Logos
Page 12
These criticisms have, of course, been anticipated by those for whom evolution is the key to explaining how we understand the world to the degree that we do and how we are able progressively to advance our understanding. The most common ploy is a) to take sentience as a free given that somehow emerged in an insentient universe; and b) to assert that there is a continuity between sentience, or at least the sense experience of our animal selves, and more advanced cognition, including the procedures of science. The cognitive capacities that give us an edge in escaping from predators, we are assured, are at bottom the same as those that are mobilized when humanity progresses from hunting and gathering to farming and which, modified by the experience of farming, subsequently become of use for flourishing in cities, and that, further modified, they enable us to engage in the kinds of inquiries that result in the great body of knowledge whose most developed form is natural science. Thus, the capacity to discover that E = mc2 (in the case of Einstein) or to understand what it means or to apply it (in the case of a few more of us) is a natural extension of traits that were adaptive, of value to the human organism, in the unmodified wild. The curiosity of the physicist is simply an extension of the curiosity of the squirrel.
Thus the article of faith of those for whom Darwinism provides the only kind of explanation of what we are and how we came to be what we are. It will already be obvious that what is offered is a mere description of successive phases of our collective consciousness and not an explanation. It does not even offer much of an account of how the basic capacity to avoid predators progressed in the way it did, so that it no longer depended on the ability to react nimbly and fast. The emphasis in prudent human life is on not having to react at all, in virtue of looking ahead in a way that does not involve literal looking. It requires to be demonstrated, and cannot be assumed, that the cooperative activity of building a city wall paid for out of taxes raised on an equitable basis is simply an extension of the strategies of running away or hiding from predators or burrowing behaviour.
The cognitive discontinuities become even more striking when we compare the modes of awareness of other species – so far as they can be inferred from patterns of individual and collective behaviour – with the most commonplace aspects of human cognitive activity; for example, the deliberate acquisition of (factual) knowledge, tested and then stored in propositional form, having a general scope, which may or may not prove to be of use. I am talking particularly of know-that rather than know-how (although in our cognitively advanced state know-how will draw on many layers of factual know-that).
It is not necessary to ascend to Einsteinian levels of sense-making to find items that are resistant to evolutionary explanation. There is much that we know, and actively acquire through memorization, which is of no practical use or whose practical use is dependent on circumstances that are not amenable to reduction by biological re-description. My knowledge that Adelaide is a city in Australia, which I probably acquired before I was ten years old, was not caught up in any action until I was invited to be a visiting professor there decades later. The knowledge was disconnected from any biological purpose.6 The fact that Adelaide is in Australia is not something that can be understood in organic terms. It belongs at least in part to the collective, the community of minds; indeed, to the Space of Reasons, which we shall discuss in Chapter 6.
Some evolutionary epistemologists acknowledge this and have invoked the notion of an “extended phenotype”, incorporating amongst other things, bodies of knowledge, institutions, and so on, and of elements of the collective mind that are envisaged as circulating through the culture at large. The analogy is with the organism whose functions and organs are shaped by genes selected for by their success in enhancing viablity.7 This – the appeal to so-called “meme” – is manifestly an ad hoc remedy designed to close the embarrassing gap between the programmed responsiveness of the animal organism and the knowledge-based decisions to act or not to act taken by the human person. It fails even at the level of analogy, given that its key concept – that of a meme – seems to correspond neither to the elements of the genotype nor the phenotype. In short, it does not work even in terms of the echoes of the biology that is invoked.8
While it is evident that evolutionary epistemology, and the endeavour to understand the origin and increasing power of human cognition in entirely biological terms, looks unlikely to succeed, it warrants careful examination not only because it is popular among philosophers but also because it is a manifestation of a wider intellectual trend. The endeavour has many different strands but they include:
1. Behaviourism. Human beings are organisms that have sensory inputs or stimuli and behavioural outputs or responses. There is nothing significant, or significantly different, in between. For behaviourists, even something as abstract as understanding the meaning of a word or a sentence amounts simply to an increased propensity to exhibit a particular type of behaviour. As many philosophers have pointed out, the vast majority of mental contents – the knowledge, thoughts and memories I have and even what I see “out there” – do not prescribe specific behaviour. Indeed, it would be difficult to know what would count as an appropriate response to many types of mental contents such as thoughts or memories, were they defined by their capacity to prompt particular kinds of actions. To put it another way, there would seem to be little congruence between the classification of the contents of thoughts or memories and the classification of types of behaviour supposed to be made more probable by them. Behaviourism runs into trouble even with quite basic mental contents. What sort of behaviour would correspond to the entirety of a visual field cluttered with clouds, trees, pavements, shop fronts, facial expressions, and so on? The argument that we are obliged to respond only to salient contents has some traction but the fact remains that we are nonetheless fully conscious of many things that are utterly irrelevant to behaviour. They cannot be assimilated into the flow of inputs translated into outputs.
2. Functionalism. This is superficially a more sophisticated form of behaviourism. The contents of the mind are not defined by any internal constitution. Rather they are individuated by the function they discharge in the living system of which they are a part: they are what they do. Any intrinsic qualities, distinctively mental, are squeezed out in favour of their supposed external relations. At its crudest, functionalism conceives of mental contents as entirely cashable in terms of their (typically biologically relevant) causal connections: the relations between inputs through sensory pathways and outputs realized in overt behaviour, alterations in the body, or increased probabilities of either of these. The mind is a mere way station in an unbroken causal flow through the organism or person and its contents are not fundamentally different from (say) the events inside an unconscious artefact such as a computer or a robot.
The contrary idea that the very being of, for example, perceptions – never mind thoughts and memories – lies in their being experienced, not in any causal relations or indeed in any putative material basis, is rejected, often as a kind of hangover from Cartesian dualism. The undeniability of the existence of contents of consciousness distinct from the flow of (biological) inputs and (behavioural) outputs should seem decisive. A long cul de sac was opened up by Daniel Dennett. He has argued since the 1960s that, while human behaviour is best understood at the level of “the intentional stance” which ascribes feelings, thoughts and beliefs to others, this should not commit us to accepting the reality of these “folk” psychological entities.9 Consciousness is still to be defined in terms of behavioural capacities and not in terms of intrinsic phenomenal contents. Dennett’s views can be opposed by anyone who happens to be conscious. Those who are not conscious will not be in a position to contradict the phenomenal stance – nor to maintain the intentional stance, as Dennett does. The idea that intentionality is something we ascribe to others makes the very act of ascription of intentionality – in beliefs that we have and express about others – impossible. Dennett, it appears, would have us believe that the
re are no such things as beliefs because that is what he believes.
More seriously, functionalism falls foul of the objections already lodged against the traditional behaviourism that dissolves mind into the lawlike tendency of organisms to behave in certain ways given specific environmental stimulations. What is often overlooked is that this form of behaviourism, like any other, helps itself to the difference between “input” and “output”, between points of “arrival at” and “departure from”, that would not seem to be available if functionalism (that wires, indeed dissolves, the individual mind into the world) took itself seriously. Without mind as a point of arrival and departure, the distinction between input and output would require an external view point (a conscious point of view) to supply it. This betrays how functionalism outsources the mentality of the mind to another mind which is in turn outsourced to a third mind and so on – just as Dennett’s reduction of the seemingly intentional contents of consciousness to the products of “an intentional stance” simply move those contents on to the individual adopting the intentional stance. Moreover, if mind is reduced to functional connections that boil down to causal relations, causation must operate differently on the input and on the output side. In the case of perception, the effect (for example, neural activity) has, as it were, to reach backwards to the cause, so that the latter can become the intentional object of the former. In the case of action, the direction of mental function is forward from a putative cause (an event or events in the agent) to a putative effect (movement). To say this is merely to highlight how there is nothing in the causal net that would create the basis of arrival versus departure, making a functionalist mind a centre of a world.
These problems are entirely predictable. They are the consequence of embedding the “inner” in the “outer” or of externalizing mind into the world, or collapsing the gap or distinction between mind and world. This has attracted less attention than the fact that, by emptying the mind of intrinsic contents, functionalism also mislays what is distinctive about sensations, perceptions, and propositional attitudes such as beliefs – namely the ineliminable “what it is like to be having them” that could be altered without a corresponding alteration in the causal relations between inputs and outputs. It also makes it possible logically to conceive of a device that looks and acts like Daniel Dennett which is simply a mindless robot and yet would meet all criteria for being the ingenious philosopher. What is more (and this is connected with the wider point), it would, if valid, justify the doubts regarding the (biological) utility of consciousness. If minds boil down to mechanisms, if they are merely conduits for energy passing through bits of matter called organisms, they would seem to be pointless.
3. Teleosemantics. The aim of teleosemantics is succinctly summarized by Macdonald and Papineau: “to offer a naturalistic account of mental representation … to show how the representational powers of mental states fit into the world revealed by the natural sciences …[I]t explains the truth conditions of belief-like states … in terms of the biological functions of these states.10 This approach to the naturalization of the mind shares the endeavour, seen in traditional behaviourism and functionalism, to collapse the distance between mind and (material) world by absorbing the former into the latter. They “wire” the subject so tightly into the natural world that it becomes an indistinguishable part of it. The human subject is identified with certain functions of an organism that is the locus of immediate or delayed reactions to salient contingencies of the material environment. A consequence of this is a reduction of human actions to direct or indirect reactions to stimuli, to responses whose form is ultimately genetically dictated. Mind is replaced with mechanisms whose purpose or telos is translated into biological functions.
The endeavour to deny that mind is something distinct from the natural world is never entirely successful. Excluded from places where it should be – in human persons – the mind surfaces in places where it has no place being. The personification of the brain (which “guesses”, “believes”, “hopes”, “calculates”, “judges”, etc.) is the commonest example. But “the return of the repressed” is observed in even less appropriate places, most strikingly in the case of genes, long judged to be (admittedly metaphorically) “selfish”.11
Naturalized epistemology overlooks the fundamental character of the conscious subject as someone who faces the world and is explicitly surrounded by his or her surroundings. An obvious casualty of teleosemantics is explicit knowledge and the “thatter” – our sense that such and such is the case – which we shall focus on in Chapter 6. Another casualty is the source of the (often long) delay in sense-making that distinguishes trying to “suss out” something in the immediate environment from trying to make sense of a phenomenon such as the passage of the sun across the sky. Ptolemy’s epicycles and Copernicus’ heliocentric theory took a long time to be arrived at and were based on observations accumulated over many hundreds of years. The 600-year journey from the theory of planetary motion via the laws of mechanics, to the general theory of relativity, and thence to GPS devices that have enabled us to move from place to place more confidently, is far too long to serve any biological purpose. The remote, transgenerational future cuts no evolutionary ice. Sense-making in nature is usually a matter of seconds rather than centuries.
The counter-argument that the kind of epistemic foraging evident in natural science is in fact an expression of a curiosity that also has a more direct biological utility in the natural world where survival is more directly at stake seems tendentious. The patient collection of data about something – the relative motion of earth and sun – that has little immediate or medium-term application, hardly seems even remotely connected with the cognitive activity engaged in by the most “inquisitive” of animals. And, given that “by their fruits we shall know them”, this probably explains the rate of progress of animal technology. Five million years ago, the height of technological achievement of a chimp was to crack a nut with a stone. Five million years later, the height of technological achievement is – to crack a nut with a stone.
We shall return to the question of utility presently but before doing so, it is appropriate to consider another casualty of collapsing mind into the regularities of instinctive or conditional behavioural responses to material events qualifying as stimuli. Truth, and the possibility of falsehood – ubiquitous in the propositional awareness that comprises so much of our mental life – do not seem to have a place in a world of stimulus and response, however complexly mediated. Admittedly, evolutionary epistemology and the positions we have just listed do not entirely dispense with some residual notion of truth. They are closely associated with extreme pragmatist accounts of truth, which squeeze out the “thatness” or “is the caseness” of truth in favour of “what works”. A glance at pragmatism is warranted.12
Assertion (or belief) A is pragmatically true if it promotes behaviour that enables an organism O to flourish or at least to achieve its goal(s). It is false if it prompts O to behave in a way that is to its biological disadvantage. Truths, in short, are beliefs that are adaptive and falsehoods beliefs that are maladaptive. They are, ultimately, a matter of the life and death of the organism and of the evolutionary success or failure of the species defined as the type-vehicle of a genetic replicator. In the case of the most spectacular body of truth – natural science – the referent of “what works” is a vast landscape of techniques, and technologies, of material infrastructure and cultural superstructure that have arisen from it and which may assist the primary goal of living long and healthily – although this may be suborned to the secondary goals (sometimes at odds with the primary goal) of living pleasurably and richly.
The obvious rejoinder to pragmatic interpretations of truth is to turn the aphorism on its head and say that the truth is what works because what works is what is true. If I want to get to Adelaide I have a much greater chance of getting there if my belief that it is in Australia is true. The belief that it is in the Czech Republic won’t wo
rk because it is untrue. This places correspondence between a thought, belief, or assertion and that which is thought, believed, or asserted at the heart of truth. There is no place available for such (explicit) correspondence in a mind reduced to efficient wiring between organism and environment enabling the fine-tuning of behavioural responses to external stimuli. Correspondence is a development whose ground floor is the consciousness of a being that faces a world rather than wired into a bit of nature. There is equally little place for the coherence between truths large and small that is a marker of our sense of what is, or what is likely to be, the case, at both the everyday and scientific level. The coherence between truth A and truth B at the same level or between a particular truth and a higher-level truth (as when an event instantiates a law) assists us to correspondent truths and may be a check on the latter. We shall return to the connection between the idea of truth and the nature of the conscious subject facing the world in Chapter 6.
The most telling objection to the extreme pragmatism of teleosemantics and other behaviourist reductions of the truth is that there are many truths (and falsehoods) that are quite unconnected with any behavioural output or anything that touches remotely on survival. Our minds are cluttered with vast numbers of facts that are of no practical use at any particular time and, in some cases, for most of the time. Uselessness does not make a proposition any less likely to be true; and knowledge may guide, even prompt, action but it is not obliged to do so. Indeed, the very impersonality of knowledge, the fact that it is not personally held as beliefs are, is connected with its truth claims and this impersonality is in turn connected with its frequent lack of influence on the probability of action. The difference between the truth that the earth goes round the sun and the falsehood that the sun goes round the earth is not to be measured by their respective contributions to my likelihood of survival. Ditto the more homely difference between the (for me useless) truth that Adelaide is 855 miles from Sydney and the falsehood that it is 830 miles from Sydney. We often acquire knowledge – both individually and collectively – for its own sake. This is an aspect of our sense of ourselves; of a life that has a narrative that strays into a huge territory that is remote from biological need; of a person who lives a life in accordance with a multiplicity of senses made of it.