Abstract
According to Hutto and Satne (Philosophia, 43(3), 521–536, 2015), an “essential tension” plagues contemporary neo-Pragmatist accounts of mental contents: their explanation of the emergence and constitution of intentional mental contents is circular. After identifying the problem, they also propose a solution: what neo-Pragmatists need to do, to overcome circularity, is to appeal to a primitive content-free variety of intentionality, different from the full-blown intentionality of propositional attitudes. In this paper, I will argue that, in addition to the problem of circularity, there is another important problem that both neo-Pragmatist accounts, and Hutto and Satnes’s refinement of them, should also deal with: their difficulty to accommodate a host of recent empirical evidence and theoretical developments on the interdisciplinary field of animal cognition. I will call this difficulty the objection from animal minds, and I will present several arguments designed to show that, even though the notion of primitive intentionality, introduced by Hutto and Satne, may be useful to account for some of the most basic ways of dealing with the environment of nonhuman animals, it falls short of providing an adequate explanation of the full-range of cognitive capacities and behavioral dispositions that many animal species display. Thus, their proposal ends up being insufficient to help neo-Pragmatist approaches to overcome the problem of animal minds. Finally, I will suggest that overcoming this objection requires attributing to (several species of) non-human animals some basic, yet content involving, kinds of intentional mental states.
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Notes
By introducing this dichotomy, Hutto and Satne clearly depart from the orthodox assumption that intentionality essentially involves “having semantic content.” See also Hutto and Myin (2013) and Hutto and Myin (2017) for an extended defense of such view, according to which “mentality is not at root content-involving” (p. 11).
There is nowadays an interesting debate on whether some particularly clever non-human species – like apes— are sensible to some kinds of social norms. Defenders of the claim that apes have some basic, and implicit, understanding of social norms include Andrews (2009, 2013), Sultanescu and Andrews (2013) and von Rohr et al. (2011). Amongst skeptics, one may mention Slingloff and Moore (2018) and Rakoczy (2015). Now, even if we accept that some species do have social norms in a relatively robust sense, the problem of animal minds keeps its relevance, since there are still many other species that, for all we know, are not sensible to social norms and, still, show complex behavioral patterns that prima face seem to call for explanations in terms of intentional mental contents.
The notion of “excusing conditions” was originally introduced by Eric Schwitzgebel (2010) in the context of discussing his dispositional account of beliefs. Nevertheless, it seems to me that it can be safely extended to the present debate.
In this case, the process that leads to the relevant behavioral change is a process of associative learning, and the example will work only if we assume that the learning process involved is non-representational. I will make that assumption here, since it only makes Hutto and Satne’s account more difficult to challenge.
The original aim of teleosemantics, Hutto and Myin claim, was to offer a naturalistic biological account of mental content. In a nutshell, teleosemantic theories understand mental representations as inner states with the biological function of enabling organisms to keep track of items in their environment. An inner state has the function of representing an item if and only if it was selected for that task (i.e., if performing that function helped these animals’ ancestors to reproduce or survive). Hutto and Satne (2015), Hutto and Myin (2013), and Hutto and Myin (2017) argue that teleosemantics is doomed to fail at this ambitious original task.
It is important to keep in mind that according to REC defenders, even if imaginers engage with surrogate mental models, such an activity will be fundamentally embodied and enactive. Consequently, imagining will be strongly constrained by the actual ways in which the organisms engage with the objects modelled (and vice versa). Cf. Hutto and Myin (2017, p. 200).
Hutto and Myin also stress that an attribution of mental contents to an organism is legitimate when core features of contents – like correctness conditions— have a genuine role to play in explaining its behavior. I think this demand is fair, but I will argue that it can be met.
Knoll and Rey (2017, p. 16-17) claim that a good example of the incapacity to recover from errors is the ants’ impossibility of correcting their paths back to their nests after having been displaced.
It is important to bear in mind, however, that in order to be sensitive to their representational errors, animals need to respond appropriately to those errors (by correcting them). But, in order to do so, they need not represent, or conceptualize, neither their representational errors nor the correctness conditions of their mental states as such (Glock 2000; Knoll and Rey 2017; Danón 2011).
See Holekamp (2007), p. 67.
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Danón, L. Neo-Pragmatism, Primitive Intentionality and Animal Minds. Philosophia 47, 39–58 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-018-9963-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-018-9963-z