One argument available to the fundamentalist biologism of teleosemantics is to argue that the value of my capacity to retain the fact that Adelaide is in Australia is a marker of my intellectual reach and this, and the (general) ability to retain many other facts, will in the way things are at present a) make me of outstanding use to humanity and b) by advancing my path in a competitive world will improve my chances of attracting a genetically superior partner. By this means, my ability to remember that Adelaide is in Australia will have biological utility to the point of serving the aims of the genes needing to shape organisms that will flourish in the world that human beings have created.
This is a truly desperate attempt to deal with the shocking uselessness of much that is acquired during the individual and collective cognitive advance of humanity. Unfortunately, it assumes precisely that which must be explained; namely that humans, unlike other species, live in a world in which facts play a central role. How did a reacting machine come to be dealing in facts that are timeless, albeit that they enter time through token assertions? Functionalism and other forms of behaviourism should eliminate these entities. Pragmatism, the existential contingencies relevant to survival, would seem to leave no place for correspondent truth beyond the implicit (pre-factual) truths of the umwelt of the human organism.
Critics of teleosemantics see the issue of unexploited mental content as damaging to this approach to understanding the relationship between mind and world. Ruth Millikan, a leading proponent of teleosemantics, addresses the issue of “Useless Contents” head on and her argument is worth consideration.13 If, she concedes, we are confined by our perceptual systems and biological needs to a world created by our “peculiarly human constitution and abilities … we should be intrinsically unable to represent a truly objective reality. The enterprise of empirical science is doomed to presenting only a warped and truncated vision of the world.”14 If the content of a mental representation must depend in the end on its having biological utility, what are we to make of the useless (but true) facts that clutter our minds? Cognitive orphans disconnected from any biological function would seem to lack criteria for truth and even lack content if the latter is defined by, or emptied into, such functions. Millikan argues that, while our conscious goals may be remote from those that can be ascribed to our genes, there is as it were a functional audit trail connecting higher, more abstract, distinctively human cognitive functions with those that are of direct biological utility: “Even the most highly theoretical of beliefs are not excluded from having direct biological utility … so long as they participate in chains of reasoning that eventually bear practical fruit”.15 Beliefs unconnected with any conceivable practical goal can, the argument goes, be reconnected with biological functions by being part of a coherent system of beliefs that do have such functions. What is more, coherence among beliefs is central to our being able to re-identify items and this is the key to our being able to acquire expertise in negotiating our way round the world.
It is difficult to see this defence as anything other than a restatement of an article of faith: that in the end everything we do is grounded in biology. The conflation of “practical fruit” with “biological function” helps to close the gap between the theorizing human person or community and the reacting organism, the person that speaks and the jelly that responds. Of course, many actions we perform do have practical use even when they are remote from biological function. For example, designing a body-worn cross that is made of plastic will certainly make this more cheaply available to many who wish to wear a cross – it is a practical solution – but it is remote from anything that would promote the replication of the gene. What is more, the appeal to “chains of reasoning” leaves gene-directed behaviour far behind, unless we think of biological material as somehow engaging in “chains of reasoning” of the abstract kinds that would link one bit of factual knowledge with another. Chains of reasoning, on any reasonable interpretation, require the capacity for abstract thought disconnected from any biological programming. This will become even more obvious when we discuss the difference between the Space of Reason and the material world in Chapter 6.
What is more, it is the uncoupling of the pursuit of fundamental truths without immediate regard to biological utility that has made human cognition, notably natural science, so powerful. One example already touched on will suffice. If I go into the desert, it might be a good idea to know where I am in relation to my destination. The most powerful and accurate way of locating myself is by GPS. The extraordinary success of the GPS system is in part the result of satellite technology whose accuracy depends on corrections calculated on the basis of the general theory of relativity and the reduction of the mechanics of gravitation to the solution of a single system of partial differential equations. When Einstein arrived at his field equations, they had no practical use. Indeed, it was necessary to look at the bending of light passing through a gravitational field evident at the time of a total eclipse of the sun even to find an experiencable consequence of them. There was at the time no measurement, even less an experience, on earth that could have discriminated general relativity from Newtonian mechanics. So while the truth was arrived at in 1915–16, its application, its use, came many decades later.16 Biology does not have, nor could it afford to have, that patience: it would be fatal and there are no posthumous rewards in the natural world.
Indeed, it is the separation of the pursuit of truth from practical interests, and even greater separation from biological utility, that is a key to the power of science and is also an important element that distinguishes scientific inquiry from the wishful thinking shaping witchcraft or shamanism. The latter, which wants immediate results, cannot distinguish wishes from horses. The separation underlines what is central not only to truth narrowly construed – the separation marked by “that” in “that such-and-such is the case” – but to the whole process of sense-making, acquiring knowledge, and pursuing truth, as a collective enterprise involving people who for the most part do not know and will never know each other personally, and conducted over centuries. It takes place at, and further widens, a distance within us and in the story of our lives. Most importantly, it expresses preoccupations remote from the organism, its needs and its appetites. The distance between the knowing subject and the known world is something unknown to biology. But without that distance there is neither truth nor falsehood – as we shall discuss further in Chapter 6.
The endeavour to eliminate that distance is evident in the use made by some proponents of representational theories of the mind where a) the representation is assimilated to biological function; and b) the latter is reduced to causal interaction between organism and not-organism. In so-called “indicator” or “causal” semantics, the content of a belief (or what is called a “belief-like state”) “is that condition that typically causes it and which the state therefore indicates”.17 Essentially this amounts to the claim that, if B is caused by A, then it will point to A; that B will represent A in virtue of being an effect of it. Because it is profoundly untrue, this kind of view is worth examining further.
Firstly, it misrepresents something central to propositional attitudes such as beliefs, knowledge, thoughts, etc. It confuses the forward-pointing causal relationship – A at t1 causes B at t2– with a backward-pointing intentional one – B at t2 is of A at t1. The stimulus that it is thought to cause the experience is confused with the experience that is “about” the stimulus. Secondly, while merging mind with the material world is the result desired by advocates of teleosemantics, it would have undesirable, indeed absurd, consequences: every time-slice of the universe would be a representation of the preceding time-slice that caused it and the nexus of causes would be a nexus of indications. The boundless, dense, causal network of unfolding nature would be a forest of competing indications. There is a further consequence: if the causal relationship between A and B were sufficient for B to be a representation of (indeed a belief that) A, it would not be possible to get things
wrong and for there to be misrepresentation. But the possibility of misrepresentation must be a condition of something counting as a representation.
This last is a common objection to the theory. But there is a more profound objection, which connects with a point made at the beginning of the chapter: representation would seem to be redundant if it were merely input wired to output. Why bother with representation, or, come to that, making present at all. What’s the point of consciousness or, indeed, truth and falsehood? The claim that: “the meaning (representational function) of a perceptual experience is given by the co-ordinated schema that emerges in the coevolution of the detector and effector systems”18 prompts one to wonder why the evolutionary process didn’t cut out meaning and perception; in short, dispense with the (conscious) middle man. Coordination would work perfectly without consciousness, as it does throughout most of the (living and non-living) natural world, where crystals, trees, and kidneys come into being and be themselves. The defence that consciousness permits flexibility of response would entirely undermine the central claim of teleosemantics, that there is a biologically essential, Pre-established (Material) Harmony between inputs and outputs.
This, however, seems a minor objection compared with the metaphysical absurdity already alluded to of having causation as the basis of representation. Every effect would be a representation of its cause; consequently, every time-slice of material world would be an image of the preceding time-slice. Such absurdity is an entirely predictable consequence of what will happen when knowledge and belief and other propositional attitudes are assimilated to the wiring of a (physical) organism to its (physical) surroundings; when the putative cause of a belief (or indeed a perception) doubles up as its content; when knowledge is swallowed up in biological function.
There is an instability in teleosemantic approaches to contents of consciousness. While there is a backward-looking identification of representation with that which causes it, content seems to look forward to a goal. Macdonald and Papineau suggest that teleosemantics “explains the content of a belief-like state, not in terms of its typical causes, but in terms of how it is biologically designed to function”.19 This has the apparent advantage of having propositional attitudes pointing forwards to their telos or purpose rather than backward to their causes. Moreover, it does seem to create a space for the difference between truth and falsehood: a true belief is one that prompts an appropriate response and a false belief one that prompts an inappropriate one. If I retreat from a real snake, the content of my belief (that the item is a snake) is true. If I retreat from a toy snake, my action lacks biological utility and the content of my belief is wrong. But many other problems remain.
The most fundamental is that it reduces mental contents to the kind of behaviour they prompt. The difficulties associated with this are common to all forms of behaviourism, and we have already touched on them. First, the way in which beliefs and other propositional attitudes (including items of knowledge) are differentiated hardly correspond to general patterns of behaviour that have distinct biological utilities. There are, as we have discussed, no biologically defined classes of behaviour corresponding to the vast hoard of knowledge we have and may or may not use. Secondly, the content, cashed out as behaviour loses its status as a piece of representational content. The latter is an inevitable result of a ruthless pragmatic reduction of the nature of truth that, dispensing with correspondence and coherence, leaves no space for truth itself as a connection between two distinct items. What we have is a portrait of the mind in which representation, and goals, are conflated in the overall idea of causal connections passing through the organism.
Teleosemantics and other attempts to translate the mind into biological functions and its contents into dispositioned behaviour and hence to reinsert it into the natural world, require an almost wilful overlooking of the cognitive nature of the knowing, inquiring, sense-making human creature. Human hospitality to “useless contents” is no minor quirk, but a profound manifestation of the kinds of minds that humans have; minds that have made possible extraordinary cognitive advances, which have often – though not reliably and frequently after a long interval – delivered biological utility. Such contents are, of course, abhorred by the aficionados of biologism because they hint at a mind floating free of nature.
Crude pragmatism is highly popular with thinkers who want to question the possibility of objective truth and, with this, the dignity of man, the Knowing Animal, and to tell us that humans are just organisms. In his wildly successful Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals, philosopher John Gray challenges the vanity of a humanism that espoused the delusion that “we can free ourselves from the limits that frame the lives of other animals”.20 Clearly, the limits he is talking about are not those defined by technology because we know of no other animal that, for example, communicates with its conspecifics over thousands of miles using mobile phones, travels the world on economy class flights or performs delicate surgical operations using an extraordinary range of tools and techniques. Rather, he is talking about cognitive (and incidentally ethical) limits. Darwin’s theory, Gray believes, has cured us of the idea that our knowledge is objective: “[T]he human mind serves evolutionary success, not truth. To think otherwise is to resurrect the pre-Darwinian error that humans are different from all other animals.”21
By this reckoning, it is a pre-Darwinian error to think that the Darwinist conclusion about truth – the product of the human mind – is itself anything more than a device to serve “evolutionary success” (whatever that may mean). The theory of evolution itself is therefore not true in the elevated, objective sense it is generally accepted to be. Nobody who understands the implications of Darwin’s theory and accepts its objective truth, it appears, should accept that it is objectively true.22 Gray’s appeal to the objective truth of Darwinism to demonstrate that it is vanity to think we have access to objective truth makes him a worthy successor to the famous Cretan liar who claimed that all Cretans were liars.
The path from Logos to bio-Logos and the naturalizing of mind is opened up by a mis-reading of the significance of the argument that of course the world makes sense to sentient creatures like ourselves otherwise we would not survive. As noted at the outset of the chapter, there is no “of course”. That our survival requires an intelligible world simply moves the mystery on to another place. Most organisms flourish without being conscious and the members of only one species locate themselves in a world of which they make general, even if incomplete, sense. The laws of nature – and the very idea that nature is law-governed – appear to be beyond the cognitive reach of all but H. sapiens.23 What’s more, many humans flourished before Newton announced his discoveries, Einstein formulated the general theory of relativity, and before the scientific revolution that made these discoveries possible. Their benefits in terms of increased life expectancy have been slow in coming. And many cultural-cognitive advances – the agricultural revolution, urbanization, and the first phases of the industrial revolution – were associated with increased morbidity and mortality. The fact that they may ultimately have resulted in increased life expectancy is irrelevant: evolutionary theory does not allow for deferred benefits, or any such mode of group selection in which several generations are sacrificed for their remote descendants. Biology does not deal in vague, promissory notes.
The naturalization of sense-making becomes an even more dubious exercise when it is attached to a wider materialism according to which the world contains only physical events, so that the mind is composed of nerve impulses. We shall set aside for the present the impossibility of accommodating the intentionality or “aboutness” of sense-experience within neural activity, and a fortiori the sense-making that we are concerned with. Instead we shall examine an especially ambitious attempt to assimilate mind, and its knowledge, to the physical reality uncovered by the natural sciences – namely that of Quine who summarized a lifetime’s philosophizing in his short (and final) book From Stimulus to Science.
24 It attempts a scientific, empirically testable, account of how we can advance from sense experience to scientific knowledge of the world.25 He aims, in short, to anchor his account of this journey to science in science itself, using the fruits of science in investigating its roots. This is central to his naturalism – according to which epistemology should be or aim to be a branch of the psychology of a primate H. sapiens – that (in a passage already quoted) he characterizes as the:
rational reconstruction of the individual’s and/or the race’s acquisition of a responsible theory of the external world. It would address the question how we, physical denizens of the physical world, can have projected our scientific theory of that whole world from our meagre contacts with it: from the mere impacts of rays and particles on our surfaces and a few odds and ends such as the strain of walking uphill.26
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