Abstract
The opening chapter gives a presentation of Wilfrid Sellars’ distinction between the manifest and the scientific images of the world and compares it with Kant’s distinction between how things appear to us and how they are in themselves. These dualistic ways of approaching human understanding do not fit easily with what Darwin told us about the human evolution and the adaptation of human cognitive capacity. The chapter suggests evolutionary naturalism as a philosophical framework of human understanding according to which we are born as common-sense realists. Such a framework, however, also entails the risk that we misuse our cognitive dispositions by assuming that we can say something truthful about a reality well beyond human experience.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Sellars (1963), p. 20.
- 2.
Bas van Fraassen (1999) construes Sellars’ position as if Sellars “argued that the two world pictures are in irreconcilable conflict, and that the infinitely superior scientific image must eventually displace the manifest image altogether” (p. 2). However, Sellars did not say anything as radical as that, but argued pretty unambiguously that “the conceptual framework of persons is not something that needs to be reconciled with the scientific image, but rather something to be joined to it” (p. 23). So even though Sellars perhaps considered the scientific imagine superior, he did not hold, as Fraassen accuses him of doing, that the manifest picture has to be replaced by the scientific image. Sellars took the two images to form a single stereoscopic picture.
- 3.
Ibid., p. 40.
- 4.
Sellars (1922), p. 3.
- 5.
Sellars (1922), pp. 1–2. The context of quotation is “Philosophy like science is a human achievement, and so rests on man’s capacities. Unlike science, philosophy is forced to consider those capacities and processes, which make it possible. It is for this reason that philosophy is necessarily so engrossed with man. Knowledge is a human affair, even though that which is known is distinct from the knower. But man is part of nature, and so these capacities and processes operative in science and philosophy must find their natural explanation. Intelligence must be given its locus and attachments. In order words, science and philosophy are properties of man. To explain them, we must comprehend man’s capacities and his place in the world. The final problem of philosophy is to connect the fact and content of knowledge with its conditions. How does knowing occur in the kind of world that is actually known? Knowing is a fact and must be connected up with the world which sciences study. Thus a system of philosophy answering this question is the capstone of science.”
- 6.
There is a strong tendency in analytic philosophy to argue that conceptual and semantic (re)presentations go hand in hand. I think it is a mistake. Thoughts in higher animals seem to have been present long before our linguistic competence evolved. Wilfrid Sellars gave a sophisticated characterization of this tendency. In his (1963) he says about man’s manifest image of himself-in-the world: “Its central theme is the idea that anything which can properly be called conceptual thinking can occur only within a framework of conceptual thinking in terms of which it can be criticized, supported, refuted, in short, evaluated. To be able to think is to be able to measure one’s thoughts by standards of correctness, of relevance, of evidence. In this sense a diversified conceptual framework is a whole which, however sketchy, is prior to its parts, and cannot be construed as a coming together of parts which are already conceptual in character. The conclusion is difficult to avoid that the transition from pre-conceptual patterns of behaviour to conceptual thinking was a holistic one, a jump to a level of awareness which is irreducibly new, a jump which was the coming into being of man” (p. 6). In contrast, several studies indicate that nonhuman animals have thoughts, which include the use of different forms of nonlinguistic concepts. For instance, one comparative study conducted by Zentall et al. (2008) claims: “We suggest that several of the major varieties of conceptual classes claimed to be uniquely human are also exhibited by nonhuman animals. We present evidence for the formation of several sorts of conceptual stimulus classes by nonhuman animals: perceptual classes involving classification according to the shared attributes of objects, associative classes or functional equivalences in which stimuli form a class based on common associations, relational classes, in which the conceptual relationship between or among stimuli defines the class, and relations between relations, in which the conceptual (analogical) relationship is defined by the relation between classes of stimuli. We conclude that not only are nonhuman animals capable of acquiring a wide variety of concepts, but that the underlying processes that determine concept learning are also likely to be quite similar” (p.13).
- 7.
This is the estimate made by a recent study based on linguistic data, which is an estimate claimed to be consistent with fossil and genetic data. See Perreault and Matthew (2012).
- 8.
Abstract and contemplative thinking allows us to imagine possible scenarios for the future, but generally all it allows is expectations of a range of possible futures, not which of those futures will actually happen. The case of deterministic mechanistic prediction is relatively a very special case where we can predict the one and only possible future. That ability arrived only many millennia after the capacity for abstract thinking had evolved.
- 9.
Evolutionary biology is an empirical science, and if these sorts of claims are more than just speculative hypotheses, they must be justified by empirical evidence. In note 4 I mentioned Zentall et al. (2008). Further evidence can be found in Shettleworth (2010) who discusses the cognitive evolution in non-human animals.
- 10.
Newton-Smith (1981), pp. 40–42. This would be a philosophical (i.e., in principle) objection only if these alleged facts are necessarily, universally inaccessible. If there is a possibility of some future way of accessing these facts, then we would find out which of the underdetermined theories (if any) is the true one, and the realist position all along would have been correct: one is true but we are ignorant of which.
- 11.
I think that the usual interpretation is that science aims at such a description, but has not yet attained it; we have some approximation to the truth, but not the “final” or “ultimate” truth of the matter. The part that I find most problematic about this common characterization of the realist attitude is that it silently moves from asserting that science provides a true description of reality to the conclusion that science provides the one-and-only true description. I think one can still call oneself a “realist” and assert that there are a multitude of possible true descriptions—because nature still determines what is true—each appropriate or somehow useful for a particular context.
- 12.
Einstein (1949), n.3, p. 81.
- 13.
Bohr (1963), p. 10. The original English text has ‘a priori given’ instead of ‘given in advanced.’ However, ‘a priori’ gives wrong philosophical associations as something existing in the mind prior to and independent of experience. Neither does ‘a priori’ match Bohr’s Danish words ‘på forhånd givet,’ which means something exists pre-structured or pre-established prior to its experience.
- 14.
Boyd (1985b).
- 15.
Unless you already know what is in fact true, one may ask how you could know that any procedure is in fact reliable. The best you could do was to show that for a procedure that made predictions that could be known by direct observation, in the past, predictions made using this procedure were subsequently verified by direct observation, so we are inductively inferring that this procedure will be as predictively successful in the future as it was in the past. Ultimately direct observation is the only epistemic criterion for truth.
- 16.
Kant ([1787]2007), A 370.
- 17.
Ibid., A 371–A 372.
- 18.
Ibid., A 288/B 344.
- 19.
Ibid., A 369.
- 20.
One might ask which red is real, the physicist’s red as the ability to reflect light of a certain frequency or the empirical red delivered by my senses? However, there is no physicist’s red but only a physicist’s and a neuroscientist’s explanation of why red is empirically real.
- 21.
This train of cause and effect takes us only as far as the excitation of neurons in the brain. It is another step from that neurophysiological event to the red qualia that enters into my consciousness; there is nothing that is “red” in my brain, but there is a very real empirical red experienced by my consciousness (a.k.a., my “mind”). This is the big issue, though not entirely unexplainable in my opinion (Faye, 2013).
- 22.
See, for instance, Boysen (1993); Boyson & Hallberg (2000); Vlamings, Uher & Call (2006); and Matzuzawa (2007). Animals and birds may have intentions without being consciously aware of these intentional states. Some researchers, like Hare, Call &Tomasello (2001), believe that chimpanzees possess a theory of mind as an intervening variable such as being aware of their own intentional states as well as imputing intentions and knowledge to others; other researchers like Povinelli and Vork (2004) claim that all data can be explained as behavioral abstractions because of separate associations between singular types of perception and singular types of behavior. See Shettleworth (2010) pp. 441 ff. for a thorough review of the research data in this area. As she correctly remarks, “In the classification of intentional states, theory of mind implies second-order intentionality” (p. 441). However, I think from an evolutionary point of view it is much more behaviorally efficient to be aware of one’s thoughts and wishes as an intervening variable between different types of thoughts and different types of behavior rather than to behave on association of singular type of thoughts with singular types of actions. It is, of course, an empirical question whether or not an animal possess self-awareness and other-awareness, but I would be surprised if at least the great apes (and perhaps birds like ravens) do not possess some limited awareness of their own mental states as well as others.’
- 23.
There are two possible interpretations to what I am saying: (1) human and chimp cognitive powers are ‘homologous,’ i.e., derived from a common ancestor, and this explains their similarity, or (2) the two are ‘analogous’ or ‘convergent’ where evolution selected the two forms separately because they both proved positive adaptations for tasks the organism faced, i.e., the similarity occurs not because of common ancestry but because of common needs and environments. I think it is combination of the two, partly because chimp cognitive powers will also have evolved after the separation from their common ancestry with humans, but this is all together an empirical question.
- 24.
Chomsky (2004) and (2005) has suggested that the evolution of language was a very discontinuous process taking place as a single mutation around 100,000 years ago. For him, language ability consists of being able to construct and understand recursive data. Hence, Hauser, Chomsky & Fitch (2002) find that this ability defines the faculty of language in the narrow sense (FLN), whereas all perceptual, motor, and cognitive abilities that contribute to language but are shared with other species belong to the faculty of language in the broad sense (FLB). It has indeed been shown that the protein FOXP2 affects language learning as malformation of the FOXP2 gene causes loss of language skills, but the protein is to be found in animals as well as songbirds. The protein in humans is distinct from those observed in chimpanzees by the substitution of two amino acids, in mice three, and in songbirds seven amino acids. Others such as Pinker and Jackendoff (2005) point out that this disposition evolved more gradually on the basis of many mutations and that the precursors of language in general are not to be sought among non-human primates. Here it is worth noting that ever since chimpanzees and bonobos shared a common ancestor with humans about 5–7 million years ago, natural selection has been effective among their as well as our ancestors. So it is not at all certain that their manner of communication and our language ability are genetically linked particularly closely. The Danish linguist Ib Ulbæk (1998) thinks that language has not evolved from earlier primates’ ability to communicate, but from their cognitive abilities, i.e., as a non-linguistic understanding of their surroundings in the form of remembrance, recognition, and performance. In my view, Ulbæk correctly suggests that cognitive development from early primates to Homo sapiens has proceeded fairly gradually, while language ability has evolved in spurts. This hypothesis fits well with the notion that concept formation phylogenetically precedes language formation. In order for language to develop, a number of anatomical and physiological traits had to be in place. Upright walking not only freed our human ancestors’ arms and changed the shoulder blades, so we can throw overhand, but it also opened the pharynx and oral cavity. Today, it is estimated that about 100 different muscles are included in speech from the airways to the lips. In addition, many social competences had to be in place as well before the ability of language could evolve.
- 25.
Ruse ([1986]1998). The title of this book is Taking Darwin Seriously.
- 26.
Natural selection has to work with the materials that are available at that stage of evolution. What may evolve may be functionally the most efficient given what nature has to work with. If natural selection had been “given” different materials to work with, different—and perhaps functionally more efficient—capabilities or organs may have evolved.
- 27.
See Faye (2014), p. 103 ff.
- 28.
Ruse ([1986]1998), p. 188.
- 29.
Faye (2002), pp. 209–114. Here I associated metaphysical realism with the claim that things-in-themselves exist, that statements about these things-in-themselves are either true or false, and that we can obtain (a priori) knowledge of their truth value, whereas the metaphysical antirealism was associated with a denial of the ontological, the semantic, and the epistemological component of metaphysical realism. However, metaphysical agnosticism holds that some ontological statements about things-in-themselves are true or false, and we may have knowledge of these truth values. I further separated metaphysical agnosticism into a weak and a strong position. Of those two I defended a strong agnostic attitude, which I defined as the view that “denies that we can have true beliefs about things-in-themselves unsupported by any empirical underpinnings.” Today I would state my opinion differently. We can observe invisible objects only as long as we can make them observable to us. Hence, we do not know them as things-in-themselves but always as things-as-they-are-experienced by us. So I agree with the metaphysical antirealist with respect to things-in-themselves. There are no such things. But I am a realist with respect to truth. There are external truth-makers beyond our sensory experience.
- 30.
Ruse ([1986]1998), pp. 192–196.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2016 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Faye, J. (2016). Evolutionary Naturalism. In: Experience and Beyond. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-31077-0_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-31077-0_1
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-31076-3
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-31077-0
eBook Packages: Religion and PhilosophyPhilosophy and Religion (R0)