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.

The Pleasure of Knowing

“I don’t know much about Art, but I know what I like”

This phrase juxtaposes two kinds of knowledge: knowledge about something and knowledge of something. I may know of your best friend but this doesn’t mean that I know about them. If I knew about them I might like them, but I can’t really like anything much (apart perhaps from the most primitive pleasures) without further knowledge.

The implication of the phrase is that knowing is somehow opposed to liking or that liking precedes and is superior to knowing. This isn’t just anti-intellectualism but a privileging of sensory pleasures over cognitive ones. There’s knowing and knowing. The more we know, the more refined our understanding and the greater the scope for pleasure.

Philosophy is Quite Useless

I went on a boat trip yesterday to the island of Staffa off the west coast of Scotland. During the trip the skipper asked me if I knew how Columbus had deduced that land was ahead when he was approaching the Americas – what 3 things had Columbus noticed? I had a hunch about one (sea birds) but it seemed pointless to offer just one when three were required. The skipper looked at me with a grin and said “Ah, you see, we had a good education on the island of Iona!” The answer, he told me, was birds, driftwood and cloud formations, at which point he indicated the distinctive clouds hovering above the distant islands of Coll and Tiree.

Of course this isn’t philosophy, it’s knowledge, lore and understanding. It’s the application of observation to the realities of life and the struggle for survival. It’s empirical and testable and reliable and we call these things "facts".

There are two types of facts which are interesting to think about here: facts which are like tools - which allow us to achieve other things, to recognize that certain clouds indicate the presence of land etc - and facts which have no obvious utility. These useless facts are observations of simple patterns, affiliations and connections between things; the way’s things appear or interrelate. Whilst these observations may have no immediate or obvious utility it’s still the case that useful facts have frequently emerged out of these apparently useless ones. Certainly not all useless observations are destined to become useful but we are nonetheless programmed as beings to notice patterns and connections between things, despite our accompanying (but complimentary) tendency to doubt, question and test the fruits of such observations.

But since it’s both a natural tendency to observe and speculate about our observations and since utility occasionally emerges from such speculations, we should be unrepentant about our enquiries into things which, to some people, might seem senseless or purposeless nonsense, since who knows from whence the next important discovery will emerge from the fog of uncertainty?

Staffa, Fingal's Cave, JMW Turner, 1832

In his 1773 descriptions of Scotland’s Western Isles, Samuel Johnson devoted a single paragraph to the Island of Staffa. It begins thus:

“When the Islanders were reproached with their ignorance, or insensibility of the wonders of Staffa, they had not much to reply. They had indeed considered it little, because they had always seen it; and none but philosophers, nor they always, are struck with wonder, otherwise than by novelty.”

Staffa, The Clam Shell Cave, James Valentine, Undated

(This post originated from a discussion on Sean's Reflective Journal blog here)

Is Reflection a Class Issue?

I've recently been involved in an online discussion on James Atherton's “Recent Reflection” blog (all relevant links below). The exchange began as a response to a video of Sir Ken Robinson (talking rather hyperbolically about the need for a “revolution” in education) posted on TED.com. The responses very quickly polarised between two differing philosophical viewpoints which might be roughly characterised as a contrast between British pragmatic empiricism and the American Dream. As the debate drifted ever closer to the issue of class, I was reminded of the famous comedy sketch by the two Ronnies and John Cleese which plays upon representations of British class divisions. I looked the sketch up on YouTube and as I watched it I was struck by something said by the working class character, played by Ronnie Corbett: “… though I'm poor, I'm industrious honest and trustworthy. Had I the inclination, I could look down on them, but I don't.”

Since we can't really expect a comedy sketch to explain itself we need to look elsewhere to be able to tease out what's going on here. The remark demands a little, dare I say, reflection.

The first part of the statement is a clear case of what we could call a self-representation; a self-image which describes the qualities which this character values in himself and feels others might value in him also. Interestingly, as a description, it's in marked contrast to those given by the other two characters. He describes himself through qualities which anybody would be proud to say about themselves; he describes himself in ways which have very little to do with his social status as such and he describes himself in ways which actually say only two distinct things: he works hard and he's worthy of other peoples' trust. This begs a question about how he has arrived at these representations of himself? Is this self-image something which is self generated or is it something which has been adopted? Whilst the other two characters describe things about themselves which other people might find distasteful or problematic in some way (and are certainly social constructions too), this character only describes things about himself that the other two would wish to be the case. His self-image conforms exactly to what the other two would have him be. He's a mirror of their idea of the underclass and he is a mirror which shows not the slightest threat nor subversive inclination - even the inclination to look down on them ie: to adopt their repugnant supercilious attitude.

Class society in the UK has changed a great deal since 1966 when this comedy sketch was first broadcast. Thatcher's government presided over an unprecedented fragmentation of the working class, but despite claims of the demise of class society in the UK, the underclass is still a very tangible reality.

I'm currently reading (more like skimming through really) Pierre Bourdieu's book “Distinction” in which he uses the term “habitus” to describe how different social classes distinguish and express their values through their differing tastes. It occurs to me that the very act of critical reflection itself is often seen as being a bourgeois pretension; an elitist nonsense like so many other abstract intellectual pursuits - as Isaiah Berlin is reputed to have said: the British have never had an Intelligentsia.

We often think of critical reflection as freely available, unlimited, and unencumbered, since it can be carried out in the relative comfort one's own mind with no further requirements than a lack of physical discomfort or distraction. But, looked at from this new perspective, it becomes clear that critical reflection is something which is frequently avoided or devalued amongst the very people who, arguably, could benefit from it most. Anti intellectualism may not be exclusive to any particular social class but it undoubtedly benefits some social strata much more than others. It suits them very well because it disempowers the people who might rise against them in a legitimate struggle for emancipation.

As I said in my comments on the Recent Reflection blog discussion:

"People who have the privilege of better education, more money and more time are in the position of being able to “reflect” and make choices about their future. Reflection doesn't come for free - it has to be cultivated and given space to develop. Many people on the bottom rung of society often don't even have the time to be able to reflect and make clear choices about WHAT they'd like to do, let alone HOW, and they very often don't have the inclination to reflect because this has never been cultivated in them or valued by their social habitus."

I wrote the above as a response to the following statement:

"It is absolutely a societal responsibility to the extent possible to create genuine opportunities for everyone."

Opportunities are practically meaningless without the means to take advantage of them. A lottery ticket is an opportunity. We could argue over whether it's a "genuine" one or not, but the fact remains that providing access to opportunities is simply not enough. The "genuine" things that people really need are help, support and encouragement to participate in society at all levels, including the intellectual. If my speculations about reflection are in any way correct, then what we need far more than opportunities is a transformation in the way that people from all social strata view and apply critical, reflective and intellectual thought. Many would argue that this starts with education and yes, this is certainly a major contributor but it also starts much deeper than this, in the very attitudes that society fosters and perpetuates in all its citizens and this is a significantly bigger challenge.

References:

Context of the original discussion here (beware, it's long!).

Video of Sir Ken Robinson on TED.com here

Habitus in Sociology here