Intellectualism Refuted (Part VII: Beyond Belief)

Gareth Evans (1982) argues that perception is belief-independent and in order to substantiate this claim he cites the well known example of the  Müller-Lyer optical illusion. He points out that despite any justified beliefs we may have about the actual lengths of the lines:  "[i]t will continue to appear to us as though, say, one line is longer than the other even when we are quite sure that it is not." Kelly (1998) endorses Evan's anti-intellectualist view that beliefs have no impact on our perceptions:

"Because perceptions are not subject to the canonical norms of rationality, then - because they are not, in other words, "rationally revisable" - they do not stand within the web of inferential relations that constitutes our beliefs, and ought not to be explained in terms of them."

For Kelly this web of inferential relations enables us to form beliefs, to make judgements and to infer conclusions. Despite the fact that there is no evidence to challenge this  conclusion, it remains a commonplace amongst philosophers to talk of "perceptual judgements" as if they are independent of "canonical norms of rationality." Evans is clear on this point. For him, judgement is connected with reasons and reasons are conceptual. If we are to avoid explaining perception by reference to "inferential relations" and "canonical norms of rationality" —of reasons— then something less extravagant than judgement is required.

We already have a candidate in Brook's theory of perception as a capacity to represent the things with which the  perceiver is engaged. In order to explore this conjecture it will be helpful to examine some frequently overlooked but nonetheless revealing anthropological research.

In one of the largest studies of its kind, Segal et al (1966) oversaw a global survey of cross cultural variations in susceptibility to optical illusions. The researchers found significant variance between differing communities and age groups. For example, some groups reported no difference between the lengths of the lines of the Müller-Lyer diagram. An earlier study by Hudson (1960), of culturally isolated South African children, encountered very similar findings. Both studies attributed the results to a lack of habitual exposure to pictures amongst the communities studied, and Hudson dubbed this: "pictorial illiteracy." In fact, even children well schooled in language and arithmetic skills (but lacking pictorial literacy) were not susceptible to what is commonly described as the "pictorial illusion of depth" and were therefore unsusceptible to the simulated spatial depth that many optical illusions exploit.

McCauley and Henrich (2006) write:

"For those who experience it, the illusion may persist, but susceptibility to the Müller-Lyer illusion is neither uniform nor universal. Moreover, a plausible argument can be made that through most of our species’ history most human beings were probably not susceptible to the illusion."

If this is true, and corroborating evidence can be provided from the art historical record as well as other sources (Deutscher 2010), then we have very good reason to suppose that our skills in the use of depictions are significantly implicated in the perplexities of such optical illusions. So, the conflicting responses we have when faced with the Müller-Lyer diagram are simply explained by the fact that we are disposed to represent the diagram in two different ways. We can treat the lines as a simulation of spatial depth or else we can treat them as two lines of equal length. No judgement need be imputed.

If the capacity to derive depth-cues from perspectival images is culturally acquired and is not an immediately available part of our genetically inherited perceptual repertoire then we have very good reason to suppose not only that perception is belief independent, as Evans claimed, but that perception is both non-conceptual and non-depictive. Language and depiction are skills that have developed through cultural evolution and both take time and practice to acquire. The capacity to imitate the behaviour of others on the other hand—to produce rudimentary versions of what Brook (1997) calls "Matching” representations—is an inherited skill upon which all of our more sophisticated communicative capacities supervene.

In Part VIII I will explore Kelly’s claim (pace Evans) that “Perceptual content is, sometimes at least, irreducibly articulated in terms of dispositions by the perceiver to act upon the object being perceived.” In doing so, I aim to explain how this gives strong support to the thesis that perception is fundamentally a communicative capacity: “a disposition to act” in representational terms “on [or with] the object being perceived.”

Intellectualism Refuted (Part VI: Do Animals Have Beliefs?)

"When we first begin to believe anything, what we believe is not a single proposition, it is a whole system of propositions. (Light dawns gradually over the whole.)" —Ludwig Wittgenstein

When Kelly (1998) examines Evans' suggestion that belief is a "sophisticated cognitive state: one that is connected with... the notion of judgement, and so, also, connected with the notion of reasons" he finds this "intuition" insufficiently threatening to would-be intellectualists. According to Kelly this allows intellectualists to maintain either that animal beliefs and perception are sophisticated conceptual states or else that animals have no beliefs because their perceptual states are non-conceptual whereas human perceptual states—or so the intellectualists might insist—are conceptual. Kelly makes a valid point, but I think Evans' intuition deserves closer consideration.

Any principled theory of perception must be consistent with an evolutionary account of the emergence of intelligent behaviours and as such it must be committed to a sparing view of the development of  conceptual capacities like beliefs. Evans was evidently wary of assuming that "sophisticated cognitive states" precede skills of concept formation. But perhaps what he most needed in order to substantiate this intuition was a theory of how conceptual skills might have evolved from other more commonly observable non-conceptual capacities. One possible component of such a theory can be discerned in the notion of demonstratives to which Evans also turns his attention. I will examine demonstratives later, with the intention of explaining how such utterances as "this," "that" and "here" gain their efficacy not as "demonstrative concepts", as some have argued (McDowell 1994, Loar 1997), but as conceptualisations of what are in fact non-conceptual skills of representation. For the moment though, it will suffice to say that skills of nonverbal representation (mimicry in particular) deserve to be considered as plausible precursors to sophisticated forms of symbolic communication and concept formation that would be impossible, or so I claim, without these prior capacities to produce, select and use non-conceptual (nonverbal) forms of representation.

Since the publication of Evans' book in 1982, the question of animal concepts has been the subject of widespread research. In 1994 Chater and Heyes undertook a meta analysis of the then extant research and found that: "[T]he idea of a concept has not been successfully decoupled from natural language, and hence there is currently no coherent account of what animal concepts might be." Since this time, no further evidence of animal concepts has come to light, and whilst it may be premature to suspend all enquiries, it appears that the assumption that animal capacities are intrinsically conceptual lacks substantive empirical grounds. Analytically speaking, the picture is little better. In 1982 — two years after Evans' death—Donald Davidson, whose work had a profound influence on Evans, published a widely cited essay, "Rational Animals," in which he argues that: "[I]n order to have a belief, it is necessary to have the concept of belief...[and]... in order to have the concept of belief one must have language." Like Wittgenstein (and perhaps Evans also), Davidson considered belief to be part of a system of propositions — the idea being that beliefs and rationality in general are acquired social traits.

It seems likely that Evans was motivated by similar considerations as those expressed by Davidson which suggests that his position was more substantive than Kelly gives him credit for. Nonetheless "Varieties of Reference" makes no mention of this reasoning and it is understandable therefore that Kelly finds the arguments unpersuasive. He is also right to point out that, in the face of a challenge to the supposed conceptual foundations of animal perception, intellectualists might simply insist that human perception is uniquely conceptual. Evans had an answer to this claim that I will explore next.

Intellectualism Refuted (Part V: Communicative Action Minus The Movement)

“A child who had never manifested in words, gestures, or play the working out of simple problems could not be said to work them out ‘in his mind’, any more than he could be said to know ‘in his mind’ the names of colours, if he was unable to say their names, or to point or to fetch the right colours when their names were called out. Thinking in ones mind (silent thinking, pausing to think) is not the most fundamental form of thinking, but instead presupposes thinking in play, work, or words.”

This passage from Norman Malcolm's 1977 essay "Thinking", emphasises the idea that mindedness is the consequence of skills acquired through active engagement with the world. Tempting as it is to conceive of the mind as a limitless inner workshop or skill-space for the ingenious generation of new capabilities, it is far better understood simply as a necessary component in all intelligent behaviour. But if this is so, then how is it possible for minded states to be executable independent of the actions of which they are necessarily part? As explained previously, intentional action is plausibly explained without reference to prior acts of predictive contemplation. In which case visualisation, anticipation, envisaging etc. are not prerequisites of intention or action. As Malcolm remarks: "Thinking in one's mind is not the most fundamental form of thinking." But, if we can act intentionally with no necessary antecedent acts of envisaging, then what is this more sophisticated form of thinking? How was it possible for mindedness to become stripped of its corresponding actions?

 "Thinking is movement confined to the brain." —Oleh Hornykiewicz

Working independently (in Australia and New Zealand), Donald Brook and Derek Melser have arrived at substantially the same conclusion on this question. Mindedness, they claim, develops as a result of learned competences in the social exchange of representations, i.e. communication. Such communication could include imitation, gestures, vocalisations, enactments and in our case: language. Mind is an inextricable feature of all communicative action, but some minded creatures—most notably humans—have become capable of inhibiting the movements that normally accompany action*. Mindedness then, is communicative action minus the movement.

This conclusion is well supported by evidence from developmental psychology. Early in the 20th Century, psychologists like Jean Piaget and Lev Vygotsky were the first to document commonly occurring patterns of language development in young children. They noted that preschool children pass through several phases of representationally directed action, beginning with imitation and then passing to "abbreviated demonstration," "speech-punctuated gesturing," "solitary speech" and finally "internalised speech." Something similar has also been observed in historical accounts of reading. According to Alberto Manguel (1996) the practice of "silent reading" was very uncommon until around the 10th Century. Prior to this time, reading was almost exclusively performed "out loud" and many wealthy readers even went so far as commissioning special reading rooms to which they could withdraw in order to read out their private correspondence etc.

These examples of internalised speech and silent reading underline the vital relation between the world involving skills of representation and their constitutive role in mindedness. The idea that it might be possible to read silently without first reading out loud or to plan one's actions "in one's mind" without first learning to intelligently negotiate obstacles, is not only a misunderstanding of the nature of skill and skill acquisition but a widespread misconception that continues to be a major source of confusion and philosophical argument.

In the next section I will explore the contention, attributed to Evans by Kelly (1998), that "perceptual content is belief-independent." Once again Evans' provides little in the way of evidence or argument, so the support for this view will have to be drawn from elsewhere. Nonetheless, there are  strong grounds for endorsing Evans' view that perception is belief independent.

*There is widespread evidence that many social animal infants engage in displays of mock aggression in which acts of biting etc. are only partially engaged. Such restrained displays presuppose the capacity for unrestrained aggression. Similarly, many higher apes engage in abbreviated gestures that are sufficient to elicit the same responses from conspecifics as would be expected from unabbreviated gestures.

Intellectualism Refuted (Part IV: Unanticipated Intention)

"Theories of mental content attempt to solve what is often referred to as Brentano's problem: the problem of explaining intentionality, explaining how mental states can be about things or be directed on to things in this way." —Karen Neander 2012

Previously I discussed the problems that arise as a consequence of conceiving of brains as representation containers as opposed to evolved organs of embodied response. I also raised some related objections to the notion of aboutness that many theorists claim is fundamental to the explanation of intentionality. My contention is that representations can only possess aboutness by virtue of their participation within an already intentionally directed system of rules. Without a rule to govern its use, even the most basic symbol is incapable of standing-in for anything (Bickhard and Turveen 1995, Bickhard 2004). If this is so, then the problem of explaining intentionality, raised by Neander in the above quote, runs into severe difficulties. Furthermore, if an inner representation is required to initiate an intentional action then this representation must itself be either intentional or unintentional. If it is intentional then it is a necessary condition that it also be initiated by another intentional representation and so on ad infinitum. If, on the other hand, the initiating representation is unintentional then the resultant behaviour cannot be intentional. I conclude therefore that inner representations are logically incapable of underwriting any form of intentional action — human or animal.

So, how can we answer "Brentano's problem" whilst avoiding the perils of infinite regress? In his “Philosophical Investigations,” (1953) Wittgenstein writes: "When people talk about the possibility of foreknowledge of the future they always forget the fact of the prediction of one's own voluntary movements.” Wittgenstein was concerned here with the question of why we are not surprised by our own voluntary movements. Despite the fact that we need not envisage any movement of our body prior to actually moving, we are invariably unsurprised by the outcome. As Wittgenstein suggested, and Gilbert Ryle (1949) further explored, where such voluntary actions are concerned, the action and its anticipation are one and the same thing. In other words, enacting a learned action is in itself predictive of the action's unfolding and therefore no prior act of contemplation is necessary for the behavior to qualify as being intentional. The learned capacity to do something presupposes its outcome. Another way of putting this would be to conceive of kinaesthetic learning (the learning of movements) as the acquisition of dispositions to move in certain ways in certain circumstances. These acquired dispositions are then capable of underwriting future intentional behaviour of the same kind.

If the above is correct, then there may be grounds to suppose that animals are capable of intentional action. Any questions we might have concerning anticipation and mindedness will have to wait until the next post, but what of perception? Was Gareth Evans correct in his intuition that humans and animals share certain perceptual characteristics? Gilbert Ryle (1949) argued that perception is less an action or procedure than an "achievement," and as Derek Melser (2009) remarks: "achievements necessarily imply prior active strivings." Melser contends that perception is a skill that depends on language acquisition and is developed through interaction with other perceivers in a process that he calls "tokening and concerting". On this view, perceivers engage in active dialogue about perceived objects that gradually accumulates into a perceptual repertoire of associated linguistic and behavioural responses. Melser also offers an important refutation of the commonplace assumption that perception is a relation between acts of perceiving and things perceived. He writes: "The question of what thing X is has the same answer as the question of what perceiving X is. [...] Hence they are not two things and cannot be 'related.'"

If language is essential to the development of perceptual skills as Melser claims, then Gareth Evans' view that animals and humans share certain perceptual states would seem to be in difficulty. Nonetheless there may yet be hope for anti-intellectualism. Like Melser, Donald Brook (1969, 1997, 2014) emphasises the cultural basis of perceptual skills but unlike Melser, he claims that perception is not exclusive to language-users but may be reasonably attributed to other creatures capable of producing nonverbal representations of the things with which they are engaged. The challenge for this theory is to provide evidence of these hypothesised causally influential but untriggered dispositions to represent. However, if it is true that many creatures are also capable of learning new behaviours, as is widely observed, then it follows—at least in principle—that they are capable of performing these skills and demonstrating them to other perceivers in just the way that Brook suggests. Indeed, if an animal learns a behaviour by observing and imitating the actions of a parent or sibling, then we have all the evidence we need that such an animal is a perceiver by virtue of its manifest capacity to imitate (to represent) this observed behaviour.

So the non-conceptual view that Gareth Evans is often invoked to defend would seem to have healthy grounds for support — so long as we bear in mind the importance of nonverbal know-how. As the arguments develop, we will see that this Rylean approach presents yet more significant challenges for intellectualism.

Intellectualism Refuted (Part III: The Unending Contents of Content)

In a paper entitled "What Makes Perceptual Content Non-conceptual?" (1998), Sean Dorrance Kelly examines Gareth Evans' (1982) arguments for a non-conceptual understanding of perception. Kelly lists these as follows:

"a) that perceptual content is the same for humans and animals,

b) that perceptual content is belief-independent,

c) that perceptual content is, sometimes at least, irreducibly articulated in terms of dispositions by the perceiver to act upon the object being perceived, and

d) that perceptual content is more finely grained than the concepts in terms of which we classify our thoughts."

Before I discuss each of the above (in this and following posts) I'd first like to say a few words about what Kelly, Evans and others term "perceptual content." In my view, to speak of content in this way is to beg the question: content of what form? If the answer is "representational content", as Kelly and Evans make plain, then we already have an unexamined assumption on the table before we have even begun any serious analysis. It is my contention that a thorough analysis of social practices of representation lies at the heart of any principled explanation of perception, and any unfounded assumption about what representations are—and more importantly: how they function—is both premature and potentially obstructive to insight. For this reason, when discussing perception I intend to speak only of perception and to reserve the term "perceptual content" specifically for the discussion of  theories that make explicit use of the term.

In (a) Evans' takes the view that humans and animals share the same "informational states" and thus the same perceptual content. He writes: "The informational states which a subject acquires through perception are non-conceptual, or nonconceptualised. Judgements based upon such states necessarily involve conceptualisation." Although I agree that perception is non-conceptual and that judgements necessarily involve conceptualisation, I find Evans' claim that perceptual content is the same for humans and animals to be lacking in argumentative force. All he provides is a rather flimsy assertion that perception is non-conceptual. Furthermore, as as John McDowell (1994) points out: "the word 'content' plays just the role in Evans' account that is played in that position by the fraudulent word 'conceptual.'" Unlike Evans, McDowell (who edited and published Evans' book after his death in 1980),  conceives of perception as fundamentally conceptual. Nonetheless, as Daniel Hutto (1998) points out, McDowell's commitment to conceptual content, like that of other intellectualists, creates a "heavy burden when it comes to explaining the origin and development of concepts." 

The problem is readily located in the entailments of the content view. If we conceive of brains as containers then it will be necessary to provide both a theory and evidence of what these containers actually contain and how this content is generated, distributed, stored, retrieved and interpreted. The alternative is to conceive of brains as embodied organs that have evolved in response to challenging environmental influences and which have therefore developed highly sophisticated dispositions to respond to a variety of causal encounters. On this view, "content" is simply a convenient but misleading characterisation of these complex dispositions to respond. When someone asks your name, you are disposed to say your name — no inner representation is necessary. Nonetheless, despite the explanatory power of this view, the mainstream position throughout much of the cognitive sciences and philosophy holds that brains are containers and that their content is fundamentally representational. A variety of competing representational theories are proposed but in all cases the basic idea is that brains obviously cannot construct their own 1:1 copy of the world with which to do their work. Instead, it is assumed that brains generate representational states which correspond in informationally significant ways with the encountered world. A minimal version of this approach construes content as a form of "covariation" between internal (brain) and external (world) events — the idea being that as a perceived event occurs, corresponding changes occur in the brain and as the event varies, so too do the corresponding brain states. These states are thus regarded as representational states or, as Mark Cain (2013) puts it: "according to the causal covariation theory, the LOT [Language Of Thought] symbol HORSE means horse because tokens of that symbol are caused by, and only by, horses." Hutto and Myin (2013) are unconvinced: 

"If information is nothing but covariance then it is not any kind of content—at least, it is not content defined, even in part, in terms of truth-bearing properties. The number of a tree's rings can vary with the age of the tree; however, this doesn't entail that the first state of affairs says or conveys anything true about the second, or vice versa. The same goes for states that happen to be inside agents and which reliably correspond with external states of affairs—these too, in and of themselves, don't 'say' or 'mean' anything just in virtue of instantiating covariance relations."

The idea that mental content "means" or is "about" the things it is directed towards is a central article of faith amongst many, if not all, representationalists, but as Kathleen Atkins (1996) points out:

"In an important sense we do not really know what "aboutness" is. Certainly, at the outset, a vague realism about the directedness of mental/neural events is adopted: representations are "tied" to objects and properties and hence (there being no good reason to suppose otherwise) bear some kind of relation to them. But if we do not know exactly what it means to regard a particular as a particular, to see this thing as being of a certain type, this place as the same place, and so on—hence what kinds of capacities or abilities are involved in having representations that are about those things—then we do not know, in any substantive sense, in what that relationship consists. We only trust that it is."

Theorists are right to enquire into the relationships between neural events and the perceived world, but whether those neural events are "about" the world is simply too uncertain to merit the credibility it currently commands, especially if this credibility is simply taken on trust. 

On the issue of whether we know what aboutness is, perhaps we don't in the context of alleged inner representations but what we do know is that in the publicly perceptible world, aboutness is very well understood. Aboutness is the meaning we attribute to symbolic representations of numerous kinds and forms, all of which rely on rules of use for their efficacy. For something to be about something else — for it to signal, refer, indicate, signify, token, connote, or denote, is for it to be generated and interpreted within an already intelligent system. Without such a system or rule to give it meaning, a wink is nothing more than a contraction of the eyelids (Ryle 1968). Without a system or rule, a symbol or signal cannot reliably stand-in (i.e. represent) anything (Bickhard and Turveen 1995). It merely is what it is. 

Moreover, acts of symbolic communication are intentional and herein lies the greatest challenge in proposing a coherent account of mental content. Because if an inner representation is needed to drive an intentional action, then a further intentional representation is needed to initiate this intentional representation and this regress of representations is without end! An alternative naturalistic theory is therefore needed that avoids this regress, not to mention the equally illogical assumption that some form of symbolic language underlies language itself (Fodor 1975, Fodor and Pylyshyn, 1988). As Gilbert Ryle put it to Daniel Dennett in a letter in 1976: "Fodor beats Locke in the intricacy of his 'wires-and-pulleys', when what was chiefly wrong with Locke was the (intermittent) intricacy of his 'wires-and-pulleys'!"

In the next post I will explore how the challenge of intentional action can be met without recourse to inner representations. Such an account will also prove helpful in understanding how we might reasonably attribute intentional action to animals. In so doing it may also be possible to give some substance to Evans' intuition over the common foundations of animal and human perception.

Intellectualism Refuted (part II: Efficacy or Truth?)

"Natural selection does not care about truth; it cares about reproductive success." —Steven Stich, 1990

In his 2011 book "Know How", Jason Stanley argues that to know how to do something is to know a fact that answers the question: "How can I do this?" According to this view, know-how is based on knowledge of truths and to this extent it is a sub-species of knowledge that something is the case, or what philosophers call "propositional knowledge." Propositional knowledge is a somewhat controversial idea because many philosophers assume that animals also possess certain kinds of propositional knowledge despite the fact that many otherwise intelligent creatures have significant difficulty understanding basic abstract ideas let alone truths. Perhaps this is why psychologists prefer to talk of "procedural knowledge" (knowledge how) and "declarative knowledge" (knowledge that) and to reserve the latter for the discussion of strictly linguistic capacities. 

Other philosophers contend that whilst non-human animals may not be capable of propositional skills they do possess beliefs and desires that are not linguistically enabled and that deserve to be considered as "propositional attitudes" (more on this along the way). Stanley makes no claims about non-human capacities in this book so it is uncertain whether he regards his theory as being applicable to our animal cousins. If he does, then he faces a considerable challenge if he wishes to explain how propositional knowledge could emerge prior to know-how.

Stanley describes himself as an "intellectualist" and as such he rejects Gilbert Ryle's arguments against intellectualism put forward in Ryle's 1949 book "The Concept of Mind." The arguments Stanley mounts against Ryle are by no means inconsequential and were Ryle still around he might well have his work cut out defending what until now have been some very serviceable arguments, the most famous of which has become known as "Ryle's regress." Basically Ryle's idea is that if intellectualism is true, then every intelligent act would need to be preceded by an intelligent thought and this thought itself would have to be initiated by another intelligent thought and so on ad infinitum. Ryle uses this regress to refute what he calls the "doctrine of intellectualism" and to argue for the logical possibility of unpremeditated acts of intelligent know-how. Stanley argues that if intelligent acts of know-how are possible in the absence of prior acts of intellection then so are acts of intellection themselves and consequently Ryle's regress fails to convince. Stanley explores several of Ryle's further variations on the same basic thesis, all of which he contends, similarly fail in their refutation of intellectualism.

So what should the anti-intellectualist do in the face of such counter arguments? Is Ryle's regress the only defence we have against the claim that intelligent action is conceptual to the core? If Stanley is correct, Ryle's arguments represent the only serious challenge to intellectualism — unless Stanley is picking a conveniently absent adversary in order to create the impression that he has anti-intellectualism on the run. In 1982 Gareth Evans' book "Varieties of Reference" made several frequently cited arguments against intellectualism, none of which Stanley mentions, even though he quotes Evans widely on other matters.

Stanley's position relies on the supposition that to know how to do something intelligently amounts to knowing a truth. My contention (pace Stich 1990) is that where efficacious action is concerned, truth is, at best, of secondary importance. If being able to swim is knowing a truth, as Stanley claims, then what purpose does this truth actually serve? The concept of truth is irrelevant when compared with the competences from which the ability is comprised. Stanley would presumably contend that each atom of competence is also an atom of truth. But if knowing how to do things like swimming were simultaneously the acquisition of constituent truths, then teaching by description would be the only educational method necessary. Demonstration and practice would have nothing further to impart. However, skill in describing a procedure does not bestow a skill in the performance of the procedure described. A knowledge of linguistics does not make an orator. And a witness who provides a clear description for a identikit image need have no expertise in drawing.

In a response to a related 2001 paper by Stanley and Williamson, Ellen Fridland (forthcoming) writes: "knowledge of rules and facts is not identical to the practical knowledge of how to put those facts and rules into practice effectively." In a footnote she continues:

Of course, Stanley and Williamson would agree with this. They would say that the knowledge has to be represented in a particular way.  My claim is that such a way of representing would itself necessarily be a kind of (nonpropositional) knowledge.

Indeed, if the knowledge must be represented in a particular nonpropositional way then this representation cannot be symbolic—on pain of circularity. If we require a non propositional representation, as Fridland suggests Stanley and Williamson would concede, then the choice will necessarily be limited to one or other of the following: a demonstration, performance, exemplification, illustration, image, diagram etc. None of these is easily  translated from even the most rudimentary propositional truth because abstract concepts simply do not lend themselves to nonverbal representation.

Truths are typically statements or stories. A true statement is a statement of truth but a true likeness is not a likeness of truth.  Truths are linguistic items that we take  to represent objects and events objectively. But if it could be shown that a widely employed and extremely useful class of nonverbal representations are never objective then the intellectualist's position would be in need of major revision. I think such a counter-example is ready-to-hand in the commonplace practice of representational simulation (Brook 1969, 1997, 2014). In order to avoid the incredulity of theorists who do not share my convictions concerning the perceiver-dependence of simulating representation, rather than arguing this line directly I will instead take a more indirect route via the more widely acknowledged arguments raised by Evans (1982). I intend to show that in each case Evans' arguments against intellectualism are best understood in the context of skills of non-verbal representation (including simulation) production and use, a fuller understanding of which will challenge not only Stanley's view but intellectualism per se.

Intellectualism Refuted (Part I)

"Let us not forget this: when 'I raise my arm', my arm goes up. And the problem arises: what is left over if I subtract the fact that my arm goes up from the fact that I raise my arm?" —Ludwig Wittgenstein

In the next several posts I intend to explore the philosophical doctrine of intellectualism and to contrast this with a principled alternative that avoids many of the shortcomings that accompany the intellectualist view. Intellectualism takes many forms, but in each case the foundational assumption holds that intelligent action, in all its varied manifestations, is the result of one or more forms of conceptual thought, judgement, computation, reason, ratiocination or intellection. So, when animals act intelligently on the basis of anticipated future states of affairs, these actions are taken by intellectualists to be the product of logical operations conducted at some level in the brain.

Brains are extremely complex organs and neuroscience, being a relatively youthful field of enquiry, hasn't yet discovered any clear and unequivocal evidence of these postulated logical processes. It would probably be fair to say then, that much intellectualist thinking is simply the consequence of widespread uncertainty about what kinds of mental states or processes might legitimately qualify as the inner correlates of the many sophisticated things that animals (including human animals) are capable of doing and is therefore simply a convenient way of saying that brains process inputs that lead eventually to behavioural outputs of one kind or another. Likewise, when people speak of "perceptual judgements," very often, all that is meant is that perception is a skilful capacity to discriminate between similar objects or attributes etc. If intellectualism were merely a matter of convenience of this kind, then there really wouldn't be anything worth debating. As it is though, the assumptions and commitments of intellectualism are far reaching, not only for perceptual theory but for a wide range of fields throughout the cognitive sciences, philosophy and potentially medicine also.

If the stakes are this high, then it obviously matters a great deal that theorists get it right about whether brains compute information relayed via neurological data representations or whether, as a growing minority of theorists and researchers argue, this explanatory route is untenable. Theorists like Dan Hutto and Eric Myin maintain that brains are best understood as embodied, embedded and enactive organs of response and intentional action that do not—indeed cannot—produce their own inner representations. The vicious logical regresses that emerge as soon as such intention-directing representations are invoked lead to the unavoidable conclusion that such representations must be an impossibility. Theories that reject representationalism therefore deserve to be taken very seriously. So what is needed in order to propel anti representationalism forward is a coherent explanation of how intelligent predictive behaviours could emerge and evolve whilst at the same time avoiding any of the errors of intellectualism. As I progress through this discussion I will explore how predictive behaviours can be explained in the absence of the conceptual powers that are such a indispensable part of the intellectualist's story.

My views on the subject of intellectualism are motivated by the conviction that conceptual skills have arrived on the evolutionary scene only relatively recently with the emergence of language and that these skills are supplementary to other vitally important non-conceptual skills that are widely misunderstood and overlooked. Like language, these skills are representational but unlike language they do not permit the contemplation of abstractions of the kind that are a central feature of verbal communication. It is my view that these non-conceptual skills pre date our linguistic capacities and continue to be skills that we  regularly deploy in our intentional interactions with the world. When we struggle to find words to express our intentions, it is often precisely these skills that we are labouring to translate into linguistic form, not another equally semantic but indirectly accessible "Language of Thought" or "Mentalese" as is hypothesised by many intellectualist thinkers.

Despite its intuitive appeal, the Language of Thought hypothesis is far from an established fact about cognitive processing. What is beyond dispute though, is that organisms possess both genetically inherited as well as environmentally conditioned predispositions to respond to their causal encounters with the world. To have learned something is therefore to develop a disposition to behave in a particular way. Very often the best way of demonstrating that you have learnt how to do something is simply by doing it, not by describing it. A verbal description of a procedure, no matter how finely nuanced, is no proof of competence. For this reason I take our skills of performance and exemplification to be both logically as well as evolutionarily prior to our skills of description, but in each case it should be noted that a dispositional theory of representational capacities is fundamental to an understanding of all intelligent action. On this basis I also take the view that the capacity to envisage future states of affairs is by no means a fundamentally conceptual aptitude. If we wish to understand how animals are capable of anticipating the immediate future—of how predators are often remarkably skilful in predicting the behaviour of their prey—then there are really only two explanatory routes available to us: conceptual or non-conceptual. I intend to show that the conceptual route is both logically and evolutionarily infeasible.

What’s So Wrong With The Selfie?

Paleolithic handprints, Argentina (Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

With the help of devices like smartphones and tablet computers it has never been easier to produce photographs, and with the rise in social media it has never been easier to share them. But is this availability of media a neutral influence? Does it empower or corrupt? Does it enable us to express ourselves in new ways and to discover new things about the world or does it cultivate narcissism of a previously unknown kind or degree?

It is certainly no bad thing that the means to produce depictive representations is no longer the exclusive preserve of a privileged few. But with the wider availability of media has come an unprecedented proliferation of representations clamouring for our consideration. Of course there are many ways to skim, filter or ignore this information, so there is certainly no requirement that we treat each call to our attention with equal regard. In fact, to bemoan the proliferation of content is perhaps an admission of a lack of selectivity. Nonetheless,  distractions can sometimes be an important source of unexpected discovery — why else would we be so susceptible to them in the first place if they were only ever a disadvantage?

But perhaps the problems lie elsewhere — not with the quantity or kind of information on offer but with its quality. A good example of this problem is to be found in the cultural phenomenon of the "selfie"? Selfies are what would once have been called "self portraits", but the shift in terminology is telling. Dropping the word "portrait" and appending the suffix "ie" not only trivialises the practice, it infantilises it. It takes a term most closely associated with artworks and replaces it with the language of the nursery. This alone wouldn't be so bad — defenders of the selfie might well argue that the attraction of the term is precisely its lack of pretension and the break it makes with the pomp of the artworld. The desire is as understandable as it is naive.

Much as depictions are capable of prompting sophisticated thoughts and associations, they are not fundamentally conceptual objects. Pictorial images do not rely on our skills in the use of abstractions for their efficacy, which is presumably why infants have no difficulty recognising them. Self-hood, on the other hand, is an abstract concept — it does not lend itself to being recorded on film or sensor. Self-hood can only be represented by allusion, analogy, reference, or signification — all of which are fundamentally symbolic strategies for the communication of meaning. In other words, a picture of someone can only be about them if it makes use of one or more of these codes, associations, references etc. and these are inextricably enabled and informed by culture. A picture of a person is not intrinsically about them. So a picture can never be of the self — which is why portraits need not actually depict the person portrayed. Such is the power of allusion.

So where do these thoughts bring us as regards selfies? For the most part, selfies seek to be light-hearted, uncomplicated depictions with as few pretensions to the world of portraiture as possible. Selfies rarely, if ever, seek to articulate meanings. They seek to record the presence of their makers and to share simple pleasures and conviviality of a playful kind. To this extent selfies are the most naive form of depiction. 

Whilst selfies seek to rid themselves of artworld references they are nonetheless steeped in unintended meanings. Culture not only enables artists to articulate and allude to meanings but it also enables everyone to 'read' images; to interpret them via the many codes and clues of which culture is formed. Selfies expose all kinds of subtle, and sometimes not-so-subtle, information about the people depicted, from their sexual orientation to their social class, from their political views to their emotional state and sometimes even the state of their relationships. Even the quantity of images produced by some individuals can be strongly suggestive about the maker's need for attention and approval. And whilst our interpretations may not always be accurate we are nonetheless unavoidably drawn to treat these images as information, as indicators about the drives, intentions and preoccupations of others.

In their infantilising rejection of content, the champions of the selfie have lost touch with the very thing that gives portraits meaning. Ironically, selfies are almost exclusively focused on appearances and have practically nothing interesting to say about the self.

Colour Perception And The Impossibility Of Ever Painting Things Exactly As They Are.

When I was sixteen I had my first serious opportunity to do an oil painting en plein air as it is sometimes referred to, harking back to the French impressionist practice of painting in the open. I had an easel and primed board set in front of a huge field of oilseed rape and the choice of a handsome selection of colours. I also had plenty of time, it being the summer holiday, and my plan was to build up the painting gradually as each successive layer dried. Everything went well enough until I began working on the intense yellow of the oilseed rape. I could mix the colour very convincingly on the palette and for a while there seemed to be little difference between my yellow and the yellow of the field. But as the lighting conditions changed, the difference between painting and field was unmistakable. This was a source of enormous frustration to me since it seemed that either my skills of colour mixing were defective or else the paints were sub-standard. Actually the paints were professional quality oils so it seemed unlikely that they were at fault but what I didn't realise then but is clear to me now is that the paints were indeed defective. All paints are. The reason we don't complain to Windsor and Newton or Rowney is because our perceptual powers are also systematically limited in ways that we do not notice because these flaws are shared and are therefore the perceptual norm. Pictorial representations such as oil paintings or photographs would be impossible without these shared perceptual limitations because pulverised pigments or chemical dyes—even when expertly mixed—would almost never seem to have the same properties as the things they represent. Their chemical structure and therefore their spectral properties under varying lighting conditions would simply be too easily discriminable for use as colour substitutes. If our perceptual capacities were faultless, no two different things would ever seem to be the same.

The issue can be better understood in the case of my struggles with oil painting. The reason the yellow of my painting and the field seemed to be the same for a short time was because under those particular lighting conditions I was incapable of discriminating between them. Other humans would have the same difficulty whereas other perceivers with different perceptual skills probably wouldn't have nearly the same trouble. Tetrachromats who—like many birds, fish and amphibians—possess an extra set of colour-sensitive cones on their retinas, would be unlikely to make the same mistake. When the lighting conditions over the field changed, the differing spectral properties of the paint and oilseed rape absorbed and reflected light in ways that were more easily discriminated (for me with my trichromatic vision) so it was obvious that the paint wasn't the same shade as the oilseed rape. Any hope I had of mixing a perfect spectral match of the crop was doomed before I had even begun. Perhaps if I had known this at the time I wouldn't have mistakenly concluded that the fault was due to a lack of skill on my part, but rather to inherited weaknesses which make all the wonders of pictorial representation possible in the first place.

The Intellectualist Attitude

In an essay entitled “Representing the Real”, Berkeley philosopher Sean Dorrance Kelly, remarks that the laws of perspective are: “the laws for drawing things as they are seen in the detached perceptual attitude.” The detached perceptual attitude he tells us: “is the attitude one takes when one not only has a perceptual experience of a thing, but at the same time pays attention to the details of the very experience one is having. In the detached attitude one pays attention not to meaningful things, but rather to the ways things look.”

For Kelly the detached attitude is to be contrasted with the standard “engaged” or “absorbed” perceptual attitude that “we adopt with respect to objects when we see them as things in our meaningful environment.”

It is true that different situations and intentions demand different kinds of attention just as different jobs require different tools. Use the wrong tool for an inappropriate task and the results can be disastrous. Kelly is right then to make a distinction between different forms of attention, but aside from this rather obvious observation is there any deeper sense or coherence to Kelly’s claims?

If, according to Kelly, our environment is meaningful and artists, when drawing, do not pay attention to meaningful things, does this mean that artists need not or cannot attend to meaning as they draw? Surely that can’t be what Kelly means. Perhaps he means that by adopting the detached attitude, artists absorb or discover meaning anyway. After all, if the environment is already meaningful, as he claims, then all they need to do is record this predetermined meaning? So, by being detached, artists get what they would otherwise get by being engaged and absorbed. But that doesn’t sound right either. Anyone who has spent even a little time trying to produce an observational drawing knows that it requires considerable engagement. Perhaps Kelly would concede that the detached perceptual attitude does actually constitute a kind of engagement, just a different kind of engagement from what we might call “standard engagement”. So, in this non-standard attitude we attend to how things look rather than what they mean. Perhaps artists might also benefit by commencing any act of drawing by adopting the standard perceptual attitude first in order to attend specifically to the meaning, before then applying the non-standard attitude in order to capture this meaning.

Does that sound okay? Well it might if our environment were meaningful but sadly it isn’t. Meaning is something that humans have to strive to produce and it requires articulation through the use of shared strategies, codes, and cultural symbols etc. Certainly we can record things that are apt for interpretation, but, once again, meaning isn’t an intrinsic attribute of things, it is an attribution based upon cultural norms, associations, references etc. There is no app that will ever tell you the meaning of the world you point your smartphone at, nor will there be such an app, at least not until smartphones become capable of inventing stories.

When discussing the standard perceptual attitude (the engaged and absorbed one), Kelly observes that running down a flight of stairs would be dangerous if you were to contemplate the colours of the carpet or to consider “where exactly the best spot is to place your foot.” True, but does it follow that we need to interpret the meaning of the stairs as we descend them? Presumably not. So what is he saying? It might be argued that Kelly is simply saying that the brain is doing a lot of intricate processing regarding the position of the stairs, body etc. Undoubtedly the brain has to process a lot of stimuli in order to respond accurately and rapidly in some situations but this doesn’t necessitate interpretation of the meaning of the environment. A defender of Kelly’s position might suggest that by “meaningful environment” Kelly means to suggest that the environment is significant in certain ways and that perceivers need to be able to apprehend and process these significances. However, significance—like meaning—requires conceptual understanding and interpretation. Environments are not things that organise themselves for our interpretive convenience. Interpretation is something that has to be learned – it certainly isn’t a genetically acquired skill.

An entirely different characterisation of the process is necessary if Kelly is to avoid the pitfall of what is known in philosophy as intellectualism*. Simply stated, intellectualism is the idea that all intelligent acts are preceded by intelligent abstract thoughts. I will have more to say about intellectualism in a later post. If the capacity to perform an action intelligently were reliant upon interpretation—on the processing of meaning—as opposed to simple recognition and efficacious action—then the demands placed upon even the simplest life-forms would be evolutionarily intractable. Even insects behave with a sophistication that makes a mockery of contemporary AI and surely nobody seriously supposes that insects conduct interpretive analysis of the meaning of their environment as they move around and interact with things.

Skilled action is reliant upon non-conceptual capacities, i.e. memory, sensory discrimination and rudimentary representational skills like mimicry which have developed over millions of years and that have been shaped by countless trials and incremental improvements (at both the phylogenetic and ontogenetic level). 

Any artist wishing to draw by observation needs to employ only two strategies, neither of which require any kind of detached attitude. (In fact the accompanying attitude is simply a behavioural side-effect of the application of these techniques.) One is to maintain a fixed point of view for the duration of the drawing—the other is to close one eye when looking at the subject.

Intellectualists, on the other hand, might benefit by opening both eyes and going back to the theoretical drawing board.

*Kelly would insist that his position is not that of an intellectualist. On the basis of my analysis, I beg to differ.