that they view their owners not merely as useful objects (e.g. food-providers), but as “significant others” But as Feser would readily acknowledge, the concept of a person is not a material one. It therefore follows that if some pets are capable of genuinely loving, empathizing with or enjoying the companionship of their owners, they must be capable of performing at least one immaterial mental act. And if that be the case, then we can no longer rule out the possibility of immortality for these animals.”
If animals seem to form (abstract) concepts, i.e. they actually do something with concepts, then they are reasoning, are they not?
ETA: That particular article by Dr. Torley was (yet another) counterstrike to Dr. Feser, when Dr. Feser wrote that pets don’t go to heaven. What does it take to get to heaven, Dr. Torley? Conscious choice between right and wrong, willing submission to God, does it not? Given the title of that article, your answer should be, “I’m agnostic about whether animals have reasoning.”
If we all had your attitude we would still be eating fish on Friday and paying for indulgences to spring our loved ones from purgatory.
It’s not about knowing better it’s about not blindly trusting that the experts have it all figured out and trying to understand for yourself.
Have you been following the recent news that it’s possible that dark matter and dark energy might not exist after all? It’s entertaining to see the “experts” jump to the defense of the status quo like their mother has been disrespected. And theses are two relatively recent ideas with no direct evidence at all to support their existence. Hence the word “dark”. Just imagine the fuss they would kick up if someone were to challenge 150 year old received wisdom.
I would say that “the experts” in all fields are a very conservative bunch and their opinions are not infallible. Those two things alone are good reason to question what they think they know about stuff.
peace
You simply have no way to know what the crows understand. It’s possible Likely even that they are just having programmed responses to various stimuli with out having any actually understanding at all.
In order for the crows to prove that they had understanding they would at a minimum need to be able to answer questions and describe their knowledge in their own words. In other words they would need language
peace
I agree with Torley that there’s a socio-linguistic dimension to reasoning that’s not part of the mental life of non-human animals, which reflects a shared Wittgensteinian influence on both of us.
However, I’m less happy with the use of the taught/innate distinction as he’s using it here.
Firstly, as others have noted, spatial cognition (for example) develops through the exercise of sensorimotor abilities. Even seemingly “low-level” cognitive processes, like being able to distinguish vertical stripes from horizontal stripes, don’t form properly in the absence of bodily movement.
Secondly, the kind of reasoning that I’m interested in here is much older than the explicit presentation of that reasoning that begins to get codified with the Sophists and then further by Aristotle, the Stoics, and other logicians. While one does need to be taught explicitly how to avoid affirming the consequent, it’s less clear to me that a facility with the game of giving and asking for reasons requires explicit instruction.
Imagine a bit of dialogue that could have happened anytime between 200,000 years ago and today:
“Look at those footprints. Deer have been here recently.”
“No, those are too big for deer. That must be a baby moose”
“Can’t be, there are no moose around here.”
“Are you sure?”
“Well, no one has ever seen one.”
When I’m talking about reasoning, I’m talking about this ability that we have to make assertions about the world, based on evidence, to which others have an obligation to endorse or challenge.
In some of the stuff I’ve been writing lately, I’ve been putting the point as follows: nonhuman animals think but they don’t argue. And getting clear about that distinction requires (I think) distinguishing inferences from inferential practices. So the question of the evolution of rationality from non-rational cognition becomes a question of how inferences became inferential practices.
As Kuhn explained, it’s important for the progress of learning that ‘normal science’ be conservative in the respect you mention. Sometimes there are revolutions, surely. But if one occurs in the area of dark matter I think we can all be pretty sure that it won’t be as a result of a Bible passage and claims of revelation.
To paraphrase Wittgenstein, if crows could speak, we wouldn’t understand them.
There’s a linguistic element to formal logic, but formal logic appears to have been invented in historical times (in the written record).
Anyone thinking that nonverbal critters can’t reason has not raised an infant or observed many non human animals. Ignorance of something does not imply non existance of that something.
Formal logic is an invention in the same sense that science is an invention. Elements of each existed prior to the formalization.
Two comments moved to Guano. Please follow Lizzie’s simple rules, in particular:
“Address the content of the post, not the perceived failings of the poster.”
“This means that accusing others of ignorance or stupidity is off topic As is implying that other posters are mentally ill or demented.”
ETA: If anyone wants to flag a comment for the admins’ attention, please do so in Moderation Issues where it is more likely to be seen. I’ll try to come up with an Assistant Junior Janitor badge for anyone who helps out more than average.
“How, then, was an organ developed so far beyond the needs of its possessor?”
Suppose we substitute “science” for reason.
Science is a more of behavior. It is not an organ. And formal reasoning is not an organ, it is a learned behavior.
Informal reasoning exists throughout the world of animals. Corvids do it. Squirrels do it. Great apes do it.
Let’s see if I understand your argument correctly.
You are saying that science as formerly practised by animals has come a long way now that it’s being practised by humans. And so have organs come a long way. And so has reasoning.
I think I can agree with one point in your post: Ignorance of something does not imply non-existence of that something. But I am sure you would find my applications of this disagreeable.
Quite clearly you didn’t understand.
And, by the way, I agree with Petrushka. But I’ll note that he made a statement (or assertion, or expression of opinion), not an argument.
Neil Rickert,
I agree that I didn’t understand it. But I’m sure he has some general drift aiming at something, an argument in seed form. It’s just that it’s so general that I cannot tell if it’s even on topic.
That is so silly it isn’t even wrong. It’s just random words strung together.
John Harshman,
With the exception of the ostrich, John. Please don’t practice selective memory. You need to add your own contribution to the concession.
walto,
The key change is that Darwin’s original mechanism of random change and natural selection is no longer considered the whole mechanism of life’s diversity. This is somewhat equivalent to saying the mass/energy is no longer the sole mechanism of space time curvature. Without the mechanism there is no real theory. The papers at the conference will discuss new ideas ranging from subtle changes to cells being able to re engineer themselves.
Really? Why isn’t the evidence for the ostrich as good as the identical evidence for other paleognaths? For that matter, the same evidence applies to common descent of all birds. If you admit the one, what keeps you from admitting the rest?
Also, what am I supposed to concede?
John Harshman,
The evidence for common descent you cited and we discussed was the missing 8 bits among paleognaths. The ostrich is not missing those 8 bits.
Is there a reason why you need to denigrate those you disagree with in this way?
I agree that science does not usually progress by these means and I never said it did. However I do expect that if there is a revolution in dark matter or dark energy it will make no sense unless we presuppose the existence of the Christian God.
That is because any knowledge at all is impossible with out this foundation
peace
right, that means we have no way of knowing if they employ reason rather than unconscious response to stimuli.
Glad we cleared that up
peace
No, no, no, no. That’s just the tiny little bit of the evidence you chose to focus on. Most of the evidence comes from the DNA sequences themselves, as is explained at length in the paper you claim to have read. That evidence involves not just ostriches and other paleognaths but a set of neognaths and a couple of crocodylians.
Yes, it’s how your words look like. Re-phrasing could help.
petrushka,
I quite agree that non-human animals and human infants can think. Tomasello describes extensively the kinds of inferential patterns that characterize great ape problem-solving, and I’m sure similar work has been done in children.
The reason why I want to deny that this counts as reasoning is that reasoning also involves the ability to take oneself as mistaken. This is not just the ability to be mistaken but the ability to recognize oneself as being mistaken. In reasoning we understand that our inferences can be wrong and susceptible to correction by others. Paradigmatically we invite criticism by sharing our inferences. Great apes and corvids cannot do this. They are unable to play the game of giving and asking for reasons.
This doesn’t make them less intelligent that us, and certainly not in any sense inferior. But it does make human cognition really quite different from theirs, and that difference needs to be explained.
I agree with Torley that the clue lies in the evolution of language. Unlike Torley I think the prospects are quite positive for a strictly naturalistic explanation of language, and therefore of the origins of distinctly human reasoning as well.
I prefer Dennett’s rejoinder: if a crow could speak, we could understand it perfectly well, but we would learn nothing from it about non-speaking crows.
John Harshman,
This is the evidence you used to argue for common descent.
The tree you made also shows closer shared ancestry between the ostrich and neognaths then other paleognaths. I will take a fresh look at the paper but as I agreed the evidence of the common missing 8 bits supports common ancestry among paleognaths (with the exception of the ostrich).
It is contrary evidence that the ostrich shares ancestry with paleognaths which is something very interesting and needs to be explored not ignored.
It is not. As I’ve said, the 8-base deletion is only a tiny bit of the evidence, the bulk of which is described in the paper you supposedly read, the paper in which the 8-base deletion is a single paragraph and one figure.
No it does not. You are reading the tree incorrectly. The ostrich is more closely related to other paleognaths than to neognaths.
That statement is true, but if that’s all you got out of the paper, you need to read the whole thing.
It is not contrary evidence at all. Let’s try a different case: evidence that you are more closely related to your siblings than to your first cousin is not evidence against the claim that your first cousin is more closely related to you than to a stranger.
Notice the implicit requirement of self awareness.
We are left with a trinitarian complex of language, cognition, and self awareness.
Each of these is equally necessary and interrelated but not identical.
I’m not sure how any one of the three can arise with out the others. It seems like the entire complex needs to show up fully developed all at once.
I would very much like to see what the outlines of such an explanation would look like.
peace
There are people who don’t recognize their own mistakes. According to your reasoning, their thinking would be on a par with animals. Which, God forbid, does not make them less intelligent or inferior. It’s just that their cognition is different from ours.
Wonderful.
Lacking self-cognition, animals cannot be said to be making mistakes in the same sense as humans, and thus they have no obligation to correct them. This is the difference. Just like mental cases are handled in court. And, yes, obviously the difference involves inferiority – the judges are those who determine the case and those under judgement don’t determine anything. Are you trying to argue that the court system would become better by doing away this difference?
John Harshman,
Hey John,
What are you basing your closeness of relationships on?
Oh wait, I forgot, you don’t like to respond to posters who challenge your statements. Being so shy and all.
Oh, YAY! Cuz three’s a magic number, right??
No because there are exactly three necessary elements to the kind of intelligence we are discussing. All three are necessary and none can exist with out the others AFAICT.
I do note your apparent squeamishness any time these sorts of things present themselves.
Don’t worry I’m sure the “experts” have a reasonable explanation of how this complex of traits arose in human’s via random mutation filtered by natural selection. Despite the fact that apparently the rest of the animal kingdom gets by just fine with out them.
peace
Get used to it. I think your need for magic numbers is childish, and i’m not planning to stop saying it.
Yet I just pointed out that this is not about a magic number. So your conclusion about my need is mistaken.
Is it possible you have a need to think I have a need for magic numbers and that need is childish?
peace
Explore it then. Or don’t you dirty your hands with actual work?
I find this comment very confusing.
It seems as if you are trying to draw some connection between my view of the difference between human rationality and animal cognition and legal protection of the mentally disabled.
Is that what you’re trying to do?
If so, I have to say that I don’t see the connection. Those look like two very different things, as far as I can tell.
No. I can walk you through the way your reasoning appears step by step, even though past experience is not very encouraging.
First step: Are there people who don’t recognize their own mistakes?
The relevance of the question comes from this statement of yours: “The reason why I want to deny that this counts as reasoning is that reasoning also involves the ability to take oneself as mistaken.”
Likewise.
Are you asking, “are there people who are incapable of recognizing themselves as being mistaken?” or “are there people who generally don’t recognize themselves as being mistaken?”
For example, are you alluding to cases of people who lack the ability or who fail to exercise it — say, because they are extremely dogmatic, or caught in the grip of an ideology?
If you stop asking leading questions and state your argument directly and succinctly we might be able to make some progress.
Kantian Naturalist,
If you just answered, it could work. If you perceive the question involving two or more questions, answer them all.
Since my question directly stems from your statement, it is not leading. If it appears leading, you should blame your own statement for giving rise to the question.
My full argument concerning your position is in the first paragraph. It ends with “Wonderful.” If that’s unclear, ask.
You mean that when you said,
That’s your idea of an argument??
That’s hardly even a coherent thought, let alone an argument that has identifiable premises and conclusions.
So, no questions? And no answers either?
Because, you see, the whole point of it was that your thought was incoherent.
Your refusal to walk through your own reasoning one more time for clarity is, well, I’ll leave it at that.
Actually, it is. 😀
Start with proton, neutron and electron.
The triple alpha process
Third generation star
etc etc
Erik,
Well, let’s see here. I asserted that being able to reason involves being able to recognize when one is mistaken. You seem to think that there’s something deeply wrong with that. But you haven’t said what it is, and I’m not interested in guessing.
You don’t have to guess. The thing wrong with the assertion is this: There are people who don’t recognize their own mistakes. Thus, according to you, such people don’t reason. And inasmuch as, according to you, such non-reasoning is an animal quality rather than human, such people are animals rather than humans.
The point being, you are distinguishing between humans and animals (or between reasoning and non-reasoning) by an irrelevant characteristic. That’s wrong.