External Conditions on Meaningfulness

Here's a quick argument against views according to which there are conditions external to the present individual that must be met in order for the individual's present thoughts to qualify as meaningful. (One such view is that language and thought are irreducibly social; another would be historical/'teleological' views according to which evolutionary history and natural 'function' are essential for meaningful thought.)

(1) I can know just by introspection that I have meaningful thoughts. (Cf. Descartes)

Reifying Possibilia

Sally could have had a child, but didn't. Does that mean that there is some possible child, of Sally's, who doesn't actually exist? Can we give him or her a name - 'Kim', say - and lament for Kim's own sake that s/he wasn't brought into existence?

I think such talk is metaphysically confused. But it can sometimes be useful to talk of mere possibilia (e.g. possible people), so long as we take care to understand what is really being said. Suppose that, if Sally had had a child, it would have had a wonderful, flourishing life. This modal fact might give us a reason to prefer that Sally had the child. We might express this in shorthand by saying, "Kim's welfare gives us reason to want Kim to exist". But we are not really talking about Sally's child Kim - there is no such person to talk about. Rather, we are talking about the world and how it could have turned out. It could have turned out that Sally had a child with a flourishing life, and this fact about the world gives us a reason to wish things had turned out that way.

Compare our talk of fictional characters: it is convenient to reify them, and talk "about" Frodo and Sauron and the rest. We can even say true things using such talk: e.g. Frodo destroyed Sauron's ring of power. This is a truth, not about what actually happened, but about the fiction. There is not really an entity, 'Frodo', and another, 'Sauron', such that the former destroyed the latter's ring of power. You can't reify intentional objects so. There aren't really any such people or things. But it is sometimes convenient to talk as if there were, since that can help us talk about particular features of the fiction.

In the same way, we can talk "about" possible people in this loose, 'de dicto' sense. But it's just words. It would be a mistake to reify them, or to think that there are some particular possible people (de re) of which we speak. Talk of possible people should instead be understood as shorthand for talking about particular features of a way the world could be -- i.e. such that more people exist than currently do.

This theoretical point has at least two important applications: (i) in understanding what's wrong with the ontological argument, and (ii) in seeing that possible people cannot really be the ultimate source of the (even non-instrumental) reasons to bring them into existence.* More on this in a future post...

* = [Of course, there isn't really any 'them' to refer to. So that should read: "reasons to bring it about that the world contains additional people."]

Defining into Existence

The ontological argument:

1. We can think of a greatest conceivable being – call it 'God'.
2. It is greater (qua being) to exist than not.
3. So for any being X to qualify as the greatest conceivable, X must exist.
4. So God [the greatest conceivable being] exists

The refutation:
Distinguish the properties things are conceived to have vs. those they really do have. (Santa is conceived to be a material person, made of flesh and blood, but in fact he's a mere figment of our imaginations.) When we think of the 'greatest conceivable being' in #1, is it actually great? Or merely conceived to be great? If the latter, then the premises are insufficient to establish the conclusion: it may be possible for us to conceive of some X as supremely great (existing) without it actually being so.

In other words: insofar as we can imagine the qualities of a supreme being, one of the things we imagine may indeed be that it exists ("according to the fiction", so to speak). This act of imagination is compatible with the being in question not actually existing -- and hence not actually qualifying as 'supreme'. It's one thing to be imagined as the greatest conceivable, and quite another to really be that way in fact. So, for the ontological argument to be valid, we would have to replace the first premise with:

1*: We can conceive of some being, 'God', and this being is in fact the greatest conceivable being.

But of course if we accept premise 2 then there's no reason at all to think that 1* is really true. There's no reason to think that any being actually possesses the qualities required to qualify as the greatest conceivable (which, after all, include necessary existence).

The ontological argument raises a lot of other interesting issues: whether existence is a predicate, whether it is a perfection, whether there is a unique set of qualities that would render a being insurpassably great, etc. But I think the above counterargument -- based on the distinction between the actual properties of a represented thing vs. the properties it is represented to have -- cuts to the core of the matter.

It's also worth noting that all I've done here is bring out the core insight that finds inchoate expression in the slogan, "You can't define God into existence." I recall there was a bit of a brouhaha a while ago as theists complained about Dawkins' so swiftly "dismissing" the ontological argument on these grounds. But it seems to me that Dawkins was exactly right. It's like Zeno's paradox. The argument is very obviously unsound -- sophistry, even -- and you don't have to be a philosopher to see this. The difficulty simply lies in pinpointing the error, and explaining it in a philosophically sophisticated way. Any old fool can recognize that there's an error there to be found (they even have a rough sense of what the error is).

Granted, the ontological argument is philosophically very rich, and rewards further discussion and exploration in the philosophy classroom. But that's not because there's any real question as to its soundness (as would be relevant to a popular book on the question whether God exists). It's simply because the mistakes - and the further questions it raises - are so subtle and interesting. It is, in short, of purely academic interest. (Not that there's anything wrong with that.)

Content as Possible Worlds

One argument for a possible-worlds analysis of content is that it helps us make sense of partial understanding, as found for example in children and animals (Stalnaker, Inquiry, p.65):

The child who says that his daddy is a doctor understands what he says, and knows it is true, to some extent, because he can divide a certain, perhaps limited, range of possibilities in the right way and locate the actual world on the right side of the line he draws. As his understanding of what it is for Daddy to be a doctor grows, his capacity will extend to a larger set of alternative possibilities or, rather, the extension of this capacity will be the growth of his understanding.

A second issue is that one may have a belief 'by default', so to speak, taking something for granted even if one has never explicitly thought about it -- and sometimes only because one has never thought about it, as Stalnaker insightfully notes (p.69):

With riddles and puzzles as well as with many more serious intellectual problems, often all one needs to see that a certain solution is correct is to think of it--to see it as one of the possibilities.

Stalnaker accounts for this as follows (pp.68-9):

Attitudes are primarily attitudes to possible states of the world and not to the propositions that distinguish between those states. A belief state can be represented as a set of possible worlds. Individual beliefs are properties of such a belief state: to believe that P is for the proposition that P to be true in all the possible worlds in the belief state. If one conceives of beliefs in this way, they look like something negative: to believe that P is simply to be in a belief state which lacks any possible world in which P is false.

Can these two challenges be met just as well without appeal to possible worlds?

Can something be bigger than everything?

Ah, fractals... the video eventually zooms in so far that the entire expanse of the image you started with would now be larger than the known universe. (Kind of like powers of ten, but more purely mathematical, and so even "bigger"!) Pretty cool.

There's some fun discussion at Metafilter [hat-tip: Dillon] about how it is that anything could be larger than the entire universe. In response, one comment offered a nice analogy to highlight the merely virtual nature of the fractal space: "If you play Doom 3, the environment is larger than your house. How can that be when the computer is INSIDE your house?" Clearly, the universe can contain representations as of something bigger than the universe actually is, but the representations themselves -- bits in a computer -- have a more modest reality.

Is it our natural tendency to confuse the ontological status of representing and represented things that makes the fractal video so awe-inspiring? After all, in itself the sequence of images seems nothing all that special. But if you interpret them in such a way as to feel almost drawn into contradiction, and led to ponder the mysteries of the universe, that's something else entirely. Then again, perhaps the provided hint of incoherence plays no crucial role here -- it may be enough simply to vividly represent astronomical scales, and let the dwarfing effect run its own course. What do you think?

From the Mailbag: Dream-Beliefs

Ian Olasov wrote in with an interesting response to my old post 'Truth in Dreams':

If I dream that Eli can fly, then (usually, and in at least one sense) in the dream I believe that Eli can fly. The question is: is the Eli about whom I have this dream-belief the Eli of the actual world (who exists and who does not fly), or is it of some other thing we might describe as a flying Eli (who does not exist in waking life, and who does fly)? I think that my dream is of both Eli and a flying Eli - they are, in the dream, one thing under two different descriptions. In the dream "Eli" and "flying Eli" co-refer, but in waking life they do not, because "flying Eli" doesn't refer at all. So to say that the belief is about the thing I am dreaming about does not cut any ice.

At any rate, if the object of the dream-belief "Eli can fly" is the Eli bearing all the properties he does in the actual world, then the belief is clearly false.

Also, I can be mistaken in my dreams in this way. While I am dreaming, I believe that I am encountering Murray. Now suppose that I awake to realize that I believed in the dream (as, we might suppose, I sometimes believe in waking life) that "Murray" refers to Merv, not Murray. In that case, my special dream-beliefs about Murray turn out to be false. My first-personal self was wrong.

Was my third-personal self wrong? Was my narrative subconscious, to speak floridly, falsely scripting or falsely interpreting the script of the dream so that Murray (the actual referent of "Murray") did such-and-such? No. There is no question whether the third-personal self is right or wrong. The third-personal self doesn't literally write a script, read it off, and create a visual depiction of how it interprets the text. There is no text, just dreamt experience. And if there is no text to be true or false, there is nothing for the dreamt experience to "truly" represent (or, at any rate, nothing "written" by the third-personal self). We might still be tempted to say that the experience itself is right or wrong, "veridical" or "falsidical". Now, I have always understood "veridical" when predicated of "experience", in something like the following way: "an experience is veridical iff, given a subject's cognitive make-up, the subject acquires only true beliefs from the experience" (there are many good objections to be made here, but this gets the gist of things). Are the dreamt experiences veridical? This, again, hinges on questions like the one I had above about the content of dream-beliefs. But those questions aside, I would point out in favor of dreamt experiences being falsidical that on waking from dreams, I often persist in believing that all of my dream-beliefs are true of the actual world, and it can take a minute or two to convince myself otherwise.

One way or another, I think it is false that the third-personal self is the "ultimate arbiter of what's true in the dream". The third-personal self does not say anything, and so does not issue any arbitrations one way or another. I'd say that the ultimate arbiters are at least two: (1) the phenomenal beliefs of the first-person self and (2) the authorial intuitions of the first-person self. The phenomenal beliefs of the first-person self are all true, at least if we constrict "phenomenal" appropriately. The authorial intuitions are true, given the qualifier below. Still, there remains the question what determines the non-phenomenal, non-first-person-legislated facts in the dream. I'd say that as long as the dreamt events are not events in which the first-person subject is being deceived, then whatever the subject believes is happening in the dream is actually happening in the dream. If it turns out that we can have unattended experiences in our dreams, then there will be further facts internal to the dream that I have not accounted for. Otherwise, I think I've covered all the bases.

Alternatively, non-first-person-legislated facts in the dream might all be phenomenal, in the sense of "phenomenal" in which our phenomenal judgments are indefeasible.

The qualifier about our authorial intuitions: I can believe in my dream that Bill is a cat, and realize on waking that I meant Gary, not Bill. We will have to qualify the indefeasibility of authorial intuition in some way such as

"if I believe in a dream that 'a' refers to b, then if I authorially intuit that F(a), it must be true in the dream that F(b)",

where "a" and "b" might co-refer, and F is an arbitrary property.

Categories:

• imagination
• mind
• semantics

Dreamt Ideas: not worth the paper they're not written on

Dreams are curious things. In them, it may seem that we are capable of many feats beyond our ordinary skill base -- flying, for example. Of course, we aren't really able to fly during the dream; the physical ability is merely imagined. But other kinds of dreamt abilities are not so naturally dismissed, especially cognitive abilities. To dream (or vividly imagine) that you perform an action is not really to perform the action; but to dream a thought or conscious experience would (at first glance) seem to entail actually having that thought or experience. If you dream about coming up with a brilliant new idea, upon waking the natural thing to do is to try and remember what exactly the idea was, right?

It seems incredible that one could dream about a non-existent idea in such detail as I sometimes do. How could one dream about reflecting on it and discussing it with others, if there never was any real "it" being discussed? Did the dreamt discussion not involve any specific words combined meaningfully into sentences? Perhaps not. At least, the specific snippets I remember from such dreams seem far less coherent when exposed to the unforgiving light of wakeful reflection. (Perhaps there really is an idea, which simply lacks the brilliance ascribed to it in the dream, but it's not entirely clear where to draw the line between jumbled incoherence and no idea at all.) I've previously suggested that dreaming is like a form of anosognosia, in which we're unaware of our cognitive deficits. It could seem like a dreamt "idea" or "discussion" is brilliant, simply because the lack of content evades our diminished awareness.

Compare Brandon's account of William James' experiments with nitrous oxide:

While on it, he had the intense conviction of having discovered the secret of the universe, the ultimate discovery that would revolutionize the way we look at the world. So he wrote it down. When he came out of the state induced by the gas, he found that all he had written down were a few puns.

(My favourite: "That sounds like nonsense, but it's pure onsense!")

Our initial puzzle may in part be due to the misleading common-sense picture of conscious experience as providing a kind of direct and infallible grasp of the "sense data" found inside our minds, on display in the Cartesian Theatre. On this view, one's total conscious experience simply consists in the direct appreciation of all the specific contents that are presented on this metaphorical stage. Hence, to dream a conversation, that conversation must really be taking place on your mental stage, for your mind's eye to observe. I don't know if anyone would explicitly endorse this view, but there's something intuitive about it, and this explains some of the pull that we (at least, I) initially feel towards the idea that dreamt ideas are real in a way that dreamt actions are not.

This idea is strongly undermined once we re-model our understanding of consciousness in terms of representation (rather than presentation). Representations can mislead in a way that direct presentations cannot, for there's a sense in which only the former can hide its component parts. On the presentation model of experience, as described above, we are aware of everything that's on stage. Each specific element is transparent to us. But if dreamt experience is merely a representation, then things are rather different. Representations can be fuzzy or incomplete; you can represent that Sherlock Holmes has hair, without there being any particular number of hairs that you thereby represent him as having. Likewise, you might dream that you have a conversation or idea, without there being any particular conversation or idea that you dreamt about. Rather than being built up from specific component contents (e.g. real words combined into meaningful sentences), the impression that is one's "total experience" might be irreducibly superficial. The appearance of richness and depth in dreamt experiences may be entirely illusory. The stage might be empty after all.

On an extreme form of this view, we might even be lead to the conclusion that we don't truly experience (e.g. visual) sensations whilst dreaming -- we merely think we do. I wouldn't want to go that far, though. I do think that dreams involve genuine phenomenally-conscious representations, it's just that the contents may misrepresent other elements of our awareness. A dream may involve the conscious representation that I'm aware of a great idea, when in fact there is no such idea that I'm aware of at that time. It's all an illusion. But just because there's nothing really on stage, doesn't mean that I don't have subjective experiences to the contrary. Again, it's just that the experience misrepresents itself as being deeper than it truly is.

Let's consider two opposing examples to finish up. First: dreamt fluency in a foreign language you don't really speak. I've heard such dreams may occur (though I haven't had one myself), but they obviously misrepresent the dreamer's actual thoughts, which cannot truly involve fluent sentences of the alien language. So that supports the above suggestions.

Here's a harder one: music. I often dream that I can compose/improvise incredibly beautiful piano music on the spot. Alas, this is not a skill that I possess in my waking life. But don't the vivid auditory experiences in these dreams arise from my imagination? Isn't my subconscious the composer of these spontaneous beauties? Hence, don't the dreams entail that I do, in some sense, possess the dreamt skill after all?

To apply my earlier response, we would have to assert that there is not actually any real tune, or sequence of specific tones, that I auditorily experience in these dreams. The stage is empty. I have a dream experience which represents there as being a beautiful tune; but in fact the details are never filled in, and in my diminished state of awareness I never notice the lack. Is this plausible? I find it extremely difficult to swallow, since the dreamt experiences sure seemed to have more depth than that -- a depth that I thought I apprehended. The appearance of vividness was very compelling, at least in the sense that I am initially no less inclined to trust it than any other memory about an episode whose specifics elude my recollection. (And - I say, clutching at straws - the reality of it would not be so impossible as in the foreign language case.) But, I admit, it is probably wishful thinking to resist the application to this case...

Categories:

• imagination
• consciousness
• mind
• aesthetics

What is illusion?

Here's an interesting (new-to-me) proposal implicit in a recent talk from Alex Byrne: illusions are when perceptual experience itself misrepresents reality (as opposed to when we draw false conclusions based on our experiences). This then gives rise to what we might call the illusion test: if misjudgments about X are not illusions, then X-judgments are not built into the content of experience itself.

Since all kinds of standard perceptual misjudgments -- say, mistakenly thinking that a facade in Fake Barn Country is a real barn -- are not really illusions, it follows that the contents of experience are rather more "thin" than sometimes supposed.* They involve basic things like colour, shape and length, but not such concepts as "barns" or the like. Your experience does not represent that there is a barn in front of you. It just represents the more basic visual qualities, and it gets all them quite right. The error comes later, when on the basis of this experience, you infer that there is a barn in front of you.

* = Byrne hence argues that the contents of experience have little to offer epistemologists. It's an interesting suggestion, but I won't discuss it further here.

Compare this to the Muller-Lyer illusion, where your experience (mis)represents that the two lines differ in length. The error is in the experience itself, rather than any further judgment. Indeed, the illusion persists even when you know the truth. Perceptual representations are hence informationally encapsulated from our reflective judgments or beliefs. The latter fail to correct the former. This might provide another argument for the "thinness" of perceptual content, since you probably will not continue to see the facade "as a barn" after learning the truth. Correcting the belief is enough. There's no enduring perceptual misrepresentation here.

These claims spell trouble for all sorts of proposed "thick" perceptions. Consider those who think that we "see" mental properties (e.g. another's happiness), or moral properties, etc. The illusion test flatly contradicts such proposals, since there is clearly no illusion involved in the relevant misjudgments (and nor do they persist after belief-updating). They go beyond the basic visual qualities presented in experience.

Categories:

• mind

Conscious Experience as Represented

What is it that we're aware of when we undergo visual experiences? It's natural to say that we're aware of the world. The red apple I see is on my desk, not in my head. But experiences themselves are surely in the head. The issue may be clarified by conceiving of experience in terms of representation. A book can be about things beyond the confines of its pages, and similarly for the conscious representations in our minds.

One of my experiences is a representation of an apple. I perceive the apple as being red: this is how it is represented in my experience. My mind represents the external world. I am introspectively aware of the content of the experience, i.e. the external world, and not the vehicle or representation itself. To attend to the "redness" in my visual experience, I direct my attention outward, to the apple. I cannot see into my own mind, even though that's where the event of my seeing occurs.

Our talk of conscious experience risks conflating two distinct objects: the qualities (properties) of the vehicular experience or representation itself, versus the qualities represented in the experience. It's plausible to think that we can access only the latter. For information to be available to us, it must be represented in our minds. There are facts about our minds that are not so represented, and so remain inaccessible to us. Thus cognitive psychologists surprise us by revealing how our minds really work.

This includes experience itself: there may be facts about it of which we remain unaware. This is plausibly true of the temporal properties of our experiences, for instance. It seems to me that I experience A before experiencing B, but in actual fact all I have access to is my mental representation as of "A followed by B". The representation need not be accurate: I might in fact have an experience [of B], followed by a later experience [of A], without being aware of this objective sequence at all. If the information isn't itself represented, then I cannot access it. Merely being true does not suffice. I don't really have a "mental eye" in my head to tell me what's going on in there, independently of what eventually enters into a conscious representation. Our introspective capabilities are hence severely limited.

So what are qualia (or the "qualitative character/properties" of experience)? The term is ambiguous. Some use it to denote those properties of which we are aware. When I feel pain in my foot, what I am aware of - what is represented in experience - is a property of my foot, say tissue damage. On this odd way of speaking, I can have a pain without feeling it, and I can feel painful hallucinations when there is no real pain (tissue damage).

The more relevant use of the term concerns the properties of our experiences ourselves (i.e. the vehicles, not the contents). Painful experiences have a particular phenomenal "feel" to them, and this is unaffected by whether or not they are veridical (in the sense of accurately reflecting one's bodily condition).

Curiously, we do seem to have infallible introspective access to this phenomenal property, of "what it is like" to have the experiences we do. My earlier remarks might be taken to imply that we must thereby represent this further fact of what it is like. But that would leave our phenomenal infallibility a mystery, since misrepresentations are always possible. Instead, I think, our access to the phenomenal feel must derive from the original contents themselves. The fact that I consciously represent [pain in my foot] entails that I have access to the represented contents. I can know that I represent [pain in my foot], because this content - [pain in my foot] - is consciously accessible to me. It is the content of which I am directly aware. And while the content itself might misrepresent (there might not really be anything wrong with my foot), there can be no mistaking my conscious access to the content, and it is the latter fact that constitutes phenomenal feel.

But enough of my untutored reflections on the philosophy of mind. It's quite a confusing area! Hopefully others will clarify matters further in the comments...

Categories:

• consciousness
• mind

Solipsizing the "irreducibly social"

It is sometimes claimed that central features of our lives -- such as (linguistic) meaning, or even consciousness! -- are "irreducibly social". This is typically accompanied with a wave in Wittgenstein's direction. But it seems to me that the possibility of solipsism suffices to refute such claims.

It's possible that, despite appearances to the contrary, no-one else actually exists besides myself. Then there would be no real "society". But even if it turns out that this bizarre scenario is actual, it doesn't change the fact that I'm certainly conscious and thinking (linguistically) meaningful thoughts. A lot of my beliefs would turn out to be false, of course. But various others would presumably still be true. And even for the false ones, I could imagine scenarios where they would turn out to be true, e.g. wherein the appearances were less deceiving and other people really did exist. So my beliefs have content. And I can express them in English sentences, which I know well enough how to assess. Given a full enough description of the world, I can determine which of my beliefs or sentences are true and which are false. That doesn't change if it turns out that I'm the only person in the world.

So all these claims about language (or any other survivors of the solipsistic possibility) being "irreducibly social" must be false. Long live methodological individualism!

Categories:

• mind
• semantics
• philosophy

Truth in Dreams

I recently dreamt that a friend of mine was -- despite all appearances to the contrary -- a cat. I don't recall the superficial events of the dream as providing any supporting evidence for this (I was surprised to learn that she had children, but they looked like baby owls, not kittens, so go figure). Nevertheless, I must insist that it was true in the dream that she was a cat. This raises the philosophically interesting question: how? What determines the "facts" internal to a dream?

It won't do to appeal to the simplest or most charitable interpretation of the sense data. In any remotely realistic possible world where events unfold largely as experienced in my dream, I am simply mistaken to believe my friend is a cat. She has every appearance of being human (well, until you factor in the avian offspring! But a revisionist might as well claim that I was mistaken to think the owls were truly her offspring, too.), and there is nothing in the dream -- apart from my firm belief -- to suggest that she is actually a cat instead.

Still, it seems to me, authorial intuition trumps all. Dreams don't have to be simple, sensible, or even consistent. If a dreamer intuits (with psychological certainty) that P, then P is true in the dream. As subconscious authors of our own dreams, we have a special authority and privileged access to their content. Appearances can be misleading, even in dreams, and dreamers may have "authorial intuitions" to inform them when this is the case.

This raises difficulties, because we must also recognize the possibility of being deceived within a dream. Here I think we must appeal to a sort of 'duality' to the dreamer's sense of self. This arises from the multiple roles we play in our dreams, as both authors and actors, third-personal narrators and first-personal characters.

(This strikes me as supported by phenomenology. It seems like I sometimes switch between third- and first-person perspectives while dreaming, going from spectator to participant and back again. I may know things as a spectator that cannot influence the actions of my 'character' -- perhaps due to a kind of compartmentalization, or perhaps due to my refusal as an "actor" to break from the "script".)

With this distinction in place, I want to say that our authorial, spectating, third-personal self is the ultimate arbiter of what's true in the dream. While in the first-personal mode, we might sometimes be deceived or mistaken about the internal facts of the dream. But even the participating dreamer can sometimes attain infallible insight into the dream-facts, by way of what I call "authorial intuitions". These are accompanied by a distinctive phenomenology, a feel that this is how things are, which allows the dreamer to recognize them as certain facts (within the dream). We might consider this a sort of communication between the two parts of the dreaming self, an exception to the "compartmentalization" posited above.

Does any of that sound even remotely plausible?

Categories:

• Imagination
• personhood
• semantics

What Behaviour is About

What Behaviour is About: ascribing intentionality to animals

Richard Chappell

Animal behaviour can appear strikingly intelligent and purposive at times, but what lies beneath this appearance? What are the reasons behind an animal’s actions? We commonly explain human behaviour by way of intentional[1] mental states, which represent the world as being a certain way. Humans act so as to achieve their goals. Can the same be said of non-human animals? Do they conceive of the world and act purposefully to achieve their goals, or are they mindless stimulus-response automatons? How can we tell? After clarifying what intentionality involves, I will examine experimental methods that allow us to make inferences about animal minds on the basis of their behaviour.

I will take means-ends reasoning to be the cornerstone of practical rationality. Thus the hallmark of agency is recognizing the link between some goal G and the behaviour B apt to achieve it. Behaviour can be goal-achieving even in the absence of such recognition. For example, ants remove decaying corpses from their nest, which achieves the biological goal of good hygiene. But the ants themselves have no conception of this goal. They merely respond to oleic acid, a chemical produced in the decay process. Bits of paper or even live nest-mates are similarly disposed of, if daubed with the chemical.[2] In this case, the ant is not the agent – it does not recognize the purpose of its own behaviour. Nevertheless, there is a genuine sense in which the ant behaviour is about removing dead nest-mates. After all, it’s no coincidence that ants remove corpses from their nests. Evolution selected for a behaviour to fill this functional role. The ‘agent’ here is natural selection, which ‘chose’ the behaviour precisely because it fulfils adaptive goals.[3]

Intentional explanations, like other causal explanations, can be illuminated via their counterfactual implications.[4] Intentional content can be fixed upon by determining what properties are ‘tracked’ by the organism’s behaviour through relevant possible worlds. Whereas an ‘actual-sequence’ explanation details how a particular event actually came about, a ‘robust-process’ explanation situates events in modal space.[5] It tells us what is common to all the close possible worlds in which the event occurs – explaining the occurrence of this act type rather than token. Taking a broad view, we may note that if oleic acid had not been a reliable corpse-indicator, ants would likely have evolved sensitivity to some other appropriate cue instead. Reliable detection and removal of decaying corpses is what remains constant across the various evolutionary scenarios we might imagine. So it isn’t merely metaphorical to say that this biological goal is the reason for the ant behaviour – it really does offer a robust explanation, at the phylogenetic level.[6] We can thus use it to fix intentional content (of a sort): when ants detect oleic acid, the function of this registration is to detect corpses; that is what it is about.[7] But this ‘biosemantic’ theory offers only a very weak form of intentionality, which doesn’t even require the organism to have a mind. So let’s move on now to considering intentional mental states.

First we must indicate existence conditions for mental states. I will adopt Sterelny’s suggestion that we think of cognition in terms of “flow of control”.[8] Mindless organisms exhibit a “straight-through” flow, with particular stimuli provoking invariant responses, unmediated by internal processing or feedback. Mental ascriptions are only warranted when organisms exhibit behavioural plasticity. Applying this rule to an organism’s registration of information, we may conclude that single-cued tracking does not involve representing the world.[9] Genuine possession of a concept X requires that one “abstracts away from the perceptual features that enable one to identify X’s.”[10] Single cued tracking leaves no room for identification of error – the organism has no other basis on which to identify the X-property. No matter how the acid-coated live ant might struggle as it is dragged from the nest, the other ants have no possible basis on which to revise their conception of the situation, because their ‘removal behaviour’ is triggered solely by the oleic acid cue. Indeed, given the inflexibility of their behaviour – the tight connection between stimulus and response – we have no reason to attribute mentality here at all.

So, to represent a property X, the organism must be capable of robust, multiple-cue tracking of this property. Otherwise it is incapable of identifying an X as such, distinct from the perceptual cue by which it detects it. This guideline may be fleshed out by appeal to the notion of a unified explanation. If we find that a particular behaviour occurs in a range of situations, we should want to unify these events under a single explanation. To achieve this, we look for something that all the situations have in common. In the ant case we have oleic acid. But other times there may be “no one sensory kind of stimulus”[11] common to all the situations. As such, we may need to look for higher-level explanations. Perhaps warning cries are elicited in situations across which the ‘lowest common denominator’ is that they contain evidence that a predator is nearby. If we can find no simpler way to unify these disparate environments, then this is probably how the cases are united for the animal itself.[12]

So far we have concentrated on animals’ discriminatory powers. Robust, multiple-cue tracking gives rise to representations, the content of which can be inferred from what is common to all the eliciting contexts. But this leaves open the crucial question of how the registered information contributes to the animal’s behaviour.

Genuinely purposive behaviour requires separation of the ‘indicative’ and ‘imperative’ functions of the intentional system.[13] This binary distinction lies at the core of folk psychology. Beliefs represent how the world is; desires, how we want it to be. Either alone is impotent: beliefs are motivationally inert; desires, blind. Our actions arise through utilizing information in pursuit of our goals. But many animals have no such distinction, instead showing a strict connection between information-registration and action. The ant does not distinguish between the indicative ‘here is a corpse’ and the imperative ‘get rid of it!’. This leaves no room for practical reasoning – which, recall, we are taking to be the hallmark of agency. An animal cannot think about how to achieve its goals unless it first represents these goals as distinct from the means by which it may achieve them. Fully-fledged beliefs are ‘decoupled’ from particular actions, providing a general-purpose “fuel for success” that can potentially influence a wide range of different behaviours.[14]

We have now developed our theory to the point where it can be put into practice. Two upshots from the above discussion bear highlighting. First, beliefs should be sensitive to a range of evidence, unlike brittle single-cued tracking systems. Thus, in addition to the ‘unified explanation’ strategy described earlier, we might also conduct experiments based on the idea that intelligent animals might learn to give less weight to cues they’ve recently found to be unreliable.[15] If, in robustly tracking some property X, an animal can pick up on some of its own discrimination errors and thereby learn to better discriminate Xs, then we can be fairly confident in ascribing the concept of X to the animal.[16] Suppose the ants had become suspicious of oleic acid after experimenters started splashing it over their live nest-mates. That is, the next time the ants came across a corpse, they instead checked for other signs of death before engaging in ‘removal behaviour’. Such flexibility would warrant attributing to the ants the concept of death.[17]

The second point to note is that beliefs should be utilized in pursuit of a wide range of goals, rather than being tightly coupled to some particular action only. So we might test whether animals can make use of previously acquired information in novel situations. Thus Allen and Hauser suggest that, if an animal A has previously recognized animal B as dead, then when A is later presented with a stimulus that would normally elicit a response directed at B, A should modify its response in light of its knowledge.[18] More generally, if an animal’s behaviour is sufficiently flexible and responsive to past experience, this constitutes evidence of representation.

The above provides a groundwork for ascribing beliefs. But desires too have their interpretative difficulties. Does the monkey give its warning call because it wants to inform the other monkeys of the leopard, or because it wants them to run into the trees, or from sheer instinct? Again, behavioural plasticity is key – first to establishing the voluntary status of a behaviour,[19] and then its intentional content. We can determine the content by setting up situations in which the various hypothesized goals are in conflict, and seeing which one the animal most reliably produces. For example, if we found that a monkey failed to give a warning call when it noticed that the only endangered animal was a personal rival,[20] then this would help illuminate the animal’s motivation in producing warning calls. It is also worth noting that the earlier suggestions regarding concept-fixation can similarly inform our goal-ascriptions, since one cannot represent a goal about X as such unless one has the concept of X.

As a general rule, cognition is reflected in behavioural plasticity. We can test this by varying the stimuli presented to an animal, and observing its subsequent responses. If the range of behaviour can be simply accounted for in terms of responses to sensory kinds of stimuli, then higher-level intentional explanations are unnecessary. On the other hand, if the animal engages in robust tracking which (1) can most simply be unified under an intentional explanation; and (2) is ‘decoupled’ and used to inform a wide range of behaviours; then we have grounds to consider it an intentional agent. Finally, we can test rival ascriptions by putting them into competition, and seeing which goal the animal seeks to realize. Thus a plausible methodology has been outlined for what might otherwise have seemed an impossible task: namely, making warranted inferences about animal minds based solely on their behaviour.

Bibliography

Allen, C. (1999) ‘Animal Concepts Revisited: The Use of Self Monitoring as an Empirical Approach’ http://grimpeur.tamu.edu/~colin/Papers/erk.html

Allen, C. & Hauser, M. (1991) ‘Concept attribution in non-human animals’ Philosophy of Science 58.

Bennett, J. (1983) ‘Cognitive ethology: Theory or poetry?’ Behavioral and Brain Sciences 6.

Bennett, J. (1991) ‘How to Read Minds in Behaviour’ in A. Whiten (ed.), Natural Theories of Mind. Oxford: B. Blackwell.

Dennett, D. (1987) The Intentional Stance. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Heyes, C. & Dickinson, A. (1990) ‘The intentionality of animal action’ Mind & Language 5.

Millikan, R. (1989) ‘Biosemantics’ Journal of Philosophy 86.

Roitblat, H. (1983) ‘Intentions and adaptations’ Behavioral and Brain Sciences 6.

Sterelny, K. (2001) ‘Basic Minds’ The Evolution of Agency and Other Essays. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Sterelny, K. (2003) Thought in a Hostile World. Malden, MA: Blackwell.

Terrace, H. (1983) ‘Nonhuman intentional systems’ Behavioral and Brain Sciences 6.

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[1] Throughout the essay I use the term ‘intentionality’ in its technical sense of ‘aboutness’. Intentional states need not be voluntary – comprehending this sentence will cause you to think about elephants, whether you want to or not. I will use the term ‘purposive’ in place of the common sense of ‘intentional’.

[2] Allen & Hauser, p.229.

[3] Dennett, pp.259, 299.

[4] Heyes & Dickinson, p.88.

[5] Sterelny, ‘Basic Minds’, p.207.

[6] The scope of the counterfactual is crucial here. Of course, on the individual level (and given their actual evolutionary history) ant ‘removal behaviour’ merely tracks oleic acid, not corpses. That is why we cannot attribute such rich intentional content to the individual ant, as we will see in the next paragraph.

[7] Cf. Millikan, p.290. I’m speaking rather loosely here. It might be more appropriate to say that what we are fixing here is the intentional content of the ant’s genetic information. But this provides an intentional explanation of the resulting behaviour in much the same way as mental explanations do, if on a somewhat different scale – cf. note 6 above.

[8] Sterelny, ‘Basic Minds’, p.206. I don’t mean to take this as a strict analysis of mentality. All we need for present purposes is a rough indication.

[9] Ibid., pp.210-211. Note that ‘single-cued tracking’ is when an organism detects an object or property (e.g. corpses) via a single cue only (e.g. oleic acid).

[10] Allen & Hauser, p.227.

[11] Bennett, ‘How to Read Minds in Behaviour’, p.102.

[12] Ibid. Instrumentalists about intentional explanation need not commit themselves to such a strong claim, however. In ‘Cognitive ethology: Theory or poetry?’, p.356, Bennett suggests that “if a teleological generalization does work for us – giving us classifications, comparisons, contrasts, patterns of prediction that mechanism does not easily provide – then that justifies us in employing it.”

[13] Millikan, pp.295-296.

[14] Sterelny, Thought in a Hostile World, pp.29-31.

[15] Allen & Hauser, p.232.

[16] Allen, ‘Animal Concepts Revisited’. But see note 17 below.

[17] Or some related concept, at least. Fixing the details is not so easy – perhaps they are instead looking for decay, or hygiene risks, or immobile ants, etc. Nevertheless, the problem should be empirically tractable using the methodologies previously outlined. We can rule out various proposals for X by noting that the organism must be capable of robustly discriminating Xs from non-Xs, and ideally demonstrate some capacity for learning to improve their discriminatory skills. Experimenting with enough diverse stimuli should (eventually) indicate what environmental properties the organism’s perceptual mechanisms are latching on to (i.e. ‘tracking’).

[18] Allen & Hauser, p. 232. They go on to apply this template to the specific case of infant distress calls in vervet monkeys, see p.233.

[19] Cf. Terrace, p.379: “To show that an organism wants to do X, it is necessary to show that there are comparable circumstances in which it elects not to do X.” See also Roitblat, p.375, who distinguishes “positive optionality” – that is, performing an action in the absence of the normal eliciting stimuli – from “negative optionality” – neglecting to perform the action in face of the normal stimuli.

[20] Terrace, p.379.

Decoupled Representation

I previously discussed Sterelny's distinction between single cued and robust (multiple cue) tracking. Robust tracking will be more accurate, flexible, and intelligent. But it might still be tied to particular behaviours. That's where "decoupled representations" come in. Genuine belief-like representations are 'decoupled' from particular actions, becoming much more general purpose. They can potentially influence a wide range of different behaviours.

Millikan, in 'Biosemantics', points out that human minds separate the 'indicative' and 'imperative' functions of their representational system. (Beliefs represent how the world is; desires, how we want it to be. Either by itself is impotent: beliefs are motivationally inert; desires, blind.) Many animals have no such separation. When ants detect the oleic acid of a decaying corpse, they inevitably carry it out of their nest. There is a strict connection between stimulus and response. We cannot separate the indicative representation (of the corpse) from the imperative (to get rid of it). These are not two distinct states within the ant's cognitive system.

Without decoupled representation, there is no separation between identification and action, stimulus and response. This in turn leaves no room for practical reasoning, i.e. cognition which relates means to desired ends, by way of conditional beliefs ("If I perform behaviour B, then I can achieve goal G"). The importance of this will become apparent in my next post.

Sterelny writes (Thought in a Hostile World, p.31):

True beliefs are a "fuel for success": they form an information store about the world that advantages the animal in many different actions, but they are not tied to specific behaviors.

Decoupled representation aids behavioural plasticity, but how does it tie in with the two types of flexibility previously mentioned (i.e. robust tracking and response breadth)?

I think decoupled representation is conceptually, but not practically, independent of robust tracking. Sterelny grants that single-cued tracking could in principle produce decoupled representations. However, he considers it unlikely in practice for such a combination to evolve, as single-cued tracking is relatively unreliable, which decoupled beliefs cannot afford to be.

The relation with response breadth is more interesting. Sterelny argues that "decoupled representation evolves as response breadth increases. It is nothing but very broad-banded response." (p.34) It isn't clear to me that they are the same thing. An animal might choose between a broad range of options on the basis of immediate, functionally-specific stimuli (thus demonstrating response breadth without decoupled representation). Conversely, an animal might utilize long-term memory and decoupled representation to make a binary decision (i.e. a relatively narrow response breadth). So again, I think we should hold decoupled representation to be conceptually distinct from response depth, even though they may be linked in more practical ways. Though I'm not certain I've understood him correctly, I think Sterelny's main point here is that decoupled representations will help an animal to make successful choices, when faced with a broad range of possible responses. So they'll tend to go together -- but this is an empirical rather than conceptual truth.

Flexible Content

In this post I want to explore the relationship between plasticity and intentional content. Intentional explanations are a form of causal explanation (we're claiming that those mental states caused that behaviour), and as such commit us to certain modal claims, (different mental states would have led to different behaviour). We can thus use counterfactuals to illuminate our ascriptions of intentionality.

The distinction between robust-process and actual-sequence explanations is especially helpful here. To quote Kim Sterelny ('Basic Minds', pp.207-208):

Distinct explanations of the same event can both be important, for they can convey distinct breeds of modal information. In earlier work I have used the origins of World War I to illustrate this idea. This time, I illustrate it through a more significant conflict, Australia's victory over England in the 1974-5 cricket tests. One explanation of this victory would walk us through a play-by-play description of the tests, detailing each dismissal, run by run and out by out. An alternative would appeal to the strengths and weaknesses of the opposing sides: in particular, Australia's strengths in fast bowling and fielding. These two explanations do not conflict, and each is of value. The play-by-play explanation is an actual-sequence explanation, for it identifies the particular possible world that we inhabit. But if it is true that Australia in that series was much the stronger side, we could know the precise sequence of plays without knowing something very important. Namely, had Australia not won that way, they would have won in another and similar way, with the fast bowlers taking most of the wickets, often to spectacular behind the wicket catches. A robust-process explanation compares our world to others. It identifies an important class of counter-factuals. It identifies the feature characteristic of the worlds in which Australia triumphed in the series.

Sterelny continues: "When representations are causally relevant, they will be relevant as part of robust-process explanations of behaviour." Thus he thinks the key question, when attempting intentional explanations of animal behaviour, is to ask: what tracks the possible worlds in which this behaviour occurs? With basic "reflex-like organisms", the answer will be some simple sensory cues. For example, ants identify corpses to drag out of their nest by the oleic acid produced by the decaying process. Apply this chemical to a live ant, and nestmates will carry it away, despite its lively struggles! The behaviour is dominated by the stimulus, rather than mediated by a more flexible internal representation (which we may assume would be open to contrary evidence, recognizing that real corpses don't struggle, etc.).

So Sterelny insists that "robust tracking", i.e. using multiple cues to identify a property, is a necessary condition for genuine representation. Ants don't have any mental representations of death or corpses, they merely react to the stimulus of oleic acid in their environment. Allen and Hauser, in their 'Concept Attribution in Nonhuman Animals', similarly hold that to have a concept of X, "[o]ne must have a representation of X that abstracts away from the perceptual features that enable one to identify X's." Because the chemical signal is generally reliable, ants are able to identify dead nestmates. But because of the inflexibility of this single-cue tracking, we should say that the ants to not recognize the corpses as dead. They have no concept of death -- no "internal representation of death that is distinct from the perceptual information that is used as evidence for death."

Building on this foundation, Allen and Hauser go on to propose two general empirical tests to detect animal concepts. First, their behaviour must be sufficiently flexible, using multiple cues to form decoupled representations which in turn impact upon a wide variety of behaviours. Second, animals should be able to revise "what they take as evidence for an instance of that concept" -- giving less weight to cues that they've recently found to be unreliable. If ants had a concept of death, they should have become suspicious of oleic acid after experimenters started splashing it over their live nestmates. The next time they detected it, they should have checked for some other signs of death before starting the funeral march. That's what creatures with concepts would do.

I'm not entirely sure what to make of all this. It seems possible to simply respond to inflexibility by saying that ants have brittle detection mechanisms which mean we can manipulate them into having false "beliefs". Just spray some oleic acid, and ants will think the target is a corpse! It will always be logically possible to save an intentional explanation by insisting that the creature's representations are simply false, unreliable, or impervious to contrary evidence. So it seems we will need to appeal to some sort of simplicity principle, and refuse to accept ad hoc intentional ascriptions unless the evidence clearly warrants it.

J. Bennett too, in 'How to Read Minds in Behaviour', appeals to a form of plasticity. If we find an animal behaving similarly (e.g. giving warning cries) in response to a wide variety of diverse stimuli, we should want to unify this behaviour under a single explanation. He writes:

Even if no one sensory kind of stimulus is shared by all the episodes... they may have something in common that lets us generalize across them, namely the fact that each of them provides evidence to the animal that there is a predator nearby. If they share that, and there is no more economical way of bringing them under a single generalization, that gives us evidence that the episodes are united in that way for the animal itself. That is tantamount to saying that in each episode the animal thinks there is a predator nearby... We get at belief content through what is perceived as common to all the environments in which the behaviour occurs. [bold added]

Then again, even if we grant that the ants do not represent death, why not say that they represent the presence of oleic acid? After all, that is what's "common to all the environments in which the behaviour occurs". I guess it's the simplicity argument again: postulating a mental representation here is unnecessary, and adds nothing to our explanations. Further, there is the principled objection that the stimulus exhibits 'tyranny' over behaviour, which indicates a lack of internal cognitive processing.

Heyes and Dickinson utilize many of the ideas discussed above in 'The intentionality of animal action'. If an action is caused by a belief-desire pair, then we may suppose that the action would not have occurred had either of those mental states been lacking. This generates two critera for intentional ascriptions. The belief criterion requires that "[t]he behaviour must be sensitive to whether or not environmental contingencies will support a belief with the appropriate causal content." The kicking and screaming ants did not support the belief that they were corpses, so we shouldn't attribute any such belief to the manipulated nestmates. (Heyes and Dickenson concede that creatures aren't always perfectly rational, but we need to assume something like it for practical reasons. Otherwise we'd have no basis at all on which to ascribe mental content. We need there to be a reliable connection between mental content and behaviour.) Their desire criterion is that "the performance of the action adjusts appropriately to manipulations designed to alter the desire for the outcome." But they grant that this is especially difficult to manipulate in any controlled way (i.e. without causing further, unintended consequences).

I actually don't think the Heyes and Dickinson criteria are especially helpful. Suppose a creature tracked a functional property (say, food) via multiple cues, which were generally quite reliable, but there was some further cue that they were incapable of detecting. We might trick them using a dummy which presented all the former cues and lacked only the latter -- which (suppose) strikes us as a very crucial and obvious cue, the lack of which would "clearly" mean the belief is unsupported. Here it seems a mistake to say the animal lacked beliefs about the functional property. The fact that it was robustly tracked by multiple cues seems sufficient -- the belief doesn't have to be absolutely foolproof. Judgments of whether some situation "supports" the belief or not is surely relative to the discriminatory abilities of the creatures involved. What beliefs are reasonable for a blind man might not be so reasonable for a sighted person to hold in that same environment.

But then, what if the ants are simply "blind" to the struggles of the pseudo-corpse? The movements impact upon their senses, sure, but if their perceptual systems don't pick up on this as relevant, passing the information along to "central cognition" (if such exists in ants), then isn't this equivalent in principle to simple blindness? If the presence of oleic acid is the only relevant environmental datum that the ant is capable of fully perceiving, can we still hold that a belief about the "corpse" is "unsupported" by the environmental contingencies? Here I find Allen's ideas in 'Mental Content' helpful: he points out that's it's fine for individuals to make the odd mistake, or to occasionally fail to distinguish between two properties (e.g. being dead, and being marked with oleic acid) -- humans do it all the time (e.g. gold vs. "fools gold"). But if one was entirely incapable of making the distinction, in any possible circumstances, then one does not have the concepts. Ants cannot possibly identify corpses independently of oleic acid, therefore they have no concept of death as distinct from the perceptual information they use as evidence for it.

Intentional Communication

Foreword: 'Intentionality' means something quite different in philosopher-speak than it does in common English usage. 'Intentional' mental states are ones that are about something else. Beliefs, desires, etc., are all directed at things. That's what I mean by 'intentional' in this context. (But note that I use the word 'intend' in its usual sense.) Second-order intentional states are ones that are about (or directed at) some other intentional state. So if I have a belief about what you're thinking (about), then my belief is a second-order intentional state. Similarly, third-order intentional states are about second-order ones, and so forth. Now, I want to explain why genuine communication requires at least third-order intentionality.

Suppose my little brother intends for me to jump. He might (and sometimes does) achieve this by sneaking up behind me and yelling "Boo!". But that's not communication, in the fullest sense of the word. It would be quite a different sort of action were he to instead request of me, "please jump." (I don't think he'd find that nearly so fun, for one thing.) Such a speech-act would show not only that he intends me to jump, but also that he intends for me to recognize that he wants me to jump.

Purposive communication requires an intentional state of at least third-order complexity. The speaker wants his audience to recognize what the speaker intends by his utterance. Put another way, you don't just communicate 'X', you rather communicate, "I am trying to convey 'X'". (This is the difference between discreetly insulting someone, or making it clear to him that you want him to know you're insulting him.) Anything less would fail to qualify as 'communication', in the fullest sense of the word.

Note that genuine communication is thus sufficiently complex to allow for deception. Deception occurs when the utterer intends his audience to mistake what he truly intends. If my brother is choosing between two slices of cake, with the larger on the right, I might say "the one on the left sure looks good," intending for my brother to falsely believe that I want the left slice (thus tempting him to choose it himself).

Full deception, so defined, requires at least three orders (count and see). More simple trickery can be obtained with merely second-order intentions though, e.g. if I intend for you to believe something false about the world.

Where am I going with all this? Well, I think it's quite interesting in itself. But also, it could potentially help us to ascribe intentional states to animals -- e.g. if we observed deceptive behaviour in animals (of a sufficient complexity to rule out simple stimulus-response explanations).

One final note: second-order intentionality requires one to have a theory of mind. You can't really intend to implant false beliefs unless you have the concept of 'belief' to begin with. And it's pretty controversial whether any non-human animals have a theory of mind. So skeptics are going to be even more reluctant to ascribe full-blown communicative or deceptive intentions to animals. Ah well, interesting stuff nonetheless.

Update: a further thought: it seems like there's something a bit more humble about the higher-order intentions of genuine communication. Suppose I want to inform you that it's raining outside. A second-order description might say that I intend for you to believe that it's raining outside. But I could achieve this through coercively brainwashing you, for example. Genuine communication doesn't allow for such brainwashing -- that's not what it's about. When I say to you: "It's raining outside," I rather intend for you to recognize that I believe it's raining outside, or something like that. It's more indirect, and it's up to you to do with the information what you will. Once you've recognized my communicative purposes, my job is done -- I don't have any further desire to force you to accept the information. Brainwashing you wouldn't achieve my goals here at all.

The Content of Representation

It can be really difficult to know how to interpret the meaning of a representation. Consider again my example of the mouse who scurries away from hawk-shaped objects. Let's suppose the mouse's behaviour here involves some significant cognitive processing, which includes matching up perceptual data against his internal hawk-shape "search image". How should we interpret this search image? Does it represent hawks, or predatory birds, or something to scurry away from, or merely such and such a shape?

Suppose I create a hawk-shaped cardboard cutout, and hold it up above a mouse, which promptly scurries away upon noticing it. There are (at least) two interpretations of the mouse's cognitive processing: (1) It formed a false belief-like representation that there is a hawk; or (2) It formed a true belief-like representation that there is a hawk-shape. (This might then combine with the false belief that the hawk-shape posed a danger and so should be scurried away from.) How are we to pick between these two rival hypotheses?

Two strategies spring to mind. On what we might call the teleological account, we appeal to the idea that the mouse's internal search image has a specific biological function that led it to be selected for in the evolutionary history of mice. The intentional content of the representation is fixed by this biological function. That function, let us suppose, was to identify hawks. So the mouse's search image represents hawks, and my cutout tricked the mouse into forming a false representation. That is, interpretation (1).

Alternatively, we might prefer an instrumental account, according to which the content of a representation is fixed more holistically, by its place in our best (most predictive) theory of the agent's entire intentional set (i.e. all its beliefs, desires, etc.). The information given so far is simply insufficient to establish a fixed content for the hawkish representation. But if it turned out that our best holistic theory of the mouse's mind ascribed only content about hawk-shapes, and not about hawks per se, then that would yield interpretation (2). (That's a big "if" -- we might just as well end up with an entirely different interpretation. It all depends on the details of the 'big picture'.)

This problem arises for languages too. To adopt an example presented in (a different) class, imagine two humanoid species, called "Hubots" and "Rumans". They live in a land where yellowish metal is scattered about, which both species call "golper", and is their staple food. But suppose it turns out that this metal is not one common substance after all. Instead, half of the metallic clumps are actually gold, and the other half are copper. Further, it is only the gold that has nutritious benefits for hubots, and only copper is nutritious for rumans. Here's the question: What does the word "golper" mean? (Does it mean different things for hubots and rumans?)

On the teleological account, we're led to conclude that "golper" means gold in hubot-speak, but copper in ruman-talk. Assuming that they're two distinct linguistic communities, we can take the word 'golper' in each case to mean something like "that nutritious yellowish metal which feeds and sustains us" -- a description that picks out different substances for the two communities.

Alternatively, on an instrumentalist account we might instead say that "golper" is more broadly defined to include both gold and copper. This would be especially plausible if there was much communication between the two species. If they formed a gathering party to go out and find "golper" together, then they understood themselves to be gathering the same thing. It seems odd to claim that they're mistaken about this. Even worse, suppose a hubot holds up some yellow metal and proclaims triumphantly, "I have golper!", to which a ruman replies, "Yes, you have golper." It would seem exceedingly odd to say that their two statements have different truth values!

One way to understand the instrumentalist method is to see it as applying a Davidsonian 'principle of charity', interpreting representational content in such a way as to make most of the agent's beliefs come out true. I think Dennett too talks about the "assumption of rationality" that accompanies adoption of the intentional stance. (I need to read more about that though.)

A seemingly easy way to resolve the problem would be to go up to the hubots and rumans, and explain the gold/copper situation to them, in neutral terms. Then ask: "So, given these facts, what do you take the word 'golper' to refer to?" Let them decide whether it means just one of gold or copper, or whether it's the disjunction of the two. If there's a clear consensus as to the answer, then it seems that fixes the objective truth of the matter in a more principled fashion than instrumentalist interpretations do.

Unfortunately, we can't converse with animals, so this simple solution isn't going to work there. So how are we to determine the contents of their mental representations? Should we go with teleology, or instrumentalism, or is there some other alternative?

Innate Information and Behaviour

Suppose that mice will scurry away whenever they perceive a hawk-shaped shadow. It seems that there are two possible ways of interpreting such behaviour (even without appeal to cognitively 'rich' conscious states such as "oh, yikes, a hawk! Better run!"). We might consider it an innate behaviour, i.e. a hardwired response to the hawk-shaped simulus. Alternatively, we might say that the behaviour arose from innate information, coded into mouse genes over generations of natural selection. Now, I'm wondering whether these two explanations really are distinct, and if so, what the difference is.

It seems to me that the latter is merely a 'cognitive' interpretation of the former explanation. Both agree that the mouse is exhibiting an automatic behaviour, caused by some form of simple stimulus-response mechanism. It's just that the latter explanation interprets this mechanism as a kind of information-processing device. It takes in sensory input, compares it against some innate hawk-shaped 'template' or 'search image', and outputs the instruction to engage in scurrying behaviour.

On the other hand, I'm not sure we want to say that whatever can be interpreted as an information processor therefore is one. For it seems a similar analysis would apply to mousetraps. (They detect the information that weight is being applied to the trigger, and output "instructions" to spring the trap.) But we presumably wouldn't really want to say that mousetraps are cognitive systems, would we?

Perhaps we could draw the line based on how much internal processing of the information really occurs. If there is a more or less direct connection between 'input' and 'output', as in the mousetrap, we can deny that any real processing of information has occured. If the mouse's scurrying behaviour was similarly direct, then we might deny that the cognitive interpretation applied, instead insisting that only the 'innate behaviour' description was appropriate. However, if we found that a fair bit of internal processing had to occur in order to identify the stimulus and match it up to the response, then we might say that the behaviour explanation is too superficial, and that it's more appropriate to opt for the cognitive explanation in such cases.

Does that sound plausible? Can you think of any alternative responses to this problem? (Any suggestions would be much appreciated!)

I'll finish up with a neat example of innateness that came up in class:

In normal populations, female sticklebacks are disposed to produce courtship responses to stimuli which carry the information ‘red below’. Isolation experiments show that this response pattern develops in females independently of any opportunities they have for learning that sexually mature male sticklebacks have red bellies. Mayr reports that in one stream system on the Olympic Peninsula, there is a population of jet black sticklebacks. The population evolved from red to black bellies about 8000 years ago, in response to local predatory pressures. For the last 8000 years, the Olympic females have been courted by and have mated with black males. Mayr reports the following remarkable fact: “when given a free choice between a black and a red-bellied male, (the black female) chose the red male five out of six times after 8000 years of ‘habituation’ to black males!” (Ernst Mayr 1974).

In other words, the Olympic sticklebacks retained innate information that hadn't been used in their lineage for 8000 years -- what a memory! (The 'innate behaviour' interpretation doesn't sound quite so impressive, for some reason.)

Update: Lorenz argues that only information (not behaviour) can be innate, on conceptual grounds. So I take it they aren't two distinct empirical theories after all. Rather, the claim is that the 'innate behaviour' explanation is simply incoherent. Behaviour always depends upon environmental contingencies. Genetic information is the only thing about an organism that is truly innate.