Jon Cogburn's Blog

brief thoughts about the genesis of belief

I have this strange intuition that a lot of confusion in the philosophies of mind and language arises from the fact that representations are used to explain, first, two quite different activities: (1) planning, and (2) correction, and second, two quite different kinds of things: (3) individuals, and (4) groups.

Individual planning that leads to representational explanations occur when, for example, the crow goes offline and then suddenly performs some novel activity, for example bending the paperclip in a way that allows her to unlock the cage. The best explanation is that the crow was running out counterfactuals in her mind, counterfactuals that bear a systematic relation to causal facts in the world (see THIS POST and THIS POST for a link to a relevant discussions). Mark Okrent explains intentionality in this manner, and work on counterfactual and off-line reasoning by others can help fill in the details (my student Joel Okrent and I have just started a paper on this).

Group correction is more complicated. Of course, as Feyerabend said, when conversation breaks down, then we must resort to violence. But the enlightenment ideal that we can adjudicate differences without violence rests on what Crispin Wright calls "cognitive command," the view that when two people are disagreeing, there must be some deficiency in one of them or their environment. In Truth and Objectivity, Wright has a brilliant discussion of how this gives rise to representational pictures.

Recursive thinking in non-human animals

HERE. The book looks like it will contain too many problematic Chomskyan presuppositions for my tastes, but the review by Barbara King raises some really important points.

King calls the root of higher cognition "time travel." I know that some philosophers have been theorizing about "offline intelligence" and also the important role of counterfactual reasoning. (1) I think recursivity is a consequence of these deeper patterns (and I'm not at all convinced that all languages are recursive in Chomsky's sense, e.g. the Pirahã language), (2) I think that King's time travel examples show that higher animals do engage in kind of offline, counterfactual reasoning.

This is important to me because I think that offline counterfactual reasoning is exactly the place where it makes sense to attribut beliefs in a non-anthropomorphic way. This adds another layer to Mark Okrent's fine analysis of intentionality in Rational Animals, and my student Joel Musser and I are writing a paper about it. One of Mark Lance's colleagues is working on the importance of counterfactuals in basic reasoning, and I'm going to bug Mark for the guy's name and then e-mail him for a draft today.