Abstract
Hutto and Satne identify three research traditions attempting to explain the place of intentional agency in a wholly natural world: naturalistic reduction; sophisticated behaviourism, and pragmatism, and suggest that insights from all three are necessary. While agreeing with that general approach, I develop a somewhat different package, offering an outline of a vindicating genealogy of our interpretative practices. I suggest that these practices had their original foundation in the elaboration of much more complex representation-guided control structures in our lineage and the support and amplification of those control structures through external resources. Cranes (as Dennett calls them) became increasingly important in the explanation of systematically successful action. These more complex representational engines coevolved with selection to detect and respond to the control structures of others. Since much of that selection was driven by the advantages of cooperation and coordination, in part these control structures were co-opted as external signals and guarantees, in cooperation and coordination. As the time depth of cooperation and co-ordination extended, these public signals of belief and intent acquired secondary functions, as mechanisms to stabilise and structure control systems, making humans not just more transparent to one another at a time, but more predictable over time. Mindshaping, not just mindreading, became increasingly important in our lineage.
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Notes
I think Dennett’s clearest statement of this perspective is in his (Dennett 1991b).
The originating texts are (Millikan 1984; Papineau 1987), with important additions in (Millikan 1989, 2005). Nick Shea developed his own version of this program in (Shea 2007, 2013), and further alternatives are offered in (Price 2001; Jablonka 2002). There are important differences between the different formulations of teleosemantic approaches; particularly in their treatment of agents whose capacities are largely shaped by learning, and on whether representational states carry Shannon information about their targets. Many of these issues are helpfully canvassed in a recent collection on Millikan, (Ryder et al. 2012).
For an important and innovative idea on how to distinguish between these very simple systems and qualitatively more complex ones, see (Trestman 2013).
That said, there are many controversies about both the nature of cognitive maps and their empirical signature: see (Shettleworth 2009) for a recent survey of the ways animals come by and use spatial information.
This point has often been made by those sceptical of the explanatory power of representational properties; see for example the discussion in (Dretske et al. 1994).
Such selective shaping does not require that the development of these mechanisms be genetically canalized (see Sterelny 2003).
Obviously, I only get to have a preference amongst superannuation schemes because I live in a social world which has built those institutions. But I only have a preference (as distinct from a guess) between the schemes because that social world also provides online calculators and other supports that allow me to estimate the different income and expenditure flows of the different options, at quite distant futures.
They are quite common birds, but the only nest I have ever seen was by a fluke; I happened to watching the bird in a creek bed as it disappeared into what I had thought was a chunk of flood debris caught in the twigs of a small tree.
Perhaps a sentence in my language of thought, or a distribution map in my inner field guide; neither very plausible hypotheses.
It is probably not a collective adaptation: specific ethnolinguistic groups probably do not form a metapopulation of such groups, with competition, heritability, and differential success; though they may have done in the distant past.
Mameli and to a lesser degree Zawidzki focus mostly on the role of mindshaping in development: adult attributions of belief, competence and motivation shape the development of those beliefs, motivations and competences.
Clearly, there is an enormous amount we do not know about the connections between arousal, mood, emotion, motivation and belief. But we have no reason to think that belief and preference are causally quarantined from more phylogenetically ancient mechanisms of arousal, and we have evidence of contagion-like subdoxastic triggering of these mechanisms amongst agents when they interact; for example through unconscious imitation (Heyes 2011).
It remains possible, of course, that construed as a piece of proto-theory, despite the utility of interpretation we may be radically mis-construing one another’s control states. That said, the broader the range of contexts across which we manage to coordinate, the less plausible that thought is. Moreover, as I have been explaining above, even if intentional interpretation is in part proto-theory, it is also a multi-functional social tool, and there can be no two opinions about its utility as a tool (thanks to Peter Godfrey-Smith, whose comments were particularly helpful here).
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Sterelny, K. Content, Control and Display: The Natural Origins of Content. Philosophia 43, 549–564 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-015-9628-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-015-9628-0