Does thought precede language, or the other way around? How does having a language affect our thoughts? Who has a language, and who can think? These questions have traditionally been addressed by philosophers, especially by rationalists concerned to identify the essential difference between humans and other animals. More recently, theorists in cognitive science, evolutionary biology, and developmental psychology have been asking these questions in more empirically grounded ways. At its best, this confluence of philosophy and science promises to blend the (...) respective strengths of each discipline, bringing abstract theory to bear on reality in a principled and focused way. At its worst, it risks degenerating into a war of words, with each side employing key expressions in its own idiosyncratic way – or worse, contaminating empirical research with a priori dogmas inherited from outmoded philosophical worldviews. In Baboon Metaphysics (2007), Dorothy Cheney and Robert Seyfarth offer an analysis of baboon cognition that promises to exemplify the very best interaction of philosophical theory and empirical research. They argue that baboons have a language of thought: a language-like representational medium, which supports the sophisticated cognitive abilities required to negotiate their complex social environment. This claim is intended to be surprising in its own right, and also to shed light on the evolution of spoken language. Because our own ancestors likely lived in a similarly complex social environment, Cheney and Seyfarth propose that the earliest humans also developed language first as a cognitive medium, and that spoken language evolved as a means to express those thoughts. There are two potential difficulties here. First, ‘Language of Thought’ (LOT) is a term of art, with much associated theoretical baggage and often comparatively little careful exposition. Thus, evaluating the claim requires getting clearer about just what LOT implies in this context.. (shrink)

The question of whether chimpanzees, like humans, reason about unobservable mental states remains highly controversial. On one account, chimpanzees are seen as possessing a psychological system for social cognition that represents and reasons about behaviors alone. A competing account allows that the chimpanzee's social cognition system additionally construes the behaviors it represents in terms of mental states. Because the range of behaviors that each of the two systems can generate is not currently known, and because the latter system depends upon (...) the former, determining the presence of this latter system in chimpanzees is a far more difficult task than has been assumed. We call for recognition of this problem, and a shift from experimental paradigms that cannot resolve this question, to ones that might allow researchers to intelligently determine when it is necessary to postulate the presence of a system which reasons about both behavior and mental states. (shrink)

Over the last quarter century, the dominant tendency in comparative cognitive psychology has been to emphasize the similarities between human and nonhuman minds and to downplay the differences as (Darwin 1871). In the present target article, we argue that Darwin was mistaken: the profound biological continuity between human and nonhuman animals masks an equally profound discontinuity between human and nonhuman minds. To wit, there is a significant discontinuity in the degree to which human and nonhuman animals are able to approximate (...) the higher-order, systematic, relational capabilities of a physical symbol system (PSS) (Newell 1980). We show that this symbolic-relational discontinuity pervades nearly every domain of cognition and runs much deeper than even the spectacular scaffolding provided by language or culture alone can explain. We propose a representational-level specification as to where human and nonhuman animals' abilities to approximate a PSS are similar and where they differ. We conclude by suggesting that recent symbolic-connectionist models of cognition shed new light on the mechanisms that underlie the gap between human and nonhuman minds. (shrink)

Bermúdez (2003) argues that (T1) nonlinguistic creatures can think thoughts about protocausal conditional states of affairs and engage in rudimentary forms of reasoning, but (T2) they cannot ‘in principle’ think thoughts about thoughts (propositions)—in particular, they cannot have higher-order propositional attitudes (PAs). I reconstruct Bermúdez’s argument for T2 and show that it rests upon an implausible empirical assumption and is, therefore, not a threat to current empirical research into nonlinguistic higher-order PAs. I argue that even on an interpretation of the (...) argument that would pose a threat to this research, a parallel argument would seem to disprove T1. Finally, I argue that on an interpretation of Bermúdez’s argument that would not pose a threat to the above empirical research but would still present a significant philosophical thesis about thought and language, the argument either appears to confuse thoughts with their representational vehicles or the representational vehicles of thoughts with those representations used to hold thoughts in mind. (shrink)

How do rational minds make contact with the world? The empiricist tradition sees a gap between mind and world, and takes sensory experience, fallible as it is, to provide our only bridge across that gap. In its crudest form, for example, the traditional idea is that our minds consult an inner realm of sensory experience, which provides us with evidence about the nature of external reality. Notoriously, however, it turns out to be far from clear that there is any viable (...) conception of experience which allows it to do the job. The original problem is to show that thought is rationally constrained by external reality. If sensory experience is to provide the solution--in particular, if it is to provide the answer to sceptical challenges--it must therefore meet two criteria. First, it must itself be `receptive'--i.e., appropriately constrained by external reality. Second, it must be the kind of thing that can enter into a logical or rational relationship with belief--it must already be `conceptual,' in other words. In arguing against the idea that anything could serve both roles, Wilfred Sellars termed this conception of experience "the Myth of the Given.". (shrink)

Abstract: I address the issue of how pretence emerged in evolution by reviewing the (mostly negative) evidence about pretend behaviour in non-human primates, and proposing a model of the type of information processing abilities that humans had to evolve in order to be able to pretend. Non-human primates do not typically pretend: there are just a few examples of potential pretend actions mostly produced by apes. The best, but still rare, examples are produced by so-called 'enculturated' apes (reared by humans) (...) and among them specially those that have been systematically trained to use symbols (so-called 'linguistic' apes). A hypothesis that would explain the lack of pretence in apes is that they lack the mentalistic ability of theory of mind. However, in the last years apes have been demonstrated to possess relatively sophisticated social cognitive skills, some of them ontogenetically appearing in humans alongside with or even after pretend play. As a solution to the paradox, I discuss a model according to which pretence is supported by a mechanism capable of computing intentional relations with non-existing objects or properties (Intentional non-existence), as opposed to mechanisms computing intentional relations with existing, although not necessarily currently perceived, objects (Intentional availability). Apes possess the latter, which allows them to solve a variety of theory of mind tasks, but not the former, which typically prevents them from developing pretence. (shrink)

Consider the task under which I labour: These are supposed to be talks in the millennial spirit. My charge is to find, somewhere in the philosophical landscape, a problem of whose current status I can give some coherent account, and to point the direction in which it seems to me that further research might usefully proceed, And I'm to try to sound reasonably cheerful and optimistic in the course of doing so. No sooner did I begin to ponder these terms (...) of engagement, than it occurred to me that cheer and optimism aren't really my thing; also that I hadn't heard of a topic in the philosophy of mind which seems to me to be other than a godawful mess. It struck me that my best course would be for me to change my name and go into hiding. Thus my first choice of a title for this lecture, which was ‘To Be Announced’. (shrink)

A phenomenon “emerges” when a concept is instantiated for the first time: hence emergence is relative to a set of concepts. Propositional thought and language emerge together. It is proposed that the degree of complexity of an object language relative to a given metalanguage can be gauged by the number of ways it can be translated into that metalanguage: in analogy with other forms of measurement, the more ways the object language can be translated into the metalanguage, the less powerful (...) the conceptual resources of the object language. (shrink)

SummaryNeither an infant one week old nor a snail is a rational creature. If the infant survives long enough, he will probably become rational, while this is not true of the snail. If we like, we may say of the infant from the start that he is a rational creature because he will probably become rational if he survives, or because he belongs to a species with this capacity. Whichever way we talk, there remains the difference, with respect to rationality, (...) between the infant and the snail on one hand, and the normal adult person on the other; this difference is discussed here.The difference consists, it is argued, in the having of propositional attitudes such as belief, desire, intention and shame. This raises the question how to tell when a creature has propositional attitudes; snails, we may agree, do not, but how about dogs or chimpanzees? The question is not empirical; the question is what sort of empirical evidence is relevant to deciding when a creature has propositional attitudes.It is next contended that language is a necessary concomitant of any of the propositional attitudes. This idea is not new, but there seem to be few arguments in its favor in the literature; one is attempted here.Crucial to the considerations advanced is the idea that belief depends on having the concept of objective truth, and that this comes only with language.RéuméNi un bébé d'une semaine, ni un serpent ne sont des créatures rationnelles. Si le bébé survit assez longtemps, il deviendra probablement rationnel, mais ce n'est pas vrai pour le serpent. Sil'on veut, on peut dire d'emblee du bébé qu'il est une créature rationnelle parce qu'il le deviendra s'il survit ou parce qu'il appartient à une espèce qui possède cette faculté. Quoi qu'on dise, la différence subsiste, en ce qui concerné la rationalité, entre le bébé et le serpent d'une part, la per‐sonne adulte normale de lcar;autre, et c'est cette différence qui sera discutée ici.La différence consiste, selon l'auteur, en une capacityé d'avoir des attitudes propositionnelles telles que la croyance, le désir, l'intention et la honte. Ceci pose la question de savoir quand on peut dire qu'une créature a des attitudes propositionnelles; on peut se mettre d'accord sur le fait que les serpents n'en ont pas, mais qu'en est‐il des chiens et des chimpanzés? La question n'est pas empirique, elle est de savoir quelle donnée empirique va décider si oui ou non une créature a des attitudes propositionnelles.L'auteur prétend que les attitudes propositionnelles s'accompagnent nécessairement du langage. Cette idèe n'est pas nouvelle, mais il semble qu'il y a peu d'arguments qui la soutiennent dans la littérature. On en trouvera un ici, où l'on montre qu'un élément crucial de a croyance dépend de l'acquisition du concept de vérité objective, qui ne se développe qu'avec le langage.ZusammenfassungWeder ein eine Woche altes Kind noch eine Schlange sind rationale Wesen. Wenn das Kind lange genug überlebt, wird es sich wahrscheinlich zu einem vernünftigen Wesen entwickeln, wäh‐rend das für die Schlange nicht zutrifft. Wenn wir wollen, können wir vom Kind sagen, dass es von Anfang an cin rationales Wesen ist, weil es im Fallc des Ubcrlebens vernünftig werden wird oder weil es zu einer Spezies mit dieser Fähigkeit gehört. Wie auch immer wir das ausdrücken, bleibt bezüglich der Rationalität der Unterschied zwischen dem Kind und der Schlange einerseits und der erwachsenen Person andererseits zurück. Dieser Unterschied wird hier diskutiert.Es wird argumentiert, dass der Unterschied in der Fähigkeit besteht, psychologische Haltun‐gen wie Glauben, Begierden, Absichten und Scham zu haben. Damit erhebt sich die Frage, wie man entscheiden kann, wann ein Wesen solchc Einstellungcn hat; Schlangen, wird man zugeben, haben keine; wie steht es aber mit Hunden Oder Schimpansen? Die Frage ist keine empirische, sondern betrifft die Frage, welche Art von empirischen Belegen für den Entscheid relevant ist, ob ein Wesen derartige Einstellungen hat.Es wird die These aufgestellt, dass Sprachen ein notwendiger Begleitumstand einer jeglichen propositionalen Haltung ist. Der Gedanke ist zwar nicht neu, aber es finden sich wenige Argu‐mente zu seiner Stützung in der Literatur; eines wird hier ausgeführt.Entscheidend für die vorgelegten Betrachtungen ist die Auffassung, wonach Glaube vom Begriff der objektiven Wahrheit abhängt, und dieser kommt erst mit der Sprache. (shrink)

SummaryNeither an infant one week old nor a snail is a rational creature. If the infant survives long enough, he will probably become rational, while this is not true of the snail. If we like, we may say of the infant from the start that he is a rational creature because he will probably become rational if he survives, or because he belongs to a species with this capacity. Whichever way we talk, there remains the difference, with respect to rationality, (...) between the infant and the snail on one hand, and the normal adult person on the other; this difference is discussed here.The difference consists, it is argued, in the having of propositional attitudes such as belief, desire, intention and shame. This raises the question how to tell when a creature has propositional attitudes; snails, we may agree, do not, but how about dogs or chimpanzees? The question is not empirical; the question is what sort of empirical evidence is relevant to deciding when a creature has propositional attitudes.It is next contended that language is a necessary concomitant of any of the propositional attitudes. This idea is not new, but there seem to be few arguments in its favor in the literature; one is attempted here.Crucial to the considerations advanced is the idea that belief depends on having the concept of objective truth, and that this comes only with language.RéuméNi un bébé d'une semaine, ni un serpent ne sont des créatures rationnelles. Si le bébé survit assez longtemps, il deviendra probablement rationnel, mais ce n'est pas vrai pour le serpent. Sil'on veut, on peut dire d'emblee du bébé qu'il est une créature rationnelle parce qu'il le deviendra s'il survit ou parce qu'il appartient à une espèce qui possède cette faculté. Quoi qu'on dise, la différence subsiste, en ce qui concerné la rationalité, entre le bébé et le serpent d'une part, la per‐sonne adulte normale de lcar;autre, et c'est cette différence qui sera discutée ici.La différence consiste, selon l'auteur, en une capacityé d'avoir des attitudes propositionnelles telles que la croyance, le désir, l'intention et la honte. Ceci pose la question de savoir quand on peut dire qu'une créature a des attitudes propositionnelles; on peut se mettre d'accord sur le fait que les serpents n'en ont pas, mais qu'en est‐il des chiens et des chimpanzés? La question n'est pas empirique, elle est de savoir quelle donnée empirique va décider si oui ou non une créature a des attitudes propositionnelles.L'auteur prétend que les attitudes propositionnelles s'accompagnent nécessairement du langage. Cette idèe n'est pas nouvelle, mais il semble qu'il y a peu d'arguments qui la soutiennent dans la littérature. On en trouvera un ici, où l'on montre qu'un élément crucial de a croyance dépend de l'acquisition du concept de vérité objective, qui ne se développe qu'avec le langage.ZusammenfassungWeder ein eine Woche altes Kind noch eine Schlange sind rationale Wesen. Wenn das Kind lange genug überlebt, wird es sich wahrscheinlich zu einem vernünftigen Wesen entwickeln, wäh‐rend das für die Schlange nicht zutrifft. Wenn wir wollen, können wir vom Kind sagen, dass es von Anfang an cin rationales Wesen ist, weil es im Fallc des Ubcrlebens vernünftig werden wird oder weil es zu einer Spezies mit dieser Fähigkeit gehört. Wie auch immer wir das ausdrücken, bleibt bezüglich der Rationalität der Unterschied zwischen dem Kind und der Schlange einerseits und der erwachsenen Person andererseits zurück. Dieser Unterschied wird hier diskutiert.Es wird argumentiert, dass der Unterschied in der Fähigkeit besteht, psychologische Haltun‐gen wie Glauben, Begierden, Absichten und Scham zu haben. Damit erhebt sich die Frage, wie man entscheiden kann, wann ein Wesen solchc Einstellungcn hat; Schlangen, wird man zugeben, haben keine; wie steht es aber mit Hunden Oder Schimpansen? Die Frage ist keine empirische, sondern betrifft die Frage, welche Art von empirischen Belegen für den Entscheid relevant ist, ob ein Wesen derartige Einstellungen hat.Es wird die These aufgestellt, dass Sprachen ein notwendiger Begleitumstand einer jeglichen propositionalen Haltung ist. Der Gedanke ist zwar nicht neu, aber es finden sich wenige Argu‐mente zu seiner Stützung in der Literatur; eines wird hier ausgeführt.Entscheidend für die vorgelegten Betrachtungen ist die Auffassung, wonach Glaube vom Begriff der objektiven Wahrheit abhängt, und dieser kommt erst mit der Sprache. (shrink)

Bill Brewer presents an original view of the role of conscious experience in the acquisition of empirical knowledge. He argues that perceptual experiences must provide reasons for empirical beliefs if there are to be any determinate beliefs at all about particular objects in the world. This fresh approach to epistemology turns away from the search for necessary and sufficient conditions for knowledge and works instead from a theory of understanding in a particular area.

Thinking Without Words provides a challenging new theory of the nature of non-linguistic thought. Jose Luis Bermudez offers a conceptual framework for treating human infants and non-human animals as genuine thinkers. The book is written with an interdisciplinary readership in mind and will appeal to philosophers, psychologists, and students of animal behavior.

To what extent can animal behaviour be described as rational? What does it even mean to describe behaviour as rational? -/- This book focuses on one of the major debates in science today - how closely does mental processing in animals resemble mental processing in humans. It addresses the question of whether and to what extent non-human animals are rational, that is, whether any animal behaviour can be regarded as the result of a rational thought processes. It does this with (...) attention to three key questions, which recur throughout the book and which have both empirical and philosophical aspects: What kinds of behavioural tasks can animals successfully perform? What if any mental processes must be postulated to explain their performance at these tasks? What properties must processes have to count as rational? The book is distinctive in pursuing these questions not only in relation to our closest relatives, the primates, whose intelligence usually gets the most attention, but also in relation to birds and dolphins, where striking results are also being obtained. -/- Some chapters focus on a particular species. They describe some of the extraordinary and complex behaviour of these species - using tools in novel ways to solve foraging problems, for example, or behaving in novel ways to solve complex social problems - and ask whether such behaviour should be explained in rational or merely mechanistic terms. Other chapters address more theoretical issues and ask, for example, what it means for behaviour to be rational, and whether rationality can be understood in the absence of language. -/- The book includes many of the world's leading figures doing empirical work on rationality in primates, dolphins, and birds, as well as distinguished philosophers of mind and science. The book includes an editors' introduction which summarises the philosophical and empirical work presented, and draws together the issues discussed by the contributors. (shrink)

Now in a new edition, this volume updates Davidson's exceptional Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (1984), which set out his enormously influential philosophy of language. The original volume remains a central point of reference, and a focus of controversy, with its impact extending into linguistic theory, philosophy of mind, and epistemology. Addressing a central question--what it is for words to mean what they do--and featuring a previously uncollected, additional essay, this work will appeal to a wide audience of philosophers, linguists, (...) and psychologists. (shrink)

What is the connection between thought and language? The dependence of speaking on thinking is evident, for to speak is to express thoughts. This dependence is manifest in endless further ways. Someone who utters the sentence “The candle is out” as a sentence of English must intend to utter words that are true if and only if an indicated candle is out at the time of utterance, and he must believe that by making the sounds he does he is uttering (...) words that are true only under those circumstances. These intentions and beliefs are not apt to be dwelt on by the fluent speaker. But though they may not normally command attention, their absence would be enough to show he was not speaking English, and the absence of any analogous thoughts would show he was not speaking at all. (shrink)

The idea that reasoning is a singular accomplishment of the human species has an ancient pedigree.Yet this idea remains as controversial as it is ancient. Those who would deny reasoning to nonhuman animals typically hold a language-based conception of inference which places it beyond the reach of languageless creatures. Others reject such an anthropocentric conception of reasoning on the basis of similar performance by humans and animals in some reasoning tasks, such as transitive inference. Here, building on the modal similarity (...) theory of Vigo [J Exp Theor Artif Intell, 2008 (in press)], we offer an account in which reasoning depends on a core suite of subsymbolic processes for similarity assessment, discrimination, and categorization. We argue that premise-based inference operates through these subsymbolic processes, even in humans. Given the robust discrimination and categorization abilities of some species of nonhuman animals, we believe that they should also be regarded as capable of simple forms of inference. Finally, we explain how this account of reasoning applies to the kinds of transitive inferences that many nonhuman animals display. (shrink)

One of the earliest issues in cognitive ethology concerned the meaning of animal signals. In the 1970s and 1980s this debate was most active with respect to the question of whether animal alarm calls convey information about the emotional states of animals or whether they “refer” directly to predators in the environment (Seyfarth, Cheney, & Marler 1980; see Radick 2007 for a historical account), but other areas, such as vocalizations about food and social contact, were also widely discussed. In the (...) 1990s, ethologists largely came to a consensus that such calls were “functionally referential” (Evans & Marler 1995) even if they did not satisfy all the semantic requirements imposed by philosophers of language. More recently, though, it has been argued that ethologists should eschew the concept of reference and return to a focus on the affective aspects of animal communication (Rendall & Owren 2002). We propose to take a new look at this debate in the light of recent developments in the philosophy of language under the heading of “Neo-Expressivism” (Bar-On 2004). This view provides two different senses.. (shrink)

I critique an ancient argument for the possibility of non-linguistic deductive inference. The argument, attributed to Chrysippus, describes a dog whose behavior supposedly reflects disjunctive syllogistic reasoning. Drawing on contemporary robotics, I urge that we can equally well explain the dog's behavior by citing probabilistic reasoning over cognitive maps. I then critique various experimentally-based arguments from scientific psychology that echo Chrysippus's anecdotal presentation.

By whatever general principles and mechanisms animal behavior is governed, human behavior control rides piggyback on top of the same or very similar mechanisms. We have reflexes. We can be conditioned. The movements that make up our smaller actions are mostly caught up in perception-action cycles following perceived Gibsonian affordances. Still, without doubt there are levels of behavior control that are peculiar to humans. Following Aristotle, tradition has it that what is added in humans is rationality ("rational soul"). Rationality, however, (...) can be and has been characterized in many different ways. I am going to speculate about two different kinds of cognitive capacities that we humans seem to have, each of which is at least akin to rationality as Aristotle described it. The first I believe we share with many other animals, the second perhaps with none. Since this session of the conference on rational animals has been designated a "brainstorming" session, I will take philosopher's license, presenting no more than the softest sort of intuitive evidence for these ideas. (shrink)

This introductory chapter explains the coverage of this book, which is about animal rationality and mental processing in animals. This book discusses the theoretical issues and distinctions that bear on attributions of rationality to animals and draws some contrasts between rationality and certain other traits of animals to determine the relationships between them. It explores the relations between behaviour and the processes that explain behaviour, and the senses in which animal behaviour might be rational in virtue of features other than (...) classical reasoning processes on the human model. -/- . (shrink)