Abstract
If we focus on current debates on how creatures revise or correct their beliefs, we can identify two opposing approaches that we propose to call “intellectualism” and “minimalism.” In this paper, we outline a new account of doxastic revision — “the first-order model”— that is neither as cognitively demanding as intellectualism nor as deflationary as minimalism. First-order doxastic revision, we argue, is a personal-level process in which a creature rejects some beliefs and accepts others based on reasons. However, it does not involve second-order thinking or sophisticated semantic and epistemic concepts. Besides defending that there is conceptual space for this alternative, we explore the possibility of extending it to some non-human animals. Based on our interpretation of some empirical evidence, we conclude that there are initial reasons to think that some animals — i.e., great apes— might be able to correct their beliefs in the way that our first-order model suggests.
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Notes
Whether minimalism provides a genuine account of “doxastic revision” requires further discussion. We will briefly deal with this issue in Sect. 2). In any case, it seems to us that it is enlightening to take minimalism as a point of contrast with the model that we want to propose. If minimalism does not describe proper doxastic revision, the comparison will help us understand why our model does that. If one thinks minimalism describes a lean but genuine variety of doxastic revision, comparing it with our model can help us understand why the latter characterises a more robust sub-kind of the same general process.
This is not, however, the only argument that intellectualists offer to defend their view. Some of them have also argued, for example, that rational creatures capable of revising their doxastic systems must be able to “step back” from their experiences and beliefs to raise the question of whether there are good reasons to maintain other beliefs. See McDowell (1996, pp. 11–12; 2009, p. 128–129) and Boyle (2011). For these authors, a creature incapable of such distancing does not count as a rational and doxastic subject.
Admittedly, numerous studies on metacognition may be relevant here. See, for example, Beran et al. (2006; 2015); Basile et al. (2009); Call (2010); Beran and Smith (2011). Nevertheless, there is disagreement on whether this evidence shows that some non-human animals engage in the kind of explicit meta-representational second-order processes required by the intellectualist account of doxastic correction. Carruthers and Williams (2019), for example, claim that the available evidence can be better explained in terms of specific first-order processes; Proust (2019) thinks that what non-human animals have is a kind of “procedural” metacognition which does not involve explicitly representing one’s representations, and Shea et al. (2014) claim that what non-human animals have is an unconscious, implicit, “system-1” variety of metacognition.
Some researchers restrict their claims about how animals update their beliefs to specific cognitive domains. For instance, Wang and Spelke (2002) point out that animal navigation frequently uses path integration. In this way, the relation of the animals to one or more significant places in their environment is permanently updated as they move (see also Tetzlaff and Rey, 2009, p. 78). Focusing on a different domain, Hoerl and McCormack (2018, 2019) claim that many animals have a capacity for temporal updating that allows them to deal with changes that take place as time goes by without explicitly representing time. These creatures operate with a model of their current environment. When they receive incoming information that contradicts some of their representations of how things are, they use their updating systems to change those representations, recording the new state of affairs. However, there is no additional representation that things were different before. Things are only represented as they are at present.
If one understands beliefs, even roughly, as we have proposed here, one can argue that we are justified in attributing beliefs to non-human animals whenever they satisfy two requirements. Firstly, their responses to the environment must indicate that their behaviour is (at least partially) guided by information that is not currently perceptually accessible but has been acquired in the past. Secondly, the flexibility of their responses must show that these informational mental states do not rigidly guide them to respond always in the same way. On the contrary, we must find that their behaviour varies in ways that appear to depend on how these informational mental states are combined with other motivational and descriptive mental states in their possession. Authors like Newen and Starzak (2022), Carruthers (2004), and Saidel (2009) provide several compelling empirical examples of animal behaviour that fulfil these requirements.
As an anonymous reviewer of ROPP points out, there is still room for articulating an “externalist” notion of rationality compatible with this model. Animals may be considered sensitive to changes in their environment and capable of “revising” their beliefs accordingly, even when they cannot be aware of the mistakes made and the reasons for abandoning them. However, this minimalist model is incompatible with an internalist notion of rationality and of doxastic revision, according to which rational agents must change their beliefs based on some reasons in their possession.
This assumption applies not only to the hypothetical case of Malcolm’s dog but also to the other empirical examples presented in the following sections. What we take for granted here, for the argument’s sake, is that our dog has an informational mental state about the whereabouts of the cat that is independent of current perceptual stimulation (since the dog does not see the cat anymore) and gets combined with the dog’s motivational mental states to produce her barking behaviour. In other words, we are conjecturing that our dog fulfils the requirements to count as having beliefs (in the diluted sense presented in Sect. 2).
We cannot fully understand the subject’s reasons for behaving in some way without locating that behaviour in a larger rationality pattern. Suppose we see a person flipping a switch. We can assume that this person wants to turn the light on. That is why she is flipping the switch. But why does the person want to turn the light on? If we realize that she wants to read a book, we can locate her action in a broader context of rational behaviour. This allows us to understand better why she initially flipped the switch.
The possibility of locating the creatures’ behaviour in holistic patterns of rational activity is a necessary requirement to consider first-order doxastic correction as a personal-level phenomenon. Nevertheless, it does not suffice to differentiate this kind of doxastic revision from minimalist updating processes. It seems to us that some other internal cognitive and representational processes must take place to enable first-order belief revision. In the rest of this section, we will try to provide a rough sketch of these processes.
Other proposals on how to characterize personal-level processes appeal to the notion of consciousness (Rowlands 2010, p. 144). Here we will favour approaches that understand these processes as subject to rationality constraints, leaving the issue of consciousness momentarily aside. However, many researchers think nowadays that consciousness is widely spread in the animal kingdom (Andrews 2015). Thus, it may turn out that the same animals that meet our criteria for personal-level doxastic correction also satisfy the consciousness requirement.
There is an important discussion about the ontology of reasons, i.e., whether they are mental states, propositions, or facts. See, for example, Turri (2009); Davidson (1980); Alvarez (2013); Scanlon (1998); Hyman (1999); Collins (1997); Dancy (2000); Sylvan (2016). We do not need to enter into this debate here. We assume that, though motivating reasons are related to facts, they have to be possessed (e.g., believed) by the so motivated subjects. Regarding this minimal assumption, all these positions are in agreement. This basic agreement is all we need to develop our proposal.
Of course, an advocate of the intellectualist model would contend that the dog does not behave moved by reasons at all because, for such a philosopher, reasons involve reflective capacities. But we have already criticized such a model above. The point of the imaginary example of Malcolm’s dog is to introduce, in an intuitive way, the first-order model. The dog is looking for the cat. At one moment, the dog is aware that the cat is not in the tree anymore. Later, she becomes aware that the cat is on the roof instead. The dog takes for granted —we assume— that the cat cannot be in two different places simultaneously. Having recognized the cat on the roof, she comes to believe it is there. The abandonment of her previous belief has happened because of a subjective reason (i.e., in light of how she takes things to be).
Although the verb “to learn” can be used (e.g., in cognitive psychology) to refer to associative or low-level processes, we use it here more restrictively to refer to a personal-level process of rationally acquiring a new belief, which presupposes an abandonment, for a reason, of an old belief.
Someone might object that these primitive representations might be merely perceptual or map-like instead of having a propositional structure. Hence, infants may not have beliefs, despite having these primitive representations since beliefs have propositional contents. However, these doubts might be dissipated or, at least, attenuated if we notice that, according to some philosophers, propositional contents can be instantiated in different kinds of vehicles (e.g., pictures, sentences, maps, etc.) and do not necessarily require complex cognitive capacities. For the idea that pictures can have propositional contents, see, for instance, Grzankowski (2015) and Kalpokas (2020). For minimal or deflationary conceptions of propositional content, see Sellars (1981); Schroeder (2006); Grzankowski (2013); Mitchell (2019) and Danón (2022).
Suddendorf and Whiten (2001, p. 630) also acknowledge that it might be possible to extend the attribution of these representations to other animals like dolphins, dogs, parrots, and monkeys.
An anonymous reviewer of ROPP has suggested that once we have criticized the intellectualist model, there is room for a first-order variety of external negation, which would require negating a propositional content (although not as such). How could this be the case? Here there is a possibility: instead of thinking: It is not true that a is F, which presupposes the possession of the concept of truth and meta-representational capacities, perhaps one could entertain something like this: It is not the case that a is F. We think that this is an intriguing alternative, but there are two caveats to consider. Firstly, since “It is not the case” has been traditionally understood as a mere variant of “It is not true,” if one wants to defend a first-order account of external negation, one must provide an alternative interpretation of what thinking a content like It is not the case that a is F would amount to. The following could be a suggestion: It is not a fact (in the world) that a is F. However, although this possibility does not presuppose the capacity to represent propositional contents as such, it still seems more demanding than internal negation. In thinking that a is not F, a creature represents a worldly state of affairs, for which she has to possess only the concepts of a, F, and negation. But it seems that to think that it is not a fact that a is F, she also needs to have the concept of being a fact.
Some sceptics about animal negation focus only on external negation. For example, Bermúdez argues that to negate a thought (in the external sense) is to represent it as having the property of not being true. And the vehicle of that thought seems to be no other than a sentence. Thus, negation requires language. Others, like Millikan (2004), take both internal and external negation as language-dependent and characteristically human. She holds that (internal) negation is an operation on the predicate of a sentence. So characterised, negation involves —Millikan suggests— an assertion of indefinite contrariety (to know what a is not is not the same as to know what a is). And, according to her, non-human animals, lacking language, cannot grasp indefinite contrariety.
Burge (2010) argues against this interpretation of the empirical data that chimpanzees have succeeded at several experimental tasks on “exclusion transitions” that involve different cognitive capacities. Some require that they track the location of a body even when it goes out of sight, others require that they have some understanding of causal relationships, etc. In brief, as he claims: “exclusion transitions occur across cognitively different systems dealing with different subject matters” (Burge 2010, p.62). According to him, this breadth of applicability of exclusion transition poses a problem for explanations that invoke proto-negation. Presumably, the problem is that these explanations require positing different pairs of contrary concepts to explain how animals solve each experimental task. In contrast, attributing them a capacity for negation provides us with a general and unified explanation of their results in all these different experiments. We believe that Burge is correct in highlighting that if some animals end up showing an ability to make exclusion transitions regarding all kinds of subject matters, then attributing them a capacity to negate predicates would give us the possibility of providing a unified explanation of their success, while a proto-negation account will have to postulate numerous different pairs of contrary concepts. However, it seems to us that the available tasks still deal with a limited range of subject matters. Thus, a more detailed discussion of this empirical evidence would be needed to establish exactly how many pairs of contrary concepts it would be necessary to posit to explain the data and whether it is really simpler to credit these animals with mastery of a general negation concept.
In this last example, chimpanzees apparently display the meta-representational capacity to attribute mental states to others. But doesn’t this mean that these animals can engage in second-order doxastic correction rather than just being good candidates to satisfy our first-order model of doxastic revision? Not necessarily. The examples mentioned involve, at best, the capacity to attribute perceptual mental states to others. But the intellectualist model of doxastic correction requires more. According to it, creatures capable of doxastic revision must not only have second-order thoughts about their beliefs, but they must also be capable of using epistemic concepts to judge the epistemic status of those beliefs. So, there are reasons to think that chimpanzees might still be the kind of creatures whose capacity to correct their beliefs is better described by our first-order model.
Natale et al. (1986) chose not to show the subjects that the small device remained empty after the displacement. This change makes their experimental task even more similar to Piaget’s original experiments with human children.
We assume that, to the extent that primary and secondary representations are (implicitly) treated as true, they can count as beliefs (that is, as mental states with descriptive contents that can be decoupled from current perceptual stimuli and guide the behaviours of their owners in flexible ways). This should be especially clear in the case of secondary representations, which are not limited to representing what happens in the immediate perceptual environment but can also represent past, future, or possible states of affairs. Insofar as it is justified to claim that animals use such representations to flexibly guide their behaviour, as seems to be the case in the experiments under discussion, we can reasonably suppose that there is an attitude of treating them as true or correct.
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Acknowledgements
We want to thank Andrés Crelier, Giacomo Melis, and the audiences at the workshop Filosofía de las mentes animales and the Normative Behavior in the Animal World Conference for their helpful feedback on the main ideas presented in this paper.
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This research has been funded by CONICET (under projects PIP 2021–2023 11220200101432CO and PIP 2021/2023 3 11220200103107CO); SECYT UNC (under projects 33620180100507CB and 33620180100163CB); and MICINN (under project NORMABIOMED, APID2021-128835NB-I00).
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Danón, L., Kalpokas, D.E. Doxastic Revision in Non-Human Animals: The First-Order Model. Rev.Phil.Psych. (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-023-00693-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-023-00693-x