The Price Of Intention

"Don't for heaven's sake, be afraid of talking nonsense! But you must pay attention to your nonsense." —Ludwig Wittgenstein, "Culture and Value" p.59.

I am sure I have often said and have certainly often heard others say: "I didn't realise until afterwards, what I was trying to do." This post is an attempt to pay close attention to the nonsense buried in this utterance and to tentatively suggest that the associated notion of unconscious striving — of unconscious desire even — is incoherent. It may already be clear that such a view runs contrary to one or two foundational ideas within psychoanalysis, some of which continue to garner significant recognition within the arts. If we shouldn't be afraid of talking nonsense, then we probably shouldn't be afraid of identifying nonsense either.

To realise something after the fact is to have learned something new; to have become aware of something that was previously unclear or inaccessible. The sentence "I didn't realise until afterwards, what I was trying to do." is commonly used as an acknowledgement that our goals are often vague, fragmentary or imprecise and only through the gradual, or sometimes sudden, accumulation of understanding do we become capable of clearly articulating this more developed knowledge. But whilst our goals can be sketchy, a vague intention is not an intention for vague outcome. A sketchy idea for a diagram is rarely a desire for a sketchy diagram.

There is nothing confused or paradoxical about such thoughts. Where the confusion arises is in the suggestion that some part of us, some inner and inaccessible intelligence, seeks to express itself through our actions; that an alleged unconscious or subconscious self is trying to tell us things that may only dawn upon our conscious awareness later. Certainly there are times when we recognise patterns or significances in our past actions. But is this sufficient grounds for the supposition that we are host to unconscious intentions that are striving to articulate themselves? I hope to show that it is not.

Trying, striving, endeavouring, pursuing, envisaging, seeking, aiming etc. are intentional goal orientated behaviours. Without goals there can be no striving  because there can be nothing to strive towards. If we were never capable of communicating an outcome of our actions in any shape or form, then we could not be said to try to achieve something either. "All 'willing' is willing something," as the neurologist Oliver Sacks puts it.

If someone asks us what we are doing and we have no answer, then we cannot be said to be acting purposefully. It is for this reason that goals are fundamentally reliant upon our powers of communication; upon our ability to offer some sort of token, word or gesture that would be acceptable to others as a representation of our intention.

In a 2006 paper, Jack Glaser and John Kihlstrom argue that: "Unconscious Volition Is Not an Oxymoron." They write:

...the unconscious, in addition to being a passive categorizer, evaluator, and semantic processor, has processing goals (for example, accuracy, egalitarianism) of its own, can be vigilant for threats to the attainment of these goals, and will proactively compensate for such threats.

Clearly Glaser and Kihlstrom recognise that volition demands goals, but it is extraordinary that they are prepared to suggest that unconscious behaviour is fundamentally intentional: that it has ulterior motives, even if these are as seemingly benign and basic as accuracy and egalitarianism etc. In its most extreme form, such a view opens the door to any number of unwitting intentions and renders us as nothing more than witnesses to motives beyond our control or ken.

If goals can be pursued without our conscious awareness or control, then we are puppets in a theatre not of our own making, and all we can do is observe our actions like passive audience members in the hope of gleaning some comprehension of the hidden goals that actually drive us. Consciousness never looked more wretched.

The alternative is to reject the notion of unconscious volition altogether and to seek a less extravagant explanation.

When in 1974 Oliver Sacks broke his leg whilst fleeing from a bull, the trauma of the injury left him with a temporary inability to properly sense or move his leg. In essence the episode had rid him of all knowhow in the use of his leg. A closely related condition is sometimes experienced by people who become temporarily blind in response to the traumatic loss of a loved one or some other major upset. These sorts of psychological responses to trauma are known as "Conversion Disorders" and it is interesting to note that the term was first coined by Freud as an alternative to "hysteria" or "hysterical blindness."

In a paper on the subject of conversion disorders, Harvey et al. (2006) point out that: "One difficulty facing research in this field is the complexity of the conceptual issues and variable ways in which terminology has been used." The authors helpfully include a table of definitions and explanations of key terminology and they also explicitly state that conversion disorders are “not intentionally produced” and cannot be feigned. It should be made clear that they do not make any suggestion that conversion disorders are the result of unconscious intention, striving, trying etc.

When overtired drivers are overcome by sleep, their unconscious is not striving to take control. If you attempt to kill yourself by holding your breath, it is not inner volition that will rob you of consciousness before the job is done. These are simply highly evolved autonomic responses that have no goals and do not have to strive, seek or endeavour to impose themselves. They have no more volition than the iris of the eye. No doubt conversion disorders are similarly rooted in complex autonomic processes.

Can we aim for one thing only to find that we were actually aiming for something else? If goals are necessarily communicable, then it follows that we cannot be oblivious of those we are pursuing. We can certainly aim for inappropriate goals or be confused, uncertain or vague about our goals, as I have already mentioned. But I don't think we can be mistaken that the thing we are intent upon is actually the thing we are intent upon. That would come at an extremely high price; the price of intention itself.

Indivisible Atoms of Intention

We are purposeful creatures. That would seem to be beyond serious doubt. Aside from the occasional twitch, sneeze, hiccup, yawn, or blush—and a wide range of autonomic processes—our behaviour is not merely efficacious but directed. It consists of actions.

But what makes an action intentional? A common assumption is that intention consists in some prior inner event: a thought, a decision, or a particular configuration of neural activity that initiates what follows. We have reason to resist that assumption.

Consider a familiar case. When you rose from your bed this morning, you did so intentionally. But it would be a mistake to suppose that your intention consisted in a discrete episode in your brain—a nascent act that then caused your body to move. Certainly there was neural activity, but there is no need to treat it as an inner “intender” issuing commands. There is no agent within the brain pulling the strings.

Instead, intention is better understood as a feature of the organism as it is situated in its world—as a way it is poised to engage with its circumstances. It concerns how you are constituted: your situated dispositions to respond to particular situations, prompts, and possibilities in certain ways. When you get out of bed, you act as the kind of creature you are, in the situation you are in: one whose habits, sensitivities, and history incline it toward that behaviour. This is what we register when we say that someone “acts in character.”

Put this way, intentional action can begin to look merely habitual. But habits need not be blind. What matters is not whether an action is preceded by explicit thought, but whether it belongs to an organised field of responsiveness—one that is sensitive to circumstances, open to adjustment, and able, in the right conditions, to be made explicit.

Here a further feature becomes important: our readiness to communicate what we are doing. If I were to interrupt you and ask what you are doing, you would almost certainly have something to say. You are not covertly narrating your life in advance; rather, you are disposed to communicate your activity when prompted, within practices where such communication has a place.

This readiness is not merely evidence of intention, though it is that. It is also part of what it is to act intentionally. To act intentionally is, in part, to be the sort of creature whose engagements with the world belong to organised patterns of responsiveness—patterns that sustain, and sometimes give rise to, communication, though not always.

This cannot depend on actual performance. One might be gagged, interrupted, or otherwise unable to respond, and yet still act intentionally. What matters is not the act of communication itself, but the underlying preparedness: a structured sensitivity to situations and to others that would ordinarily enable it.

Seen in this light, more explicit forms of deliberation—imagining outcomes, weighing reasons, anticipating consequences—are not more intentional than ordinary, habitual actions. They are more elaborate expressions of the same underlying capacities. Some actions involve explicit communication; others unfold through gesture, movement, or skilled response. All belong to a continuum shaped by the ways in which an organism is situated and able to respond.

This perspective also raises a further question. What of animals? When a dog chases a squirrel, is it acting intentionally? It would be too strong to deny this. Dogs exhibit patterns of behaviour that we readily take to be directed toward outcomes, and they respond to their surroundings in flexible and intelligible ways. Their behaviour expresses urgency, pursuit, and excitement in forms we recognise.

Part of what is at work here is that we find it easier to attribute intention where there are signs of responsiveness that resemble communication, broadly understood. We are more confident in attributing intention to a dog than to simpler organisms, not because the behaviour is more complex in a purely causal sense, but because it is more evidently embedded in patterns of signalling, coordination, and response.

Wittgenstein draws attention to a related shift in perspective: “We say: ‘The cock calls the hens by crowing’ … Isn’t the aspect quite altered if we imagine the crowing to set the hens in motion by some kind of physical causation?” What changes here is not the observable behaviour, but how we are prepared to situate it. In one case, it belongs to a pattern of interaction; in the other, it is reduced to a mechanism. The difference lies not in the presence of some hidden ingredient, but in whether the behaviour is taken as part of a responsive exchange.

A similar sensitivity can be seen within our own species. Doubts about intention are sometimes expressed—or allowances made—in cases where communicative responsiveness is diminished or unfamiliar: in descriptions of so-called feral humans, or in early encounters between cultures whose forms of expression were not yet mutually intelligible. In such cases, it is not simply behaviour that is in question, but whether it can be situated within a shared field of response and recognition. Where that field is thin or disrupted, our confidence in attributing intention can falter.

What differs across these cases is not the presence or absence of intention as an inner state, but the richness and accessibility of the situations in which behaviour can be understood. Human beings possess highly developed practices for making activity explicit—for describing, explaining, and evaluating what they are doing. This does not create intention, but it deepens and refines it, situating action within more complex networks of possibility and response.

If this is right, then we should be cautious about locating intention in inner mechanisms, whether neural or otherwise. Communication, in its various forms, is not the output of a hidden agent, but an expression of organised engagement with the world. Agency is not something contained within us as a part; it is a feature of us as situated organisms.

There has, in other words, to be a cutoff. Intention does not extend indefinitely inward to organs, cells, or atoms. But neither is it located in some inner component. It belongs at the level of the organism as it is situated in its world—the level at which a living being can act, respond, and, in its various ways, make sense of what it is doing.

Animal Minds?

The American essayist and poet Ralph Waldo Emerson, once wrote "The ancestor of every action is a thought." Superficially this idea seems plausible enough, but on closer examination it turns out to conceal a vicious paradox. If every purposeful action necessitated a prior thought, then every act of thinking – every thought – would itself have to be initiated by a further motivating thought. This inextinguishable spiral of antecedent thoughts is sometimes known as a “Rylean regress,” named after the British philosopher Gilbert Ryle who took the view that “intelligent practice is not a step-child of theory.”

At the core of Ryle’s philosophy was the conviction that intelligent behaviours are not the result of practical knowledge but are instead instances of practical knowledge. Confusion arises because we tend to conceive of knowledge as an independent "thing" that leads to, results in or produces actions. Ryle exposed the “category mistake” implicit in this reified conception. Knowledge for Ryle is neither an entity nor a neurological region that we can point to on a fMRI scan – it is a repertoire of aptitudes, skills and dispositions. For Ryle, skillful action is a form of thinking. And if thought and action are indivisible in this way, then there need be no prior “thought processes” driving intelligent behaviour. Actions are already integrated processes of intelligent engagement with the world.

So, do animals think before they act? A Rylean analysis would suggest not. But this is not to support the view that only language users are capable of contemplating the future or of making plans. Many plans are diagrammatic objects after all. Nonetheless what it does strongly suggest is that the skills involved in planning and other sophisticated forms of future directed activity, rely upon techniques that must be learned and practiced through trial and error. In the human case this is achieved through publicly negotiated forms of communication, both verbal and nonverbal. Without such public exchanges it is extremely doubtful that any creature could ever develop the capacity to ponder with any degree of complexity or proficiency. Skills are demonstrated and tested in the unforgiving crucible of actuality, not in the cosseted ether of thought or imagination.

Misunderstanding Media: the medium is not the message*

In his famous essay "The Medium Is The Message" (1964) media guru, Marshall McLuhan uses the analogy of electric light to illustrate his view of the relation between a medium and what he sees as its wider message. He writes: "The electric light is pure information. It is a medium without a message."

McLuhan makes no attempt to clarify what he sees as the difference — if any —between this notion of "pure information" and say, pure form, pure matter or pure energy. Nor does he provide any guidance regarding the question of what quantity or kind of information might be left over once a message has been stripped of its content. If electric light is all information and no message then, according to McLuhan's logic, it is possible to rid a medium of its message whilst retaining pure information. If information exists independently of content then it follows that information must inhere or adhere to its medium in some form — presumably a detectable form. But if this information is detectable then what extra ingredients does electric light possess beyond its raw properties?

Further questions are begged. Does only electric light qualify as pure information or might gaslight also make the grade? And what of candlelight or sunlight? What is information after all? Are flowers informed by the light that falls upon them? Does the light of Springtime inform trees that it is now the moment to blossom?

If light transmits information and this information informs things, then what is the difference between information thus regarded and messages conventionally regarded? And what are we actually left with once we remove all messages from information? What information could there possibly be in an uncrackable code? Is it not the case that an unreadable message is devoid of content precisely by being devoid of information? What information is to be had from a language that cannot be understood?

Or are we to say that an unintelligible message is pure information to the extent that we recognise it as a message; as a communicative tool? That seems fair, but it still fails to explain how ordinary electric light constitutes pure information.

A further puzzle emerges. If electric light is pure information, then it follows that the electric light in a fibre optic cable is pure information also, even when it carries no encoded information. Likewise, when information is encoded and sent along a fibre optic cable it must be encoded information further comprised of pure information: an informational wheel within a wheel.

Something has evidently gone badly awry in McLuhan's thinking. Electric light is no more "pure information" than gaslight, candlelight, paint in a jar, or a stick. Almost anything can be used as a medium so long as we can control it sufficiently to produce representations of one kind or another. A medium without representation is a material without a function. In other words it is just a potentially manipulable resource. 

Media are not things that we attach messages to like clothes on a washing line. Strictly speaking, a medium doesn't actually exist as a medium unless it is used to represent something. Media are techniques in the use of objects and materials for the purposes of communication. There is nothing intrinsic to objects and materials that confers anything other upon them than the properties they already possess. Information is not an inherent property of matter  —  it is a culturally negotiated attribution. To interpret something as information is to be an informed member of a culture and to be an informed member of a culture is to be possessed of skills in the use of materials and resources for the purposes of communication.

A resource is no more a medium than a stick is intrinsically a tool.

* For Tom

Language In A Petri Dish: the scientific misunderstanding of signals

No one sets out to misunderstand a message, or to incorporate error knowingly into their thinking. We attend to signs because it matters that we do. A red traffic light is not something we interpret loosely. It brings movement to a halt, not because of anything intrinsic in the colour itself, but because we have learned—collectively and reliably—how to respond to it. If this were not the case, if meanings drifted from moment to moment, communication would become difficult to the point of collapse. For the most part, we hold these conventions in place without noticing them. They work quietly and with a certain discipline.

This quiet discipline can give the impression that meaning is somehow carried within the sign itself—as if the red light contains the instruction, or the word contains the thought that follows it. But we know, at least in practice, that this is not quite right. The same mark, gesture, or sound can serve different purposes in different contexts. What stabilises it is not its form, but the way it is taken up and used.

It is often said that symbols allow us to connect almost anything with anything else. That is broadly true, but it risks making the process seem more magical than it is. What makes such flexibility possible is not arbitrary invention alone, but a shared understanding of how a particular sign is to be taken. A word, a diagram, a line on a page—these do not operate in isolation. They depend on a background of agreement, training, and use. Without that, they remain marks among marks.

This is where talk of “rule-following” becomes helpful, though it can also mislead. We do not, in most cases, consult explicit rules before responding to a sign. Rather, we find ourselves already able to respond, having been brought into a practice where certain responses count as appropriate. A student learns what a line can do not by being given a definition, but by drawing, correcting, adjusting, and gradually recognising when something “holds” and when it does not. The rule is not separate from the practice; it is expressed through it.

Against this background, a familiar way of speaking within the biological sciences begins to look slightly strained. It is now routine to describe cells, neurons, and even molecules as “signalling.” The term appears so frequently that it passes almost without remark. Chemical gradients become messages; electrical activity becomes communication. The language is convenient, and perhaps even suggestive, but it carries with it an implication that is worth pausing over.

To speak of signalling is to borrow, however lightly, from a domain in which signs are used, interpreted, and responded to in ways that depend on shared practices. When we say that a traffic light signals “stop,” we are referring not just to a causal sequence, but to an established way of acting in response to a mark. The question, then, is not whether there are causal processes in cells or brains—there clearly are—but whether describing these processes as “signals” clarifies what is happening, or quietly shifts the description into a different register.

It is easy to see how the shift occurs. The language of signalling has a certain appeal. It seems to bring continuity across different levels of description, linking human communication with biological process. It also lends a sense of activity and direction to what might otherwise be described more plainly as chemical or electrical change. But this convenience may come at a cost. Where there are no shared practices, no negotiated uses, no possibility of getting it right or wrong in the relevant sense, it is not clear what distinguishes a “signal” from a cause.

This is not to suggest that scientists are careless, or that such language is used without awareness. Often it functions as a shorthand, a way of organising complex interactions into something more manageable. But shorthand has a way of settling into assumption. What begins as a metaphor can become, over time, a framework—a way of seeing that is no longer questioned.

The difficulty, then, is not simply terminological. It concerns what we take ourselves to be observing. If we say that a neuron sends a signal, we may feel that we have identified something akin to communication. But it may be that we have only redescribed a causal process in terms that belong elsewhere. The risk is subtle: not that we are wildly mistaken, but that we import distinctions that do not quite fit the case.

A more modest approach might be to keep these domains apart, at least initially. To describe cellular and neural activity in terms that reflect their causal organisation, without immediately reaching for analogies drawn from language or symbol use. This does not reduce their importance or complexity. If anything, it allows those features to be seen more clearly, without the overlay of familiar but potentially misleading categories. The question is not whether it is harmful to speak of biological signalling. It may be harmless in many contexts, and even useful. The question is what such language leads us to expect, and whether those expectations withstand closer examination. When we say that signs are present in a petri dish, what are we noticing, and what have we quietly assumed?

In practice, these distinctions often matter less than they appear to in abstract discussion. Work proceeds, experiments are conducted, results accumulate. But the terms we use still shape how those results are understood, and how further questions are framed. A small shift in language can redirect attention in ways that are not always immediately visible.

It may be enough, for now, to notice that the idea of signalling carries with it more than it first appears. It brings along a set of associations—about meaning, interpretation, and response—that belong most clearly to human practices. 

Whether those associations illuminate or obscure what is happening at other levels is not something that can be settled in advance. It is something that has to be worked out, case by case, by looking closely at how the language is doing its work.

Judgement And The Handover Of Language

Some forms of amoebae can discriminate between different strains of their own species. Quite how they sense the difference isn't altogether clear, but what should be obvious is that  no judgements are involved. To make a judgement requires reasons and it would therefore be absurd to suppose that single celled creatures have reasons for their behaviour. If microorganisms could reason, then perhaps we too would have reason to replace some of the highest ranking members of our legal system with bewigged protozoa.

Philosophers and psychologists quite commonly talk of "perceptual judgements". Presumably they do not mean to suggest that the capacity to see the difference between ultramarine and cerulean blue relies on the exercise of reason. So one could surely be forgiven for questioning the value of their tacit support of such a misconception.

Judgements are evaluative, and value is a thoroughly abstract notion for which only humans are sometimes prepared to die. It might be argued that many creatures value things — their lives and those of their kin, for example, or the food they eat. Many animals are certainly prepared to do or a great deal to ensure their own survival and that of their offspring. But is this because they know the value of life or is it merely instinct? Are instincts judgements? Judgement must surely be the very opposite of instinct.

Judgements are deliberative and to this extent all judgements require rational grounds. Judges make assessments and take careful (usually) account of evidence. Judgement is a disciplined practice that only the well trained can perform. Nobody is born a judge, but babies are certainly born perceivers — not highly skilled perceivers granted, but perceivers nonetheless and some of their perceptual skills are remarkable. In a study of of the crying "melodies" of French and German newborns it was discovered that babies mimic the speech patterns of their mothers. And a 2009 study found that newborns develop expectations of rhythmic beats that bring about a measurable neurological response when the continuity of the beat is violated.

From where does the capacity to make judgements derive, and moreover, how did it emerge in the first place? The first answer is straightforward. In order to make judgements — to reason — we need the categories and concepts but most especially the logical structures of language. Without these sophisticated procedural techniques, reasoning is impossible. Nonverbal creatures have highly sophisticated perceptual skills but they do not manipulate concepts. We know this because we know how demanding it is to learn concept manipulation: language. Every parent knows that the judgements of infants stand in stark contrast to their perceptual skills.

The emergence of judgement — of the concepts of good and bad for example, is less clear. But here is a speculative hypothesis. Our ancestors were making stone tools as long ago as 2.5 million years. Stone tools are time consuming to produce, they require extremely sophisticated skills and their materials can only be sourced in certain places. Unlike tools, behaviours are ephemeral — they disappear in the moment of production. An utterance can be produced but it cannot be exchanged. Tools, on the other hand, are artifactual tokens that endure and as such they are fungible: they can be exchanged. 

There is nothing about exchange itself that requires anything more than perceptual skills. To be a perceiver is to be capable of offering or accepting one thing that is indiscriminable from another. What makes tools different is that they have a dual identity. A stick used as a weapon is no longer merely a stick. But when a stick is not being used as a weapon it doesn't necessarily revert back to being a stick. If it is kept, it remains as a potential weapon: a tool.

I contend that this aspect of possession of useful artefacts is the very basis of language. It is the instrumental root of all of our skills of symbolisation (as well as numerous handy metaphors). Many animals use symbolic communication, but only humans exchange artefacts and only humans attribute value to them. To value something is not simply to be disposed to protect it. To value something is to know what one would (or would not) be prepared to exchange for it. Language emerged through our practices of exchange, of transactions and betokenings. I suggest that language is a product of the hand.

The Mismeasure of Minds

In order to tell whether something is fixed, one needs something else that is known to be fixed and can serve as a criterion of judgement. But how can one find that first fixed point? We would like some nails in the wall to hang things from, but there is actually no wall there yet. We would like to lay the foundations of the building, but there is no firm ground to put it in.” —Hasok Chang (2009)

When we perform a skilful action like catching a ball, is it necessarily the case that the brain also performs a series of skilful measurements and calculations? Are our skills of perception and intelligent action evaluative? Many theorists confidently assert that they are. I aim to explain why I think such an assumption is both explanatorily extravagant and a hindrance to enquiry.

The word “calculate” derives from the Latin word "calculus", which once referred to the stones used as counters in abacuses. In standard usage, to calculate something is to determine a value by the use of various mathematical operations applied to quantities represented by symbols. It is possible to perform many calculations without the use of symbols, but the demands of doing so (i.e. the quantities involved), make non-symbolic calculation extremely unwieldy. Certainly we have no evidence of non-symbolic neural calculation even in the brains of simple creatures. So if it is the case that brains perform calculations, then they must be using a symbolic system to encode information. Although there is an enormous quantity of literature on the subject of neural encoding, as yet no code has been identified or unravelled. This alone should make us wary of neurocalculation.

Symbols are highly sophisticated entities. The Roman symbol “IX” bears no resemblance to the quantity it represents. Nor does the equivalent linguistic symbol “nine". Many people in the world who recognise "9" and "IX" do not recognise “nine”. Turn "9" and "IX" upside down and their corresponding quantities change. And if you say “nine” in Germany the meaning is not a number at all. It should be obvious even from these trivial examples that symbolic representation is far from straightforward. Neurosymbolic communication thus carries an extremely heavy explanatory burden. Why, for instance, would brains need symbols if they were already so advanced that they could develop their own symbolic system? As brains evolved, how did the parts that didn't know the code understand the parts that did? Why do we have no evidence of basic symbols amongst simple brains? And why are we denied access to the computational power of our own brains to such an extent that we have to sit through hours of instruction and practice to learn just a tiny fraction of what our brains are allegedly capable? None of these issues refutes neurocalculation but they do help to suggest that we have little reason to be confident about its credibility.

And what of neuromeasurement? 

In 2009 Hasok Chang published a book entitled: “Inventing Temperature: Measurement and Scientific Progress.” In it he provides a detailed history of the many complexities involved in arriving at a system for the measurement of temperature. It seems obvious to us now that water freezes at 0 degrees and boils at 100. But in fact the variables involved, like chemical impurities and atmospheric pressure as well as the fact that thermometers themselves had no standard measure, made the whole process an extremely challenging one, requiring numerous iterative improvements, insights and innovations.

Chang raises a significant obstacle for advocates of neuromeasurement. In order to measure an unknown distance for example, a standard would first be needed. But in order to establish a standard, a unit of measure would also be required. According to Chang: "This circularity is probably the most crippling form of the theory-ladenness of observation" and is the very problem that has caused well documented difficulties in every region of the science of magnitude.

One thing is certain, brains did not evolve their own inner form of science and technology. But if it took science and technology to enable the invention and refinement of our skills of measurement, then it seems extremely unlikely that brains could evolve similar techniques independently. 

Could there be such a thing as a set of evolved biological standards equivalent to those developed by culture? Are such standards actually necessary, or is there a more simple and plausible explanation for the many sophisticated skills we possess?

Imagine a single celled organism that consistently moves towards one sort of thing rather than another similar sort of thing. In that case we would say that the organism is capable of discriminating between these two similar things. Such differential responsiveness is a commonplace amongst organisms and makes up by far the greater proportion of all organismic behaviour. When the iris of the eye contracts in response to bright light as opposed to dim light or when the liver produces bile in response to fatty food as opposed to carbohydrate we do not suppose that any calculation is going on, nor any measurement. The organism is simply behaving in response the presence of one sort of thing rather than another. No choice is being exercised, no calculation, no judgement, no theorisation, no measurement, merely evolved responsiveness.

Certainly the processes involved in more sophisticated forms of responsiveness are of a higher order of complexity. But the fact of differential responsiveness gives us good reason to first explore the potential of this more fundamental form of sensory discrimination in the actions of sophisticated creatures long before we go attributing skills of neurocalculation and neuromeasurement to brains.

When a child discovers by chance that a stick can be balanced across their hand, is sensory discrimination sufficient to explain their capacity to balance the stick? I don't see why not. To be disposed to move the stick in one direction as opposed to the other in order to maintain its horizontal position would seem to be a far more straightforward answer than neurocalculation and neuromeasurement.

Skills like balancing sticks are comparative. They trade both on sensory discrimination and — crucially — its lack. To be disposed to respond to two things (or two parts of one thing, in this case) in the same way because we fail to discriminate between them in one or more respects has significant efficacy. To know how to make a stick balance across your hand is to know how to make one side of the stick behave in the same way as the other side. In essence the skill is based upon an ability to make one side of the stick match the other in respect of the forces acting upon it: to make both sides of the stick indiscriminable from one another in respect of their tendency to fall. From the point of view of artificial intelligence this is an extremely complex skill, but from a haptic point of view it is child's play.

Thanks to Jason Streitfeld for the FB discussion that led to this post.

Acquisitions of Brain and Body

Like most adults I have a fair quantity of scars on my body, mostly on my hands. The majority of these marks and disfigurements are minor, nonetheless it often strikes me as surprising that so many of us manage to retain all of our fingers through life. Considering the many dangerous things we do with our hands, it is a testament to our skills and foresight (and no small amount of first aid and general hygiene) that our hands are often in such good shape.

We commonly speak of scars as acquisitions, as things we obtain through mishap and misadventure. Scars are additions, and sometimes, in the more extreme cases, evidence of subtractions from the body – from what we would otherwise have.

It is common also to speak of skills as acquisitions – as abilities we gain through practice and experience. Knowledge also, is a capacity we tend to think of as an acquisition.

To acquire something is to gain, or to form, a certain kind of possession, typically of an object or else a demeanour, attitude, disposition or tendency. In these latter cases the term “acquisition” is used in a technical sense that could just as easily be replaced with adopting an attitude, forming a disposition or developing a tendency.

In ordinary usage, acquisition most commonly pertains to objects or other forms of material wealth. To acquire a trophy is usually – trophy-scars notwithstanding – both to acquire an object as well as the admiration, acclaim or appreciation for which it stands. But to gain recognition is not actually to acquire anything so much as it is an increased likelihood to be treated preferentially by people in the know. It is very common for such social achievements to be recognised through the use of material tokens: trophies, epaulettes, titles etc.

So, like our less extreme scars, acquisitions are most commonly additions to what we already possess and whilst such possessions may take up little space, they do nonetheless need to be accommodated. Even digital information needs to be stored.

It is no surprise therefore that we tend to describe skills and knowledge in terms of content, as things we bundle away in our heads ready for later use. It’s as if our brains were vast repositories of information which we routinely access in the same way we retrieve books from a library or artefacts from a museum. If we acquire stuff, then it follows that we need somewhere to store it. And what better place than the brain? But what seems obviously the case is not necessarily the case.

Consider our hands again. When we learn to play the piano we do not speak of acquiring new additions to our hands. Our hands are not repositories. They do not store their capacities, even though they clearly have capacities, or at least they participate to a very large degree in the capacities of the person as a whole. When we learn a new technique requiring dexterity, we may develop the musculature of our digits etc. but there are no new hand acquisitions as such – not, of course, unless we inherit another scar or two. And if we are unfortunate enough develop carpal tunnel syndrome, arthritis or ganglion cysts these are not strictly speaking acquired – they develop or arise. The capacity was already there.

Many critics of the notion of mental content continue to speak of “skill acquisition” or “knowledge acquisition” as if there were no ground to be lost as a consequence. I’m not so sure the term helps us. In fact I think it may be a hindrance. Perhaps it would make more sense to speak of knowledge and skills in the same way that we regard the changes that occur in our hands when we learn a new technique. Perhaps we should make a point of regarding skills and knowledge as developmental changes rather than as acquisitions. You cannot acquire a development but you can develop a skill and you can develop your knowledge. Organisms and organs are things that develop. There is no room in a brain for any acquisitions. All the space is already taken. Knowledge and skills are develop-mental.

Tools in the Workshop of Language

Do nonhuman animals form and use concepts? Is their negotiation of the world informed by abstract ideas of causality, agency, dominance, submission, absence, etc? Do animals theorise? I intend to use this post to explore the view that conceptualisation is possible only in direct proportion to the capacity of creatures to use symbolic communication and to the degree that they have an evolutionary history in which valuable objects – tools in particular – are  commonly manufactured and exchanged.

Language is, in large part, a highly sophisticated form of symbolic communication. By "symbolic" I mean the ability to exchange thing A for thing B despite the fact that thing A and thing B need share no properties in common. For example, we commonly exchange material goods and services for mere pieces of paper despite the fact that the pieces of paper concerned have practically no intrinsic value of their own. We can only do this because we collectively agree to abide by the rules of monetary exchange.

Now, it might be claimed that I am simply setting the bar unreasonably high for qualification as a concept-user and moreover that concepts must surely be prerequisites of the skills that enable tool-use. I hope to show otherwise. Firstly, it should be clear that language is by no means the only thing that sets us apart from other animals. Our skills in the manufacture and use of tools and composite tools outstrip those of other animals by many orders of magnitude and we have clear evidence that our ancestors worked with skillfully crafted stone tools for at least 2 million years with untold years of prior use of sticks, bones, leaves and other raw materials. It would be strange in the extreme if this long history of cultural and biological co-evolution had only a minor influence upon the development and acquisition of our skills as language-users.

Secondly, the assumption that certain sophisticated behaviours can only be explained by concept-possession is only justified if every other explanatory alternative has been ruled out. It might be argued, indeed I would support the view, that nonverbal capacities in particular deserve to be examined much more extensively regarding their potential to explain intelligent behaviour. Elisabeth Camp (2009) contends that some very plausible explanations of complex behaviours can be provided by nonlinguistic compositional capacities, and on the basis of this research she rejects the claim (Cheney and Seafarth 2007) that baboon behavior can only be explained by a “language of thought” (Fodor 1975). Nonetheless Camp’s research, whilst important, is a mere synapse in a vast cortex of research that directs its primary focus towards what animals might plausibly think rather than what animals intelligently do.

There are two problems that seriously impede progress in this area. The first is the overriding reliance upon representational theories of mind and the second is an almost universal paucity in understanding of the nature and role of capacities of nonverbal representation in the story of intelligent behaviour. Theorists like Jerry Fodor clearly realise that there are certain kinds of representation that are simply impossible in the brain. So inner displays and inner models of the perceived world are straightforwardly ruled out. (Grid cells and place cells are held by many to be evidence if inner representation but other theorists – Hutto and Myin (2011) for example – convincingly argue that correlation and/or covariation do not amount to representation). Similarly, inner pictures have so far evaded the probes, electrodes and scanners of neuroscience. Only inner symbols seem safe from the scrutiny of fMRI and for this reason Fodor’s Language of Thought continues its merry march across the pages of books, conference papers and PhD theses (although its weakening stranglehold seems to be allowing a little more blood to reach the neurons of some thinkers).

Like Davidson (1982) and Chater and Heyes (1994), I hold that language and concepts are inextricably intertwined, and I know of no instance of claimed animal concept-possession that cannot be more plausibly explained by the possession of nonverbal (i.e. non-conceptual) skills. However, unlike Davidson, I think we can reasonably ascribe the capacity for surprise to animals, and once again the explanation derives from an account of the nonverbal capacities involved. To be a conscious creature and to act deliberately is to have expectations, but these expectations are not concepts. To expect a ripe apple to be sweet is not predicated upon a concept of sweetness. To expect the ground to be solid under one’s feet is not a theorisation. We do not need concepts to be surprised when the song we are listening to on the radio suddenly stops. Expectations are skills, but they are not conceptual skills. They are practical, not ratiocinative. They are nonverbal.

For advocates of inner representation, the act of perception involves the production of internal representations that correlate with the world. I agree that representation plays a vital part in perception, but I do not agree that brains manufacture representations in any shape or form. A much simpler, and I think more plausible explanation, conceives of perception as a cluster of skills in the production of public representations, as a readiness or preparedness to substitute the thing seen, touched or heard etc. for its duplicate in one or more respects.

Experience leads to the development of expectations about the regularities of the universe and of unfolding events. I propose that we first attempt to rule out all possible nonverbal explanations before we attempt to ascribe capacities of conceptualisation to nonverbal creatures.

One further point. Nonverbal expectations cannot be conceptual because, as Gareth Evans pointed out in 1982, perception is fine grained in a way that concepts simply are not: “Do we really believe the suggestion that we have as many colour concepts as there are colours in the rainbow.”

Many animals use symbolic communication, from dolphins and prairie dogs to bats, birds and honey bees. We observe such forms of communication in a great variety of quantities and degrees. But what we do not observe is anything like the degree of tool-use that we find in human culture. Nonetheless, if it is true that conceptualisation is in part enabled by the skills of symbolic communication then it should be possible for symbol-using animals to acquire one or two very basic components of concept use. It should be noted though, that a capacity to acquire one or two basic components of a broader set of skills and the acquisition or possession of the rudiments of that skillset are by no means the same. A fistful of clay does not a sculptor make. Nor is it necessarily the case that the mere acquisition, even of a large number of proper or common nouns for example, enables these to be manipulated and recombined in intelligible ways. And the question of how the skills of combining and contrasting concepts – of conceptual reasoning – could be practiced, refined and evaluated in the absence of social feedback would seem to present a insurmountable explanatory obstacle for advocates of private concept formation.

Concepts are tools in the workshop of language. But without the techniques that enable the skillful use of these tools, concepts are as purposeless as mere sticks, stones, leaves and bones.

The Certainty of Good and Evil

Bertrand Russell writes: "Most of the greatest evils that man has inflicted upon man have come through people feeling quite certain about something which, in fact, was false." But, to be consistent, the reverse must also be true: most of the greatest goods that man has bestowed upon man have come through people feeling quite certain about something which, in fact, was true. What otherwise is true love? So, it would be mistaken to conclude from Russell's remark that certainty is intrinsically malign or contradictory.

To say that there are no absolutes is itself a straightforward truth claim — an absolute. The argument should really end there, but clearly this has not convinced the doubters. So let me try to explain why I think relativism is an error of reasoning.

What is it to be certain of something? Is a gibbon certain that the branch is really there? What advantage would doubt confer on the gibbon in such a case?

Is this breath I take an instance of certainty? Is the evolutionary exploitation of universal regularities driven by certainty? Or is it more true to say that certainty is merely a characterisation; one of a catalogue of what we take (often mistakenly) to be our commitments?

It seems to me that the relativist begins with the possibility of doubt and extrapolates into barely plausible fantasy and then takes this as sufficient cause for radical doubt. 

But doubt, like certainty, is a concept. Does the gibbon doubt? Does a fly? Nonverbals do not reason. They have no propositional faculties. That is largely why they are called "nonverbals" after all.

Sure, a gibbon might hesitate (not a fly). But the gibbon's hesitation is not due to intellection. The supposition that facts (knowing-that) underlie all knowledge is the ruin of intellectualists BTW. No, the gibbon hesitates because it has insufficient knowhow.

The fact that we can conceive of doubtful things, that we can be ambivalent, equivocal and uncertain is no ground for rejecting all certainty. Likewise, the fact that we can take some things for granted is no justification for supposing that our extrapolations are also true. That, I propose, is the root of all evil.

Nonverbal creatures are never evil. Evil is the product of language users. It is a cultural contrivance—ideas and ideologies—that require systematic planning and, in their worst manifestations, the recruitment of others. Nonverbal creatures can be malign of course, but they cannot plan systematically. Nor can they recruit others because they cannot persuade.


Thanks to Brian and John for questioning my unshakable faith in realism and to Ashok for the quote from Russell.