dialogue with Blue Devil Knight
BDK: How much do the Balfour-philes focus on studies of common mistakes in human cognition that are typically weeded out only after the study of formal logic or mathematics? Such results suggest that what is especially unique about humans is not an innate ability to reason well, but our ability to use external symbol systems in a feedback loop which modifies our cognitive practices. This feedback loop allows us to escape some of our natural tendencies in reasoning (e.g., while it is common for humans to commit the fallacy of denying the antecedent, once this inference is made public and subject to empirical scrutiny, it becomes eliminated as an acceptable inference rule: it isn't built into our nervous systems).
VR: The feedback loop may be helpful for us in accessing what we know about reasoning, but I still have a problem. What we seem to be aware of when we reason is a truth that is not local, either spatially or temporally. How is that that we spatio-temporal creatures can be aware of something, like the law of non-contradiction, that is not local to space or time? Do feedback loops go up to Plato's heaven?
BDK: Most importantly, these arguments are sort of a tempest in a teapot in the absence of a good theory of animal cognition: if we don't know the basic architecture(s) of animal cognition, it is hard to argue about whether it could have evolved. Psychology has been building serious models of animal cognition for about 50 years, neuroscience has been studying it about the same amount of time, and we are nowhere close to having an accepted theory of such things. My bet is that in 100 years this debate will be approachable from a more empirically informed viewpoint, as there will be a naturalistic consensus based on solid data.
VR: It just seems as if the terms we use to describe our lives as cognizers, and I think, must use if we are to think of ourselves as rational cognizers, are terms that have to be left out if we are to follow the dictates of a genuinely naturalistic methodology. Getting specific mental content from physicalistically acceptable data, having genuinely normative logical norms, having truth and falsity, having mental states that are causally efficaceous in virtue of their content, are all things that, if you stick to the "rules" of methodological naturalism, you're never goiing to get.
BDK: There will still remain philosophical questions then, I'm sure, but they will be better posed (right now it's like philosophers arguing about the nature of space before Newton).
VR: But it looks to me as if the best models are going to be ones that break the methodological rules of science as we now know it. An account that is naturalistic in the full sense just does not seem to me to be a coherent possibility.
posted by Victor Reppert @ 11:56 AM
3 Comments
3 Comments:
How is that that we spatio-temporal creatures can be aware of something, like the law of non-contradiction, that is not local to space or time? Do feedback loops go up to Plato's heaven?
This is a red herring. The original argument is that we wouldn't expect nature to evolve creatures whose minds follow the law of noncontradiction. They don't need to have it explicitly formulated, to know the law. A monkey, for instance, might never believe A and ~A, and it could have cognitive mechanisms that prevent it from doing so (note I don't actually think this is the case: even people believe contradictory things, and it is the public symbol system loop that helps us modify these kooky thought patterns).
As far as the ontological status of the axioms or theorems of propositional logic (which we can use to evaluate an animals cognitive system), that is an interesting but different issue. I think that is much harder for the naturalist to deal with than the Balfour argument: not as hard as qualia, but hard and requiring technical expertise I don't have in philosophy of mathematics.
Getting specific mental content from physicalistically acceptable data, having genuinely normative logical norms, having truth and falsity, having mental states that are causally efficaceous in virtue of their content, are all things that, if you stick to the "rules" of methodological naturalism, you're never goiing to get.
There is a lot here, but this isn't an argument as much as a bald claim. Some of them have good answers adumbrated in the literature (content, truth, are dealt with by Dretske quite well: I talked a little bit about it here and here. I don't think he is the final word, but he needs to be addressed concretely). I think logical laws is a tougher problem ontologically speaking, but the Balfour argument is focused on the psychology of acquisition/evolution of minds that follow such laws, and I think what I've already said is enough.
I just don't feel the same confidence in your a priori claims about what the sciences of the mind will end up with. I think we need to get an empirical grasp on cognitive systems before making pronouncements. That's largely why I'm a scientist and not a philosopher (and it isn't just the antinaturalists that are guilty of premature proclamations about the metaphysical implications of any future science of the mind).
There is a big difference between you and Carrier that is worth noting. Carrier accuses me of armchair science and thinks the science has been done that supports his position. You accuse me of armchair science and say that the science is a long ways from being done that needs to get done.
At the risk of coming off as self-serving, I think those people at the lab bench tend to be much more conscious of our present technical and conceptual limitations. While I do think that a naturalistic view of the mind is made plausible by neuroscience (and I would say, likely), I think it is a mistake to oversell what we have accomplished. I think the best is yet to come. We have yet to find our Newton and Einstein of cognition. (Though I do think Dretske may be Copernicus...).
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