In the spirit of Bastian’s proposal that all humans share innate tacit knowledge, beginning in the 1950s, Noam Chomsky pursued the then-moribund ideas of rationalism by proposing that humans possess an innate tacit knowledge of the rules of their native languages. This innate knowledge is in fact so rich that they do not “learn” their native languages but “acquire” them. From Chomsky’s theory, this tacit knowledge—universal grammar (UG)—must arise by adjusting variable aspects of UG to local languages, with the range and ability to make such “adjustments” deriving from the human genome. According to the theory of UG, the dark matter of human minds is a reflex of the way that our minds are constructed phylogenetically, either via natural selection or some other set of principles such as Turing’s self-organizational proposals (Turing 1952).
Also influential—and contrasting to some degree with Chomsky’s strongly nativist work—is that of Michael Polanyi’s, seen in such works as his Tacit Dimension ([1966] 2009) and Personal Knowledge (1974), which have exerted tremendous influence in philosophy, psychology, and even in business. Unlike Chomsky, Polanyi was concerned less with the source of this knowledge than with its effects on our day-to-day activity.
Taking a step back from more recent writings, the idea of “tacit” knowledge has been around in various forms for quite a while, much longer than either Chomsky or Polanyi. Since its history is implicated in the understanding the nature of dark matter, I want to trace its pedigree through its two major lines in what follows. Of course, the place to begin, as always, is with Plato. (I want to make it clear from the outset of this brief survey, however, that I am not summarizing the complete oevres of these philosophers, neither their views of “self,” etc. I am, rather, looking exclusively at whether they postulated a priori concepts.)
In the Western world, a foundational discussion of tacit knowledge is Plato’s Meno dialogue. The Meno is set at a dinner part where Socrates enters into a conversation with Plato’s fifth-century BCE eponymous character. Meno, as with other poor souls who chose to debate Socrates, realizes before the end of his exchange that he has bitten off more than he can chew. The catalyst for their debate is a discussion about unlearned knowledge. At the dinner party, the host asks Socrates if virtue is acquired by teaching or practice, or whether it comes in some other way.
Socrates answers that virtue is not learned. This puzzles Meno, who then asks Socrates what he means by saying that people do not learn, and that what they call learning is only a process of recollection. Socrates answers by calling to himself one of Meno’s servant boys and leading him through a series of questions about geometry, in order to establish that this uninstructed child apparently possesses surprising and accurate knowledge of the Pythagorean theorem. The philosophical question that Plato offers up for consideration is just this: How can people know so much about things they have neither been instructed in nor had any direct experience with? Knowledge that precedes experience is known as a priori knowledge. Socrates’s questioning proves the existence of such knowledge, if, as Plato would have it, the slave knows geometry without having been instructed in it.
Plato’s dialogue has provoked interest for more than two thousand years. Almost solely because of this dialogue have other thinkers in history debated the existence of a priori knowledge. In fact, it seems fair to say that all theories of the nature and origin of human language fall on one side or the other of the debate begun by Plato—that is, whether our knowledge of the world is at least a priori or a posteriori.
Another reason that Plato’s ideas about ideas are so important to many is that if ideas are invariant in heaven, then they are timeless, pure, and free from contamination by the body and the world. The dualism of Descartes is thus prefigured by Plato. Yet—looked at with modern eyes—the Meno isn’t very convincing. It should be obvious that Socrates is asking leading questions (“Do you know that a figure like that is a square?”) designed to restrict possible responses, question-forms, by exploiting Greek interactional structures and cultural understanding. Knowing this, we can see that in fact no a priori knowledge is discovered. And yet Plato’s concept of an innate endowment of universal ideas common to all humans still resonates. We see its guiding hand in the work of philosophers as disparate as Descartes and Kant, though disputed by others such as Locke and Hume. Chomsky goes so far as to call the “mystery” of the source of that knowledge which exceeds our experience (especially what he assumes to be evidence for a priori linguistic knowledge) “Plato’s problem.”
For Plato, all true knowledge is found in heaven. Like the Apostle Paul (whom he apparently influenced), Plato believed that we see only “shadows” of truth on earth or, as Paul put it, “as through a glass darkly” (I Corinthians 13:12). But for Plato, unlike Paul, we all have access to our inborn truth via reflection. Therefore, what we call “learning” is really only remembering.
If all humans are born with the same set of identical a priori ideas—even if the set of such ideas is much smaller than or quite different from that envisioned by Plato—then all humans partake of a universal, epistemological human psyche or human nature. Because of its intrinsic interest and the position of Plato in the history of the Western world, over the centuries a large number of distinct philosophical traditions have emerged from Plato’s concept of innate, universal ideas. In what follows, I want to trace the ideas of Plato’s main descendants (relative to the current discussion) in chronological order.
Perhaps the most influential of all who followed Plato in the belief in innate a priori knowledge was René Descartes (1596–1650). Descartes not only supports a version of the rationalism that was launched by Plato, but he adds a pernicious twist, one that has come to be known as “dualism”—the idea that mind and body are separate substances requiring separate understandings. This wasn’t altogether new with Descartes, as we have just seen, but it took on a name and greater prominence in Western philosophy after his writing.
In many of the religions of the world, from Buddhism to Christianity to Islam, the body is opposed to the mind (and soul) and is a corrupting influence. Thus ascetics arose who purposely violated the basic biological values of the body, seeing a “pure” heart and “pure” thoughts by denying themselves satisfaction of their hunger, sexual needs, physical comfort, and so on. Such ideas also permeated philosophy, so that even philosophers as brilliant as Descartes and Plato, or mathematicians like Alan Turing, or computer scientists such as Herbert Simon, or linguists such as Chomsky, have reached the conclusion that it is possible to ignore the body in the study of the mind.
Descartes does this by focusing on human nature, the notion of self as the mental, and by disregarding the body as little more than a sheath for the mind. In spite of its popularity, however, I contend that dualism is one of the worst errors ever introduced into philosophy. This Cartesian misunderstanding of the mind has perhaps done as much to retard understanding of the individual and cognition as any proposal ever made—with the possible exception of Kant’s transcendental arguments (see below). Dualism is pernicious because it has led to the deeply misguided view of the mind as software running on a physical hardware (hence the separation of emotions and the physical peculiarities of the human body from the study of human cognition, perhaps best illustrated in fictional stories about computers that think (e.g., 2001: A Space Odyssey) or in the popular science fiction film Transcendence, where a mind is “uploaded” onto the Internet and then takes over the world).6
Descartes’s dualism is also reflected in his utterly ignorant view of animals. To Descartes, animals were meat machines. They possessed no consciousness, no thought, no feelings, or the like. Moreover, his view of the mind of humans as special and disconnected from bodily experience led instinctively to a linguistic-based—that is, human-based—theory of cognition.
But as Paul Churchland aptly puts it:
Both of these classical accounts [the syntactic and the semantic views] are inadequate, I shall argue, especially the older syntacti
c/sentential/propositional account [of explanatory understanding]. Among many other defects, it denies any theoretical understanding whatever to nonhuman animals, since they do not traffic in sentential or propositional attitudes. (2013, 22)
Any view of cognition that ignores nonhuman animals ignores evolution. Whether we are talking about the nature of ineffable knowledge or any other kind of cognitive or physical capacity, our account must be informed by and be applicable to comparative biology, if it is to have any explanatory adequacy. Animal cognition helps us understand the importance of evolutionary theory and comparative biology in the understanding of our own cognition. It also helps us see how the bodies of both humans and other animals are causally implicated in their cognition. This disregard for animal cognition, caused by dualism, has led to what Paul Churchland (2013) refers to as “linguaformal” models of knowledge and cognition. But since animals lack language, their cognition is thus declared by fiat, not by science, to have no relation to human cognition. If beliefs and desires, for example, are based on propositional, linguaformal representations, then animals cannot have beliefs and desires, which seems patently false (see Searle 1983; Patricia Churchland 2013; Panksepp and Biven 2012; among many others).
In his First Meditation (Med. 5, AT 7:64), Descartes says regarding truths that “on first discovering them it seems that I am not so much learning something new as remembering what I knew before.” He also says of truths that
we come to know them by the power of our native intelligence, without any sensory experience. All geometrical truths are of this sort—not just the most obvious ones, but all the others, however abtuse they may appear. Hence, according to Plato, Socrates asks a slave boy about the elements of geometry and thereby makes the boy able to dig out certain truths from his own mind which he had not previously recognized were there, thus attempting to establish the doctrine of reminiscence. Our knowledge of God is of this sort. (ibid.)
To Descartes, ideas were innate if they could be grasped without sensory experience. This seems misguided to me because he fails to distinguish types of sensory experience, from “directly relevant” to “enabling” sensory experience. Deprive an infant of all sensory experience, proper diet, affection, and so on, and they will learn (“recall”) nothing, or will learn things perhaps deeply distorted, for example. A priori empirical reasoning is possible only in the presence of prior experience.
Many others who followed Plato also defended the idea of human nature as a function of universally shared a priori knowledge. One of the most influential was the Prussian philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804). Kant’s life and work are well known to most contemporary philosophers, and his philosophical program of thought is dense, well planned, and enormously insightful, such that it is difficult to imagine an intellectual of the Western world that has not been influenced by him in one way or another. Kant was obviously himself influenced by Descartes, though some philosophers see Kant as (nearly) bridging the gap between empiricism and rationalism. I don’t agree with that assessment. To my mind, Kant was an innovative rationalist, but a rationalist nonetheless—we might say that he was to rationalism what Beethoven was to the classical tradition. Further, like other rationalists, Kant’s philosophy suffers from a lack of understanding of culture, physiology, psychology, and linguistics. This is not anachronistic criticism. Kant’s philosophy doesn’t work in many crucial cases and those are the reasons why. For example, Kant championed the view that our sensibility (our perceptions and experiences of the world) is a set of powers of cognition fundamentally distinct from our understanding (our intellect or intelligence). Modern research (Gibbs 2005; Shapiro 2010; Panksepp and Biven 2012; and the present work) argues that no such separation is possible and that our intelligence and experiences are at most points along a continuum of selfhood, each an exemplar of dark matter.7
Kant was a hero of the Enlightenment, an era of human intellectual history almost single-handedly begun by Isaac Newton, with fundamental contributions by myriad others across Europe, especially Leibniz. Kant captures the spirit of the Enlightenment beautifully in a statement from his Critique of Pure Reason:
Our age is the age of criticism, to which everything must submit. Religion through its holiness and legislation through its majesty commonly seek to exempt themselves from it. But in this way they excite a just suspicion against themselves, and cannot lay claim to that unfeigned respect that reason grants only to that which has been able to withstand its free and public examination. ([1903] 2007, xi)
These admirable sentiments have changed our patterns of thinking, from the Enlightenment, broadly speaking, to Kant’s work as part of that Kultur. Though Kant has been the subject of innumerable works, it is Kant’s thought directed to the understanding of the pedigree of dark matter that concern us here. Kant argued that unless our mind has innate a priori concepts, it cannot interpret the world it finds itself in. That is, the mind not only cannot be an Aristotelian blank slate, but it must come with pre-installed concepts that match our experiences of the world. Such concepts Kant referred to as “categories.”
Interestingly, these categories did not nor could not lead in principle to an understanding of how things really are, “in themselves.” Instead, they enable us to arrange and make sense of our perceptions. Apart from Kant’s ontological commitments, I find this an appealing perspective. In fact it is easy to see the roots of American pragmatism in Kant’s writing—in particular, in his views of realism and the limits of human knowledge. Kant’s notion of a priori categories is perhaps best translated in my terms into the idea of an inborn ability of humans to generalize and learn by any means. Kant rightly observed in effect that without a learner, there is no learning. Thus humans must be born to be learners—individual humans have innate capacities to adjust to the world that we encounter (as all living creatures do). His view is that such learning is partially the application of highly specific categories to shape our perceptions. But statistical learners, even computer simulations, show that not all learning requires specific concepts.
Moreover, as we see later on, Kant’s notions of the interrelationship between experience and intelligence fail to consider other mediators between the external world and the mind. First, like many before him (and most after him), Kant saw the mind rather than the individual as the locus of learning (which is why he had little to say about interactions between reasoning, emotions, and physiology). Second, Kant overlooked the richness of potential unconscious tacit knowledge, acquired during one’s life—failing to recognize the vast amount of learning that is subliminal (“subceptive learning,” Rogers [1961] 1995). Third, some of Kant’s discussion of subjective vs. objective knowledge seems best recast in terms of emotion and perception—that is, complementary modes of relating to an object, which may be objective or subjective and which do not follow from properties of the object itself but from the role of experience-based dark matter in our relationship to the world in which we live and form a part. For example, take his illustration of the perception of a house, in comments on Leibniz (Kant B162):
The I think must be able to accompany all my representations; for otherwise something would be represented in me that could not be thought at all, which is as much as to say that the representation would either be impossible or else at least would be nothing at all.
Thus at once Kant writes off dark matter of the mind as “nothing at all” because it is not—and often may not or even cannot—be the object of “I think,” nor is it simply representational. Obviously, “knowing-how,” therefore, does not follow under a Kantian conception of apperception. But neither does knowledge of grammatical rules, taste in clothes, likes in foods, prelinguistic experiences as a child, muscle memory and so on. Kant’s view of apperception therefore seems acutely inadequate.
Kant was also influenced by Gottfried Leibniz (1646–1716), another major epistemological Platonist. Leibniz is responsible for the introduction of the novel notion that has been mentioned several times abo
ve, “apperceptions.” In Leibniz’s conception of this term, he refers to a perception that is registered by our consciousness, then stored away to build future knowledge—thus not terribly far from Kant’s interpretation of his notion. William James ([1900] 2001, chap. 14) says of apperception that “it verily means nothing more than the act of taking a thing into the mind.” All of our apperceptions, once registered are “drafted off . . . making connection with the other materials already” in our mind/memory. “The particular connections it [any impression] strikes into are determined by our past experiences and the ‘associations’ of the present sort of impression with them.”
So my take (and reinterpretation) of the notion of apperception first introduced by Leibniz and later developed by Kant and James is that we experience things during our entire lives, from conception (not merely from birth) through death, through sickness, health, and even complete cognitive breakdowns, and these experiences enter our memories consciously such that we may reflect on them (Leibniz’s and Kant’s understanding of “apperception”) while others enter our lives unconsciously (the sight of a particular color while we are ill, our mothers’ reactions to loud noises while we’re in the womb, and so forth). Although Leibniz referred to these latter experiences as “petite perceptions” and Kant said that they were of no account cognitively, I understand, to the contrary, that both types of experience are apperceptions. What binds all of these apperceptions together is long-term or episodic memory. The union of these apperceptions results in the notion of self we have (will, intelligence, and other components of the self are taken up in chap. 10). Thus Kant in my opinion does not resolve the rationalist vs. empiricist debate with regard to a priori knowledge but instead falls solidly on the side of rationalism.
Dark Matter of the Mind Page 6