Abstract
The explanation of intelligent behavior is an issue of the greatest strategic importance in any attempt to understand the conceptual features of the psychological, social, and cultural sciences. It is, however, too global an issue to be usefully confronted without substantial constraints. For example, a sensible beginning suggests that analysis should be at least initially restricted to the linguistically informed behavior of human beings, avoiding generalizations ranging over nonlanguage-using animals. In any case, it may be argued that the study of animal intelligence is conceptually dependent on the use of categories paradigmatically provided for the study of human intelligence. This, of course, is not to say that only humans describe animal intelligence . It is to say (rather) that animal intelligence is modelled on the human, in the sense that intelligence entails the ascription of propositional attitudes and that the structure of the propositional content of such attitudes is, and must be, modelled on sentences. Similarly, the issue may be fairly freed from the question of physicalistic reduction, in the plain sense that, should reductionism obtain, the phenomena of human intelligence would remain psychologically real, and the very success of any reductive effort would initially concede the apparent distinction of the phenomena thus reduced.
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Notes
See John Haugeland, ‘The Nature and Plausibility of Cognitivism’, The Behavioral and Brain Sciences, II (1978).
See Daniel Dennett, Content and Consciousness (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969); Brainstorms (Montgomery, Vt.: Bradford Books, 1978).
Jerry A. Fodor, The Language of Thought (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1975).
Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge, corr. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962).
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, Colin Smith (transl.) (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962).
See Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini (ed.), Language and Learning: The Debate between Jean Piaget and Noam Chomsky (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980).
Noam Chomsky, Rules and Representations (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980);
Jean Piaget, Structuralism, trans. Chininah Maschler (New York: Basic Books, 1970).
A full discussion of these views and of the cognitivist program is provided in Joseph Margolis, Philosophy of Psychology (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1984).
Cf. Joseph Margolis, ‘The Trouble with Homuncular Theories’, Philosophy of Science, XLVII (1980).
H. P. Grice, ‘Utterer’s Meaning and Intentions’, Philosophical Review, LXXVIII (1969), 151. Cf. also, ‘Meaning’, Philosophical Review, LXVII (1957); and ‘Utterer’s Meaning, Sentence-Meaning, and Word-Meaning’, Foundations of Language, IV (1968).
This explains, perhaps, Daniel Dennett’s attraction to Grice’s thesis; cf. ‘Conditions of Personhood’, in Amélie Oksenberg Rorty (ed.), The Identities of Persons (Berkeley: University of California Press ,1976).
‘Utterer’s Meaning, Sentence-Meaning, and Word-Meaning’.
Grice characteristically shifts from the intentional to the intensional, though he never explains or justifies the turn. Whether the change is benign enough is itself a matter of argument; cf. for example, James Cornman, ‘Intentionality and Intensionality’, Philosophical Quarterly, XII (1962).
Cf. Joseph Margolis, ‘Meaning, Speakers’ Intentions, and Speech Acts,’ Review of Metaphysics, XXVI (1973); and 7, below;
also, Hilary Putnam, The Meaning of “Meaning”, in Philosophical Papers, Vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975); Meaning and the Moral Sciences (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978).
Louis Hjelmslev, Prolegomena to a Theory of Language, rev. trans. Francis J. Whitfield (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1961), p. 9.
Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, Wade Baskin (transl.), Charles Bally, Albert Sechehaye, Albert Riedlinger (eds.) (New York: Philosophical Library, 1959), pp. 13–14. Page references are to the McGraw-Hill paperback edition, 1966.
Noam Chomsky, Language and Responsibility, John Viertel (transl.) (New York: Pantheon Books, 1979), pp . 140,15 2–15 3.
Hjelmslev, op. cit., 14.
Ibid., p. 14–15; cf. pp. 39–40.
Cf. ibid., pp. 21–23.
Hilary Putnam, ‘The Nature of Mental States’, in Philosophical Papers, Vol. 2.
Loc. cit.
Cf. ibid., p. 5–6 . Contrast Fodor, loc. cit., and Dennett, loc. cit.
Alfred Tarski, ‘The Semantic Conception of Truth’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, IV (1944). Donald Davidson has, more recently, attempted to sketch a theory in which Tarski’s account could be directly applied to natural languages, though the venture seems essentially programmatic; cf. for instance, ‘In Defense of Convention T’, in Hugues Leblanc (ed.), Truth, Syntax and Modality (Amsterdam: North Holland, 1975); and ‘Truth and Meaning’, Synthese, XVII (1967). For a favorable and unfavorable appraisal of Davidson’s account, see Gareth Evans and John McDowell (eds.), Truth and Meaning (Oxford: Clarendon, 1976); and Ian Hacking, Why Does Language Matter to Philosophy? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975).
Michael A. Arbib and David Caplan, ‘Neurolinguistics Must be Computational’, The Behavioral and Brain Sciences, II (1979). Their commentators take them to task for this, though one at least (D. Langendoen) argues that “linguistics must be computational too” (470): Cf. ‘One Author’s Response’ (Arbib), ibid.
Loc. cit.
Cf. Margolis , Philosophy of Psychology.
Saussure, op. cit., pp . 81, 84 .
Ibid., p. 84.
Ibid., p. 85.
Loc. cit.
This general view of Saussure corresponds to the extremely perceptive account that Roland Barthesaffords, in Elements of Semiology, Annette Lavers and Colin Smith (transl.) (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967), particularly pp. 15–22. (Page references are to the paperback edition.)
Saussure, op. cit., p. 14.
Ibid., p. 110.
Loc. cit.
Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977).
Loc. cit.
Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd ed. enl. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970).
Possibly the most extreme — curiously similar — opposition to the possibility of a rational method appears in the work of Paul Feyerabend and Jacques Derrida. See, for instance, Paul Feyerabend, Against Method (London: NLB, 1975),
and Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, trans. David B. Allison (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973).
Cf. Joseph Margolis, ‘Wissenschaftliche Methoden und Feyerabends Plädoyer für den Anarchismus’, in Versuchungen, Aufsätze zur Philosophie Paul Feyerabends, heraus. Hans Peter Duerr (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1981).
Noam Chomsky, Language and Mind, enl. ed. (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972). p. 83.
Cf. Jonathan Culler, Sturcturalist Poetics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975), Ch. 10. Culler considers chiefly the work of Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, and Julia Kristeva, in which — sometimes equivocally, the denial of a generative and interpretive system and the proposal of a système décentré are conflated.
For example, Chomsky remarks, contrasting his own view with that of Foucault, that “He [that is, Foucault ] is, I believe, skeptical about the possibility or the legitimacy of an attempt to place important sources of human knowledge within the human mind, conceived in an ahistorical manner,” Language and Responsibility, p. 75.
Language and Mind, p. 71.
Cf. Language and Responsibility, p. 128; also, Justin Leiber, Noam Chomsky (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1975), pp. 64–68
and Ned Block, ‘Troubles with Functionalism’, in C. Wade Savage (ed.), Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, Vol. IX (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1978).
Cf.Language and Mind, pp. 180–185.
Loc. cit.
For an illuminating discussion of the issue, see D. W. Hamlyn, Experience and the Growth of Understanding (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978), Chapter 7–8.
Cf. Noam Chomsky, Syntactic Structures (The Hague: Mouton, 1959), Ch. 2.
Language and Responsibility, pp. 148–154. Cf. Leiber, op. cit. p. 122.
Ibid., p. 193.
J. J. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979); and The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1966).
The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, p. 2.
Cf. Ulric Neisser, Cognition and Reality (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman, 1976).
The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, p. 141.
Ibid., pp. 140, 127. The concept of “affordance” is Gibson’s adjusted interpretation of the Gestaltist notion, Aufforderungscharakter (sometimes translated “valence”). Cf. p. 138.
Ibid., p. 129.
Ibid ., p . 130.
Cf. ibid., Chapter 15; also, J. J. Gibson, ‘The Information Available in Pictures,’ Leonardo, IV (1971); and ‘On the Concept of Formless Invariants in Visual Perception’, Leonardo, VI (1973).
Thus Gibson, ibid.: “What modern painters are trying to do, if they only knew it, is paint invariants” (p. 284); “But the essence of a picture is just that its information is not explicit” (p. 285). Cf. Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co ., 1968).
Chomsky,Rules and Representations, pp. 69–70.
Fodor, The Language of Thought; cf. also, ‘On the Impossibility of Acquiring “More Powerful” Structures’, in Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini (ed.), Language and Learning: the Debate Between Jean Piaget and Noam Chomsky (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980).
Op. cit., p. 142.
Ibid ., p. 143.
N. Tinbergen, The Study of Instinct (New York: Oxford University Press, 1951, 1969).
Konrad Lorenz, Studies in Animal and Human Behavior, 2 vols ., trans . Robert Martin (Cambridge : Harvard University Press, 1970, 1971).
Karl von Frisch, The Dance Language and Orientation of Bees, trans. Leigh E. Chadwick (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967).
Tinbergen, op. cit., p. 110.
Ibid ., pp. 41 —42 .
Ibid., pp. 25–37.
Bert Hölldobler, ‘Communication in Social Hymenoptera,’ in Thomas A. Sebeok (ed.), How Animals Communicate (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977), p.418.
Cf. Karl von Frisch, loc. cit.; J. L. Gould, ‘Honey Bee Communication: Misdirection of Recruits by Foragers with Covered Ocelli,’ Nature, CCLII (1974); J. L. Gould, ‘Honey Bee Recruitment : The Dance-Language Controversy’, Science, CLXXXIX (1975).
Hölldobler, op. cit., p. 449; Hölldobler mentions particularly, here, the work of H. Montagner, Comportements trophallactiques chez les guépes sociales (Paris: Service du Film de Recherche Scientifiique, Film no. B2053).
Donald R. Griffim, ‘Prospects for a Cognitive Ethology’, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, IV (1978), 535 .
Cf. Donald R. Griffin, The Question of Animal Awareness (New York: Rockefeller University Press, 1976).
Loc. cit.
There is some justification for so speaking, at the level of sponges, the Portuguese man-o -war, social amoebae, and the like — even of termites and honey bees. But the fact that the genetics of populations is not straightforwardly reducible to the genetics of aggregated individuals does not entail that populations constitute real biological organisms of any sort. Cf. Theodosius Dobzhansky, Genetics of the Evolutionary Process (New York: Columbia University Press, 1970); Mankind Evolving (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962).
‘Part and Parcel in Animal and Human Societies’, op. cit., Vol. 2, p. 147; cf. also, ‘A Consideration of Methods of Identification of Species-specifiic Instinctive Behavior Patterns in Birds’, op. cit., Vol. 1.
See Margolis, Philosophy of Psychology. Cf. Pylyshyn, ‘Computational Models and Empirical Constraints’, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, I (1978); also, the ‘Open Peer Commentary’ and ‘Author’s Response’; Noam Chomsky, Reflections on Language (New York: Pantheon, 1975);
and Hubert L. Dreyfus, What Computers Can’t Do, rev. ed. (New York: Harper and Row, 1979), especially the introduction to the revised edition.
Cf. for instance, J. D. Miller, ‘Speech Perception by the Chinchilla: Viiced-voiceless Distinction in Alveolar Plosive Consonants’, Science, CXC (1975); and A. M. Liberman et al., ‘Perception of the Speech Code’, Psychological Review, LXXIV (1967).
Noam Chomsky, Rules and Representations, p. 65.
Cf. Bourdieu, op.cit.: and Lucien Goldmann, Essays on Method in the Sociology of Literature, William Q. Boelhower (transl.) (St. Louis: Telos Press, 1980).
Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked, trans. John and Doreen Weightman (New York: Harper and Row, 1969), p. 12.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, G. E. M. Anscombe (transl.) (New York: Macmillan, 1953), § 81.
Ibid., § 242.
Cf. Hamlyn, op. cit., Chapter 6.
Cf. L. S. Vygotsky, Thought and Language, trans. Eugenia Hanfmann and Gertrude Vakar (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1962).
Lorenz, ‘Part and Parcel in Animal and Human Species’, pp. 147–148.
Bourdieu, op. cit., p. 78.
Loc. cit.
Ibid., p. 95.
See particularly Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. (from 2nd ed.), Garrett Barden and John Cumming (New York: Seabury Press, 1975);
and Paul Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning (Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1977). The latest remnant of (naive) romantic hermeneutics is represented by E. D. Hirsch, Jr., Validity in Interpretation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967); on Hirsch, cf. Joseph Margolis, Art and Philosophy (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1980).
Cf. Donald Davidson, ‘Mental Events’, in Lawrence Foster and J. W. Swanson (eds.), Experience and Theory (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1970).
Roland Barthes, ‘From Work to Text’, trans. Josué V. Harari, in Josué V. Harari (ed), Textual Strategies; Perspectives in Post-Structuralist Criticism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979), p. 77.
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Margolis, J. (1984). Cognitivism and the Problem of Explaining Human Intelligence. In: Culture and Cultural Entities. Synthese Library, vol 170. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-7694-9_6
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