Language, Truth, and Literature[1](10/23/2011)Justin Leiber
1)
Genetic. Jaynes&Gombrich 2) Machine translation (old city)
3)transformations as shorteners
4) beauty—right
level for grasp; comp. math 4 colors suffice; Church/Turing levels
5) point
of view and the construction of consciousness. 6) story
space (comp. Library of Borges,
LibraryPoema . (accent
line over e) fiction poem
Poetry-English literary work in which special
intensity is given to the expression of feelings and ideas by the use
of distinctive style
Poētēs (accent line over the e’s) Greek maker, creator Proselatin—discourse
(sequence, particular order)
Science middle english—knowledge
latin--scientia from scire--know
Tekhnē (line over second e).art or craft know-hebraism (f**k) erkennen, connaitresophistes
(accent over
second e) become wise. Sophos wise.
Lit: (1) Digestible. 2) Memorable, packed, etc. (transformations
compress); epigrams 3) like illustrations:
essential features highlighted, dross removed [point
of view: I can read him like a book,
like getting to
know a lot of different people], 4)
Machine-translation (Wittgenstein’s old city), 5) Genetic: first stories,
Gombrich, Jaynes then us: construction of
interiority, (6) The pure math comparison: Aristotle on
the right size for beauty: four colors suffice.
(7) the Scientist may rule out anecdotes, but what if,
say,
five people recount the same anecdote (same story
as all but each person says they experienced the
same in their own case). That might be thrown out
too, but what of fifty or fifty thousand? But if you
say one report is 0 and with 5 perhaps also 0,
then why shouldn’t fifty or even 50,000 also sum to 0?
The problem with the anecdotal report is that
the subject is unique and un-statistical, one belonging to
hundreds of thousands and not belonging to hundreds
of millions of categories. Not one picked from
a “random” sample of Xers who have A and have
received doses of B and markedly improve as
compared
toXers who also have A, received does of B but
didn’t improve.
Another task is
to address the opportunities for people, individually and
collectively, to engage in
reflection and conversation about the sense of
their lives. We need
a sense of how a particular kind of life might be
experienced. Dewey
recognized the need and saw it asproceeding
through the
interaction between philosophy and the arts: ‘‘As
empirical fact, however,
the arts, those of converse and the literary arts
which are the
enhanced continuations of social converse, have been the
means by which goods
are brought home to human perception. The
writings of moralists
have been efficacious in this direction upon the whole
not in their professed intent as theoretical
doctrine, but in as far as they
have genially participated in the arts of
poetry, fiction, parable and drama’’
(Dewey 1958, 432). Work that points to the philosophical significance of
literature is not
peripheral but central to a philosophical question thatarises
in different specific forms in different
epochs. (Philip Kitcher 2011, p. 256)
The ideal
writer should have the passion of a scientist and the precision of a poet.
(VladimerNabakov)
Commonly, literature was supposed to educate and entertain, both features to reinforce
each other indispensably. For Ancient Greeks, Homer played such a role. My own 19th century
ancestors seemed to have regarded the works of Shakespeare similarly. In my early teens Poe’s
short stories, Dumas’ Three Musketeers,and Shakespeare seemed indispensable; latterly, William
Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Dostoyevsky, and Franz Kafka got added. Mere textbooks seemed
wholly unimportant. In the 1950s, British novelist and scientist C. P. Snow issued “Two Cultures,”
which distinguished a natural scientist culture whose ABCs were the laws of thermodynamics,
from a literary/moral/political culture whose ABCs were Shakespeare, the metaphysical and
romantic poets, and the nineteenth century novel. Snow does express a forlornhope that the rise of
social and psychological “sciences” in American Universities might heal this rift. Even more
recently, logician/linguist Noam Chomsky, suggested that novelists have more to teach us about
human moral/political existence than social/political/psychological scientists (Chomsky 1988. p. 159).
Canone offer more than this brief suggestion?
I FROM AYER TO ARISTOTLE ON LITERARY
SENTENCES
The element is an indivisible
sound--not every [kind of] sound, but one
From which
it is natural for a composite sound to arise. For wild animals
too make
indivisible sounds, none of which I mean
by an element. The types
of this
[kind of] sound are (a) the vowel, (b) the semi-vowel, or a consonant.
A vowel is that which has an
audible sound without a contact [between
parts
of the
mouth]. A semivowel is that
which has such an audible sound with [such]
a
contact, e.g., s and r. A consonant is that which has no audible sound with
[such] a
contact, but becomes audible together with those elements that have a
sound of
some sort; e.g., g and d. (Poetics,
p. 26)
Language and Truth in the title of Ayer’s book also reinforces the suggestion that
language most importantly consists of sentences that are true or false, with the true
or verified ones comprising our knowledge of the world. But narrations, expositions,
arguments, dialogues, dramatizations, etc., texts or linguistic forms in general, consist of
ordered sequences of sentences. A philosopher such as Ayer sees his proper task as
logico-linguistic analysis: his job is to determine the logical relationship between
propositions (equivalence, implication, validity, coherence, immediate or mediate inference,
argument, etc., and not empirical truth or correspondence). A synthetic (or empirical) proposition
hasboth analytic relationships of entailment, contradiction, confirmation, disconformation,
or irrelevance with other particular synthetic propositions and logical relationships of a sort
with analytic propositions (namely, every synthetic proposition is logically compatible with
any analytically true proposition (indeed, materially implies it)). On the other hand, analytic,
or logically true, propositions are logically compatible with any distribution of truth or
falsity among the synthetic propositions that describe our actual world. By itself no analytic
proposition or combination of analytic propositions can confirm or disconfirm a synthetic
proposition: at least one synthetic proposition must be added to achieve such a result.
For Ayer, philosophy in itself asserts no synthetic propositions but aims through
logical analysis to clarify the logical structure of scientific theories. So, at least from
Ayer’s strict logical positivist viewpoint, philosophy requires marshaling a series of analytic
propositions that resolve paradoxes and pseudo problems. Ayer calls these series “definitions
in use.” His familiar paradigm of philosophical analysis is Bertrand Russell’s logical analysis
of definite descriptions in which noun phrases of the form The-such-and-so are eliminated,
thus quelling the temptation to think that “The present king of the U. S.” has to name a
particular thing (Ayer 1952, p. 59-61). More sweepingly, global doubts about the existence of the
external world of physical objects may be resolved by showing that object language propositions are
logicalconstructions out of propositions about sensory experience. (Ayer’s claim that the sentence
he plucked randomly from Bradley’s book, and presumably the rest, are cognitively
meaningless because they are unverifiable, would seem not so much of a defect in that on
Ayer’s own view, since analytic philosophers deal in analytic, not synthetic, sentences, his
own philosophical sentences must also be unverifiable. They are arranged to dismiss various
metaphysical pseudo-problems by analysis, not by verifying synthetic propositions. Bradley
surely thought the same of his own philosophizings.
Perhaps more wisely, Aristotle took literature to be a form of narrative, or tensed and
serially ordered set of sentences, whether plain narrative in the case of an epic such as Homer’s
Iliad or dramatized narrative as in Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex. Contrary to Ayer, Aristotle took
literature to be a more philosophical form of narrative than history. History must countenance
improbabilities and incoherence, while almost necessarily failing the most basic requirement
of a good story, or successful narrative: an action, or plot, that has a beginning, a set of
assumptions redolent of future developments; a middle which follows surprisingly but inevitably
from this beginning onward; and henceforth, with maximum force and economy, to a climactic
and instructive conclusion. A most important corollary is that whatever detail does not contribute
economically and essentially to the beginning, middle, and end must be eliminated. The narrative
is chiseled out of a meaningless stony block. Unlike stone, however, the story structure is one of
severalpossible structures latent in the narrative space afforded by natural language and human
culture(s) (story space is kin to the design space that Daniel Dennett labels as the Library of
Mendel).[2] Hence as a novelist I should feel my pact with my reader is that within my story
everything stated as fact must indeed be so and that every fact mentioned must contribute,
and seem to contribute, to getting to the ending. This means that I might insert a detail
that contributes to the narrative’s natural flow and prepares the reader to expect finale X, while
I really have put it there as a crucial preparation for finale Y. The finale must unexpectedly
shock the reader but also, once arrived, appear inevitable.
Masterfully, Aristotle sets the fundamental rule of literature
Therefore, just as in the other representational arts a single representation is of
a single [thing], so too the plot, since it is a representation of action, ought to represent a
single action, and a whole one at that; and its parts (the incidents) ought to be so
constructed that, when some part is transposed or removed, the whole is disrupted
and disturbed. Something which, whether it is present or not present, explains nothing
[else], is no part of the whole. (Poetics, p. 11-12)
For Aristotle, “an action, or plot,” thus should have such an economically-structured beginning,
middle, and end. Just as in nature, Aristotle insists, the end is what determines and motivates the
action sequence; and the goal the protagonist generally seeks is happiness or at least the avoidance
of misery. In
Robert McKee’s handbook, STORY:
Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles
of Screen Writing, Aristotle’s directives and observations in Poetics, are explained and seconded in
twenty-three separate paragraphs, the gist of this compact practical manual (McKee 1997).
In Republic, Plato does insist that literature and art are counterfeit because they imitate
human activity and physical objects but lack the solid virtues of their subjects – a painting of a bed
cannot be slept on, nor a storied Achilles protect you from a material Hector. So it would seem a
representation is necessarily inferior to its subject. But, for example, a set of skillful anatomical
illustrations can be more instructive than an autopsy or even the plasticized slices of human bodies
in Body Exhibit displays, just as a good topographical map may be better than a viewing from a
helicopter or the ground. Da Vinci’s minutely-detailed, beneath the skin drawings of musculature,
bone, and sinew high-light the structural properties more than nature herself, artistry and science
together. Graham Greene’s Heart of the Matter tells me almost more than I can stand about how
guilt works into an adulterous affair, just as Emile Zola’s Germinal unexpectedly makes me
comrade to late nineteenth century miners. The best autobiographer finds out what was really
going on with herself years later, crystalizing, paring away the tedium, the dross, the unremarkable,
negotiating the truest story available to paper -- epiphanies, warts, somber reflections, painful
pratfalls and all. In the novel proper, author and reader are intimate strangers, caught secretively
outside their regular lives, the author birthing and baring selves, the reader embracing an intimate,
face-to-face affair of several rapt hours, with a most private Homer. The author does do the
talkingbut, like an autocrat, you can drop the curtain at will. (Although Republic suggests
systematiccontrol and reform of stories, art, music, drama, and
myths for children and the hoi
polloi, all this is dropped for those who graduate from basic education and military training.
Still, here and in some other dialogues, Plato sticks to the claim that dramatic narrations and art,
as imitations of imitations, are at third remove from reality. That arguably the most poetic of
philosophers should have condemned his most distinctive virtue can seem puzzling. But, as usual
with this most playful of philosophers, Plato gives us a clear answer in Phaedrus, his most pastoral
and intimate dialogue, centering philosophically on love and rhetorical poetry. Yes, the imitation
the poet makes is at third remove from reality. But the poet can be inspired, metaphorically
occupied by the muse, madly glimpsing the form directly. The narrative is that Phaedrus is
memorizing a speech of Lysias that argues a youth should pick a nonlover over a lover. Socrates
jealouslyshows Phaedrus that he can do the argument better than Lysias. But then, berating
himself, Socrates confesses that he is, as was Lysias, presenting a false speech, an insult to Love
by the“nonlover” who is just a deceptive lover (luster) after all. Now Socrates, inspired, gives a
trueaccount, a philosophically inspired speech that is also an act of genuine love. It is tribute to
Plato’s philosophical and literary mastery, and the rich narrative structure he forged, that he
managed to pull it off. In Symposium he has the cheek to show he can win the prize for tragedy
and for comedy in one go.)
In the fragments of On Poets, in keeping with his claim that literature is more philosophical
than history, Aristotle marks a notable exception to the happiness or misery ending, describing the
Platonic dialogue (whether dramatic or narrative) as representational, narrative/dramatic literature,
while simultaneously and essentially philosophy as well (Poetics, p. 56). Here Aristotle suggests a
considerable extension, for it would seem that the unity of action is the quest for an answer to a
question, presumably deriving from the elenchus or “demolition” in which the victor is the
questioner or the maintainer of a thesis, all depending on whether the questioner can drive the
maintainer into contradiction or whether the maintainer survives with thesis intact. Many of the
dialogues deploy a more dialectical and cooperative quest for truth. Most are rich in humor,
irony, and revealing characterizations, with Protagoras, Gorgias, Phaedrus, Thrasymachus,
Alcibiades, Parmenides, and in Symposium, Agathonand Aristophanes as well, all taking their
bows alongside Socrates.
An individual human life or national history lacks the unity or universalities of
representational literature. Nor does, as Aristotle notes, considering Homer’s Iliad, a war:
Homer’s own action filled account, or story, begins with the Wrath of Achilles which leads
fatefully into a connected series of tragic events, finally waning when Achilles surrenders
Hector’s mutilated body to Hector’s father, King Priam. And of course, Oedipus’ life, and
certainly his beginnings, are incalculably improbable – indeed, so in a sense is every individual
human life a bizarre collection of anecdotes, one uniquely structured as a snowflake . The Greek
critical accusation deus ex machina is leveled not against an improbable beginning to a drama but
to an extravagant ending that does not follow logically (in Medea a charioted god is craned in
to bear her away, not unlike the sophomoric “then I woke up and it was all a dream”).
However, once we arrive at Sophocles’s beginning, when the prophecy arrives that the
plague upon Thebes will persist until the killer of Laius, the previous King, is exiled, then events
follow with devastating inevitably, every momentary up crushed ever more down conclusively
until the blind man sees. “I can read him like a book,” suggests a literary standard of
transparency, coherence, and predictability. Indeed, Oedipus Rex clearly anticipates Edger
Allen Poe and Conan Doyle in that most logic bound, inductive, and instructive narrative
genre, the detective story. A corollary is that the personalities and thoughts of the narrative’s
characters are subordinate: they must fit their role in the narrative. (Just because literary
narration is more philosophical than history, it is no literary defect but a mere historical
curiosity
that Charles Dodgson’s original narration of Alice’s Adventures Underground
should have described the day as warm and sunny while the Oxford Weather Station
should have reported clouds and rain. While the dotty charm of a white rabbit encased in a
brightlycolored waistcoat, checking his large brass watch and muttering “I’m late, I’m late,”
beforedisappearing underground, positively invites the sublimely intrepid Alice to scurry
pellmell after him, neither sustaining scrape nor mud stain nor darkness in their descent below.)
We
should perhaps abandon the strict assumption that Ayer rightly holds that most
or all of
the sentences of a literary
narrative are individually literally false – or that the sentence he took from
F. H. Bradley, “the Absolute enters into, but is itself incapable of, evolution and progress” was
plucked “at random” from a random collection of meaningless sentences. In both cases we expect
various kinds of logical and syntactical connections among its sentential surroundings. In first person
narration, for example, the “I” always refers to the same individual as the ordered sentences proceed.
If the burglar crawls through the window wearing a black denim jacket, we rightly cavil if he,
moments later, “shoves the pearls into the pocket of his tweed jacket.” If the omniscient narrator
says “the barber shaved him,” the him in question cannot be the barber. “He awoke with a start,
listened for her even breathing, and then slowly eased from their bed” logically entails that (1) he
was asleep, (2) after awakening he determined that it was likely she was asleep, (3) he then got out
of bed. Given deictic information earlier in the narrative, we could replace the pronouns with proper
names and replace tense with clock and calendar time, etc.
Similarly, if Bradley argues, roughly, that (A) the Absolute is unchanging and that (B) the
Absolute can effect change in other things which evolve and progress, we find it reasonable
that he concludes that (C) the Absolute enters into, but is itself incapable of evolution and progress.
I might even say that it is logical or analytic! Indeed, in the very sentence that he quotes from
Bradley, Ayer changes Bradley’s words “And it…” to “the Absolute…” We have to trace the
reference of Bradley’s “it” back through four sentences to find its antecedent, and our tracing it to
there requires that we closely follow the syntax to link “This one Reality” through “that Whole” and
“It” to get to “the Absolute.”
[P]ure spirit is not realized except in the Absolute. It can never appear as such and with its
full character in the scale of existence. Perfection and individuality belong only to that
Whole in which all degrees alike are at once present and absorbed. This one Reality of
existence can, as such, nowhere exist among phenomena. And it enters into, but is itself
incapable of, evolution and progress. (Bradley 1893, p. 499)
Stories are equipment for living. (Kenneth Burke
1974)
II Natural Language Linguistics
and Literature.
In Poetics, Aristotle helpfully also
provides a list of “Parts of Diction” from the simplest to
the most complex: “Letter [phoneme], syllable, connecting
word, noun/adjective, verb, inflection or
case, sentence or phrase utterance (a significant sound
some part of which signifies something by
itself),” adding, in keeping with the claim of current day
linguistics that there is, syntactically
speaking no longest sentence or syntactic structure,
An
utterance can be single in one of two ways, either (a) by signifying one thing,
or (b) by a
conjunction of several things. E.g. the Iliad is one by a conjunction [of many
things], but the
definition of a human being is one by signifying one thing. (Poetics, p, 28).
Perhaps the simplest
way recent linguists seek to prove that there is no longest English sentence
is to employ a recursive
rule to the effect that two well-formed sentences can be made into a third
sentence
by conjoining them
with the word and. But this is not a helpful, nor a sufficiently
fine-grained, way to
make the point: you
could, following the crude rule, simply run on indefinitely with "It is
flat and it is flat
and it is flat and . .
. " or join by and a random list of sentences with no coherent
anaphoric, implicative,
logical, or illocutionary
interrelationship (reminiscent of the atomic propositions of Wittgenstein's Tractatus).
However, Homer’s Iliad would fit the bill.A second
paradigmatic claim of contemporary linguistics
is that what we
natively and consciously hear or say as a sentence is generated
characteristically as
a hierarchical
merger, with deletion, of subsidiary sentences. Equally, in coherent discourse,
anaphoric and implicative
relationships, etc., show us that several sentences are indeed one sentence.
So the point is that
much the same grammatical restraints that determine the logical/semantical/
syntactical properties of
sentences are also those that govern collections of sentences.
The imperative sentence,
"Call me Ishmael," requires that the pronoun and noun be
co-referential.
Equally it initiates
a book length first person narrative within which the first person singular
pronouns and
"Ishmael"
will continue, for the same syntactical reasons, to be co-referential
(similarly with the richly-
structured narrative web of
nominal and pronominal references to other personae with their attendant
characterizations and actions). All
this with the demands and possibilities of consistency, coherence, and
implication, of elegant detail,
striking portraiture, and expressive power that this vast first person
narrative
act afforded Herman
Melville. The possibility of structures such as these gives full, fine-grained
richness
to the claim that
there is no longest sentence. In Requiem for a Nun William Faulkner does
indeed begin
with a sentence that
only gets a period at the book's end. But he does not add logician's ands
between
sentences that otherwise have
no grammatical relationships, rather he makes use of the rich panoply of
syntactical devices (the whens, wheres,whichs, whos,
buts, durings, sinces, sosands, etc.) through which
we indicate
grammatical relationships within complex sentences (or between sentences). That
Faulkner
mostly manages to pull off
his "one sentence" narrative, that Requiem for a Nun is not
difficult to read
and make sense of as a
story, that it has so much the sinewy cadences and anaphora of the oral story
telling that we soon forget
the lack of dots, strongly suggests that narratives at provide the richest and
most intriguing actual
exemplifications of the "no longest sentence" thesis. In the heyday
of behaviorism,
the word was seven
unrelated items, plus or minus two, can be stored in short term memory. But
many
individuals can memorize a play
or even an epic, given the coherences and chiseled economies of
well-built narratives. (In an
off-hand fashion, Quine does tell us that the inventory of logical words is
no, un-,
if, then, and, etc., leaving out any verbs, nouns, or quantifiers (Quine 1961, p.
25). But
surely the near universal
linguist’s distinction between the finite few hundred syncategorical form words
and the content words
better suggests that the Is, mes, yous,
wes, theys, etc., the whichs, whos, buts,
thats, etc., the iss,
wass, bes, hass, etc., ins, ofs,durings, sinces,
sos, etc. have as much place in the logic
business, as Quine’s favored
few.)
Linguists do tell us that there
are no syntactical limits on sentence length, but there are
performance limitations. Before
the Iliad could be written down,
well-trained story tellers had it stored
in memory and probably
could have told the whole story at one go but after a few hours his
performance would have
deteriorated and, besides, much of his audience would have lost attention or
nodded off. Aristotle does
applaud Homer for compressing a lengthy war into a few days of unified
action but he also rated
epics below tragedies in part because epic’s length lacked the unified impact
in performance that
characterized tragedy. Indeed, Aristotle compares a beautiful natural organism
to
a beautiful
narrative, reminding one of Kant’s Critique
of Judgment, which parallels natural and
artistic beauty.
Aristotle doesn’t treat the
questions that arise when a narration or play has an audience quite
different from the one the original author expected, nor the
narrative complexities that gave
rise to the modern syntactically third person narration
with effectively first person point-of-view.
Nor
perforce does Aristotle have much to say about today’s issue of genre. For him,
the tragic
protagonist is of “high station,” royalty, whose familial
“occupation” is ruling, war, and adventure
quests (winning favorites through to our nineteenth
century). For Aristotle, the necessities and
probabilities central to the action are universal, personal,
familial, military, and political (and, dare
I
say, philosophical). While Aristotle insists on necessities and probabilities
for the action sequence
and that hence literature is more philosophical and
instructive than history, Aristotle does provide a
distinction between a seemingly highly improbable possibility and
a seemingly believable
impossibility. For artistry the latter is to be preferred when
unavoidable, though usually in tandem
entertainment sometimes trumps instruction. Superior tragedy
maximizes the emotional impact of
catharsis of pity and fear. As to whether this emotional
experience is good in general is a subject
for politics and psychology. But Aristotle takes it as
obvious that humans take delight fused with
comprehension in imitations and simulations.
Today, the most common advice
offered would be writers is write about what you know
intimately. Dashell Hamett
was a Pinkerton detective before he started writing his tersely written
novels.
Le Carre, in British Military Intelligence, Ernst Hemingway, a soldier, a war reporter,
big game
hunter, and marlin fisherman before he wrote of such things. Iris Murdoch was
an
Oxford
Don before she started writing about them. William Faulkner wrote
most of
his twenty –odd novels about Yohnapataupha County, which bore a striking
resemblance
to the
county where he spent most of his life. Iris Murdoch became an Oxford Don
before she
started
writing about them. Virginia Wolfe wrote about amalgams of people she knew,
about
occupations
and problems she knew intimately. Arthur Conan-Doyle was a physician, whose
mentor,
Dr. Joseph Bell, delighted in deducing his patient’s occupations and
difficulties from
a minute
examination of their bodies. Herman Melville was a whaler, and wrote two books
about the
trade before he wrote his masterwork. Russian aristocrat Lev Tolstoy spent
several years in
the
Russian army before writing War and Peace
and Hadji Murad.
Plainly, today’s novels may
concern themselves with, even specialize in, the necessities
and probabilities, indeed instruction and insights of,
criminal matters (detective stories,
police procedural, and judicial), fantasy and science
fiction, romance, medical etc., plus
as usual the staples of war, politics, coming-of-age
novels and the human condition, the
seven acts that Shakespeare’s Jacques lists – infancy, scholar, lover, soldier, justice, age,
second childhood – and occupation (in Death
of a Salesman, Arthur Miller deliberately replaces
Aristotle’s
aristocratic protagonist of “high station” with Willy Loman, salesman).
Professional
grade know-how is often highly important and hypnotically
instructive; the coherence, terse
compression, and knowledgeable unity of action that Aristotle
prescribes is the backbone that
makes or breaks a narrative. A colleague prescribes
novelist Scott Turow’sOne Law to
students
contemplating legal careers. For good or ill, Mafioso reportedly took tailoring, deportment, and
enunciation lessons from Coppola’s TheGodfather film. John le Carre’s
many espionage novels
fill in a world with characters so heart-breakingly real caught in stories so minutely and sublimely
rendered that one shivers at his achievement.
Both Ayer and Quine suggest that science comprises verified synthetic
propositions
(crudely, facts not values, declaratives not imperatives).
Such is the cachet of “science”
or “scientific” that it has been extended far beyond
natural sciences to political and social
sciences, medicine, engineering, criminology, media,
communications, sports, management, etc.
No
wonder at this extension, certainly, if you adopt Ayer’s position that there
are synthetic,
verifiable propositions and mathematical/logical tautologies,
and all other uses of language are
cognitively meaningless, merely expressing or inculcating
emotions or values. C. P. Snow’s “two
cultures”
can seem to contrast the objective, rational, exact, progressive, value-free,
essential, and
universal scientific enterprise with a subjective, irrational,
imprecise, unprogressive, value-ridden,
inessential, and parochial
enterprise. This background model may dubiously contrast the scientific
method of observation and experiment, gradually accumulating
data from which generalizations,
and more and more general theories, cumulatively derive,
with the subjective, unquantifiable,
confabulated, anecdotal individual stories.
However, take medical science, for example. People do sometimes say that medicine is
both a science and an art, merely meaning that the
physician, a precise and knowledgeable scientist,
sometimes needs compassion and a bedside manner. But if you
examine the Merck Manual of
Diagnosis and Therapy for physicians, the compact 2,000+ paged standard
hand book of the
profession, you find a compendium of rules for evaluations
(diagnoses) and action imperatives
(treatments). Curiously, “ought” rarely appears but “should”
abounds. However, the subject
disappears except when it is the patient (“The patient should
(or must) . . .,” but not “The physician
(or
you) should . . .,” rather, “Care should be taken to . . ., etc.). Even more
frequently, a specious
present tense is employed (“The easiest and simplest way to .
. . is to . . . with the hand”; “Saline
is flushed by hydraulic pressure (the saline is held 3
to 4 ft. above the patient’s abdomen) so that it
. . .”) (Beers &Barklow 1999, p. 2019). Throughout the manual the sequence Symptoms, Diagnosis,
Treatment is
ubiquitous: goal-directed decision sequences.
Here the Ancient Greeks helpfully remind us that logic is common to both cultures, providing
a common foundation for both pure, what-is reasoning and practical, how-to-do reasoning. A practical
syllogism is just as rational as a theoretical (or pure) syllogism. The Greeks also, surely wisely, did not
have our notion of “fine arts,” which ambiguously means excellence, inspiration, and genius but also
useless, unprofitable, and upper class, in contrast to useful technology, precision, craftsmanship but
also to popular, vulgar, “unfine,” formulaic amusements. For Aristotle, medicine, engineering,
stagecraft, like animal husbandry, architecture, and agriculture, were practical productive arts,
aiming at: curatives and health, bridges and transport, drama and emotional release, attractive
building and
shelter, productive farming, etc. All of
these are governed by imperatives, by
practical reason, by how-to-do-nesses (tekhnē ).
For Aristotle, of course, politics (statecraft), ethics, and household management are also
practical, and indeed their architectural imperatives govern productive practices in a hierarchy
of command. How to build a sound bridge is an engineer’s dominium, when, where, and
priority, political, etc. Similarly, physicians decide what treatments and regimens will best reach
the goal of health, assisted and circumscribed by Merck and the edicts of their specialization.
Sometimes diagnosis and treatment is precisely determined, sometimes not. Sometimes skill and
precision required; sometimes the operative theater the prescription pad. In many respects, health,
like happiness or
doing right, is not a precise goal. As Aristotle notably comments in Nicomachean
Ethica, we must acknowledge the degree of exactitude that the subject matter allows and hence
inexactly, but by default, we ethically and politically regulate more precise, productive specializations.
Similarly, we should remind ourselves that the apodictic form of Kant’s categorical imperative is to
reason as a universal legislator to all rational beings, while perhaps also allowing that Kant, or his
expositors, may have been extraordinarily blind to the lack of rigor and precision in ethics and states-
craft. Commanding importance guarantees imprecision if not disaster is a literary instruction. It is
narrative that
Dylan Thomas labeled “In my Craft or Sullen Art.” Logically and
etymologically the
poet is literally the maker
(poētēs):
often the maker, if you will allow me the coinage, of what
-it-is-like-to-be-nesses.
Regarding humans as communal,
social, and familial by nature (human qua human),
Aristotle
saw a practical decision-making hierarchy, by the
individual humans as household
heads, by human individuals interacting with human individuals,
and human communities
interacting internally and with other human communities.
Specialized decision-making
would be the various productive arts/technologies (human
qua physician, qua engineer, qua
stone mason, shipbuilder, farmer, and so on). This puts the
story-teller in a near uniquely
central role, for the story-teller, the poētēs, makes human lives, actors at household, social,
and political levels, thought
and character enmeshed and meshing in a captivating action.
To
paraphrase Hamlet, where else to
catch the conscience of the king but in a play?
Like
film, plays and novels, all dramatic narratives, are universal, commonly
entertained
and comprehended at some level
by most all. This is captured adroitly in Wittgenstein’s
linguistic distinction
between the tangled streets of the Old City and the neat grid of the
newly-constructed,
specialized scientific suburbs, the Old City the common folk-
psychological, multifaceted
core as against the late-learned, academic jargons of the
many expert esoteric jargons
(Wittgenstein 1948xx). In the early days
of artificial intelligence,
only a decade was thought
needed to simulate core intelligence and machine translation; a massive
defeat led to expert systems
that chart a few technical areas in medical diagnosis and a few equally
narrow legal specialties. Modeling
of core human cognitive faculties now seems far away,
and
while machine translation may manage some scientific suburbs, translation of
narratives
remains an intractable problem.
1940’s and 1950’s male science fiction writers confidently
predicted
that robots would soon take over child care, house cleaning, cooking and
education
of
nursery, kinder-garden, and first graders, while robots could never be expected
to, for
example, do tough male things like
mathematics and astrogation!
Literary
narrations, like attempts to answer the question What
is it like to be a bat?,
require a personal “point of view.” Syntactically, they may be
first person (as were the first
novels
in English) but grammatical third person with a semantic simulation of a (or
several)
first
person point
of view has become more common since Jane Austen, who
brought the form
to
maturity (roughly, narrated as if you are looking and hearing over the shoulder
of a character,
getting
that character’s point of view while at the same time being able to notice things that the
character may not). Indeed, actual
human individuals rarely have an interior monologue that
puts
into words what they see, hear, smell, etc., what particular motoric actions
they
contemplate or actually undertake and
so on, while some do word plans or rehearse. Rather,
most
of the time we see, hear, sense, etc. various things, hear what others or even
our-selves
may
say or do (by contrast, an operating surgeon, a radio reporter, or deep sea
diver may
actually
give, out loud, such a running report of their current experiences and actions
for
their distant audiences).
A
reportorial or literary narration is redolent of action, of problems, puzzles,
purposes
(teleology),
and decisions, what a Kantian would understand as practical reason,
presupposing
human
freedom with all its ambiguities: the interaction of categorical, pragmatical, and
hypothetical
imperatives with the murky, veiled, and always changing and unexpected
realities
of the
surrounding personal and physical world, always personed, tensed and
time-structured,
and
individual –what is it like to be a very particular, properly named and
uniquely situated,
individual actor.
It is,
thus, no wonder that Kant’s Critique of Judgment is
concerned with
judgments of
humanly-created dramatic and artistic
productions and with natural
teleological judgments.
Aristotle, in his Physics and
in his Poetics,
comments that natural animals including humans,
through growth and development, are
most comparable to theatrical and narrative productions.
All this is memorably
realized in Shakespeare’s favorite controlling metaphor,
.
. . . All the world’s a stage.
And
all the men and women merely players;
They
have their exits and their entrances;
And
one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages. At first the infant,
Mewling
and puking in the nurse’s arms;
Then
the school-boy, with his satchel
And
shining morning face, creeping like a snail
Unwillingly
to school. And then the lover,
Sighing
like a furnace, with a woeful ballad
Made
to his mistress’ eyebrow. Then a soldier,
Seeking
the bubble reputation
Even
in the cannon’s mouth. And then the
justice,
In fair round
belly with good capon lined,
With
eyes severe and beard of formal cut,
Full
of wise saws and modern instances,
And
so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts
Into
the lean and slipper’dpantaloon,
With
spectacles on nose and pouch on side,
His
youthful hose, well sav’d, a
world too wide
For
his shrunk shank; and his big manly voice,
Turning
again toward childish treble, pipes
And
whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,
Is
second childishness and mere oblivion;
Sans
eyes, sans teeth, sans everything.
(Jacques in As You Like It)
But Aristotle gives us exposition about narrative dramatizations, while Shakespeare’s plays
are exemplary stories, terse and unforgettable individual simulations, varieties of truth about
possible-what-is-it-like-to-be-nesses,
whether Jacques bitter-sweet comic musings or the
laceration Shakespeare gave tragic Macbeth,
Life’s
but a walking shadow, a poor player,
Who struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury
Signifying nothing.
Quine indeed intones poetically, “the unit of empirical significance is the whole of science.”
Perhaps this is so for science as a timeless, tense-less, collective enterprise of pure reason,
a view from nowhere and nowhen, unnatural and unpersoned. However, no human individual can
read through, let alone remember or understand, this whole-of-science, almost infinitely long,
unitary sentence. However long, it is a miniature of Jorge Borges’ “Library of Babel,” whose
books uselessly contain all the possible sequences of twenty-six Roman letters. Yes, the Library
contains all the books that have been written in all the human languages transcribe-able in those
letters; indeed, it contains all such books that ever could be written. But how to find even one of
these books or even a book with a coherence sentence? It also, Borges’ librarian points out,
contains the true catalog of the library – but also the countless number of false catalogs, proof
that the true catalog is true but, alas, endless proofs that one or the other of the false catalogs is the
true one. Borges’ “Borges and I” crystalizes the distinction between existential “being-for” and
“being-there” in one short page, ending with the astounding but inevitable line, “I do not know
which of us has written this page.” Borges is the only notable literary figure to publish a paper,
“A New Refutation of Time,” in Mind, pace Bradley and Ayer (I except Charles Dodgson). As
a final word from Aristotle hints,
Further,
to be fine both an animal and every thingwhich is constructed from some parts
should not only have these parts in
order, but also possess a magnitude that is not random.
For fineness lies in magnitude and order.
For this reason a fine animal can be neither very
small, for obvservation becomes
confused when it approaches an imperceptible instant of
time; nor can it be very large, for
observation cannot happen at the same time, but its unity
and wholeness vanish from the
observers’ view, e.g., if there were an animal a thousand
miles long. Consequently, just as in
the case of bodies and of animals these should have
magnitude, but only a magnitude that is easily seen as a
whole, so too in the case of plots
these should have length, but only a length that is easily memorable. (Poetics, p. 10).
Truth is relative to the
individual human’s capacity to assimilate. Doubtless, there may be variation
but
at some point it becomes beyond any human capacity.
For armchair work (i.e., narrative, mathematics,
philosophy) beauty, economy, memorability,
coherence,
and vivid intensity are essential. “Stories to think with” is the genus and
“thought
experiments”
is a species. Almost any mathematical proof may be an improvement, particularly
a
shortening
on a previous one, but what one wants is a leap or an insight, and standards
(style) changes.
Bertrand Russell felt his Principiashould
be rewritten using Sheffer’s stroke as the fundamental
propositional
operator, replacing Principia’s two
operators, but subsequent logicians have found
this
unimportant, largely as a shift away from proof-theoretic logic. More recent
representative
mathematical
examples:
1) Alonzo
Church thought of and published proof that there is no decision procedure for
arithmetic shortly
before Alan Turing unwittingly took up the problem. But Turing’s invented what
we
nowcall
Turing Machines and Universal Turing Machines as a way of specifying in a
vivid, fruitful, and
powerful
way what mechanical computability meant, so he could then prove that such an
apparatus
could
not do the required job. So a lion’s
share of credit has gone to Turing. 2) A second example
is
the four color problem’s “solution” that four colors sufficed to color a map of
states so that no
states
of the same color shared a border line. But the proof goes beyond the
requirement than a
human
should check, distinct step by simple, checkable, mechanical step. Though its
course was
determined
by human mathematicians, the proof consisted of so many discrete steps that the
sequence
could not be humanly traversed. Turing himself pointed out that a literal,
physically-
constructed
Turing machine could not, given Brownian motion and the frailty of matter,
physically
perform
some computations. And even the most Platonic of mathematicians blanch at
sanctioning
proofsthat
require an infinite number of steps.
As what we might call the “Geometer’s Library”
explores possible shapes and spatial
relationships,
“Mendel’s Library” comprise possible DNA-structured organisms, and “Borges’
Library,” possible
alphabetical structures, we can imagine a Library of
Possible Stories.Apostolos Doxiadis[3]
III If It Quacks Like a Duck…
Aristotle himself considered the Platonic dialogue to be as much literature as philosophy, and modern philosophers such as Berkeley and Hume have found the form an appropriate venue.[4]
In the 20th Century, while French philosophers took to writing novels, we also find in Wittgenstein’s
Tractatus a strikingly original work of art, and in his ground-breaking Investigations several voices
contend in vignettes so striking that Wittgenstein claimed the very sentences were indelibly marked
as his own.[5] Quine, Richard Rorty, Donald Davidson, Jerry Fodor, and Daniel Dennett provide
notable examples of original, trade-marked prose styles doing conceptual narrations (as opposed
to the impersonal expositions of empirical science). Stanley Cavell compared J. L. Austin’s
paragraphs to La Rochefoucauld’s epigrams, akin to Wittgenstein’s assembled “reminders for
particular purposes” (Cavell 19xxx)
Think of the role that metaphors and examples play in
recent philosophy – “We are sailors who
must
repair our ship at sea,” “Twin earth,” “Duck/Rabbit,” “Run-away trolley,” “Paradigm
Shift,” “The
Life of Man in the State of Nature is Solitary, Poor, Nasty,
Brutish, and Short,” “To be is to be in the
Range of a bound variable of
quantification,” “Don’t look for the meaning, look for the use,” “Cogito
ergo sum,” “What is it like
to be a bat?,” “the set of all sets that are not members of themselves,” and so
on. The Philosophical Gourmet
has recently issued a defense of analytic (as opposed to Continental)
philosophy that emphasizes
its “argumentative clarity” and its identification with the sciences and
mathematics (despite the “demise at the hands
of Quine and Sellars” of strict, coherent
analytic
philosophy (i.e. logical positivism)).
Indeed, they suggest that the “argumentative clarity” would be a
welcome addition to Continental Philosophy’s
penchant for analyzing the “human condition” (P. G.
XXXX)
Apostolos Doxiadis recently claimed that mathematical proofs are like
literary narratives;
both are “arm chair” quests,
pursuing goals and taking its travelers on an instructive trip
through
possible story space (Doxiadis 2007). I want to consider the possibility that “arm chair,” natural language
arguments, which are
analogous to mathematical proofs and literary narratives, are both the subject
matter and tools of
philosophizing. “A life unexamined is not worth living” invites us to
the question “What is it
like to be a human being?” whose most accessible, appropriate, and attractive
answers are anecdotal individual narratives
– personal accountings. For all Plato’s insistence that
only
the forms are real and that their study the proper subject matter for the
Academy, I find his
Phaedrus, Symposium, and Phaedo some of if not the most
personal, dramatic, and philosophical
narratives I have ever read.
Arm-chairedly speaking, it is characteristic that
philosopher’s journal publications, like those of
pure mathematicians, and the
novelist’s and dramatist’s productions, are single authored, while
empirical scientific publications have several if not scores of
authors. Empirical scientific publication
oftenlocksteps into required, ordered sections such as Introduction, Methods
(participants,
interventions, measures, design/analysis), Results, Discussion,
Conclusion (akin to the Symptoms,
Diagnosis, Treatment of the Merck Manual). No personal pronouns except “we,” strong preference
for passive constructions and the verb to be, all designed to
give the impression that the only difference
between one paper and another is the empirical data, which is
supposed processed and presented in an
essentially uniform, impersonal, and standardized manner.
Scientific data is defined as the results of
costly double blind experiments
and perhaps their like in the nature sciences; accounts of the personal
experience of individuals are non-data,
scornfully dismissed as “anecdotal.”
One can discover that 70% of 1950s Americans answer
“yes” to “Do you think young people
today have major problems with
the world they face today?” And you can read Salinger’s Catcher in the
Rye.”Here we find (emulating Kant as well as Heisenberg) an
inevitable tension between personal depth
And coherent detail of a individual with a vague (though statistically vetted)
generalization. The more
general, statistically sound,
omniscient in viewpoint, and colorless the result, naturally, the less
anecdotal,
coherent, and deep the story. You
can read the phone book or
Emily Dickenson.
Contrarywise to the display of large scale professional
uniformity in much of the social sciences,
if you look at the Philosophical
Lexicon (also on the Philosophical
Gourmet web site), you will find
scores of prominent philosophers
each jokingly caricatured by their idiolectical writing and
argumentative style.
Samples:
ameliororate, v. To complicate discussion of a theory or topic by drawing attention to a panoply
of distinctions, difficult examples, and writings whose relevance had hithertofore been
conveniently underestimated. “We were really making progress until she had to go and
ameliororate the issue.” [Amelia Rorty]
arortiori. adj. For even more obscure and fashionable Continental reasons. [Richard Rorty]
ayer, v. (from Spanish, ayer, meaning yesterday) To oversimplify elegantly in the direction
of a past generation. [A. J. Ayer] . . .
carnap, n. (1) A formally defined symbol, operator, special bit of notation. “His prose is
peppered with carnaps” or “the argument will proceed more efficiently if we introduce a few
carnaps.” [Rudolph Carnap]
cavell, v. An exquisitely sensitive distinction of language, hence cavellier, adj. characterizing a
writing style common among extraordinary language philosophers. [Stanley Cavell] . . .
quine, v. (1) To deny resolutely the existence or importance of something real or significant.
“Some philosophers have quined classes, and some have even quined physical objects.
quintify, v. To give a popular and oversimplifying account of a philosophical problem. (a)
quantifying in opaque contexts: writing an article on Wittgenstein for Sunday newspapers;
(b) existentialquintifier: Walter Kaufman; (c) universal quintifier: Mortimer Adler.
[Kaufman gives accessible accounts of existentialist philosophers; Adler provided easily
accessible accounts of a great variety of philosophers.]
quinton, n. A large amount of chaff. [Antony Quinton]
IV Paradoxes: the Passion and Precision of
Poetry and Philosophy, Or,
The
Little Engines That Can. The case in miniature.
Take “Once upon a time . . .”;“Assume that there is a highest prime number, then multiply that number
by all the other prime numbers . . .”; “If Germany had won WWII, then . . .”;“if we suppose a perfect
vacuum two bodies will fall at the same speed”; “Golden lads and girls all must, like chimney sweepers
come to dust”; “Imagine a spaceship approaching the speed of light; from an external viewpoint,
it will rapidly increase in mass”; and finally,
’But you have no clue!’
‘There is the clue of the dog in the night’
’But the dog did nothing in the night!’
‘Precisely, my dear Watson.’[6]
All these belong to the same narrative genus. It should not be a surprise that one of the oldest meanings
of “argument” is a short summary of the main actions in a literary work (and not, shades of Poetics,
in the less philosophic mélange of history). But it can also mean a mathematical or logical proof, or the
less formalized reasoning of everyday life, of law, of plays and poetry, memorable memes, etc.
As simultaneously troupe, simile, epigram, story, touchtone, argument, logical proof, armchair
enlightenment, with all the passion of science and the precision of poetry, I suggest paradoxes best
and most compactly exemplify my claim that the logician, philosopher, and poet, raconteurs all, share
the quest for narrative truth. “I am a Cretan and all Cretans are liars,” “What I am now telling you is
false,” “What is the smallest number that cannot be expressed in less than thirteen words?,” finally
strike homedevastatingly after twenty-five hundred years, with Bertrand Russell’s paradox,
“Is the set of all nonself-membering sets a member of itself?,” which then inspired and required the
production of Principia Mathematica with its hierarchy of logico-mathematical linguistic levels.
And Pri`ncipia became the required target of Kurt Godel’sliaresqueproof that arithmetic had to
contain logical structures or arithmetical formulae, that effectively and truly said, logically speaking,
“I am not provable,” finally culminating in Alan Turing’s proofthat the truth or falsity of some arithmetical
formulae cannot be effectively determined and that there is no exhaustive procedure for identifying
these formulae. Jorge Borges commented succinctly, tragically, and beautifully,
Let us admit what all
idealists admit – the hallucinatory nature of the world. Let us do
what no idealist has done – let us search for unrealities
that confirm that nature. I believe
we shall
find them in the antinomies of Kant and in the dialectic of Zeno ... 'The
greatest
wizard
(Novalis writes memorably) would be the one who bewitched himself to the point
of accepting his own phantasmagorias as autonomous
apparitions.’ Wouldn't that be our
case. I surmise it is so. We (that indivisible divinity that
operates in us) have dreamt the
world. We have dreamt it as enduring, mysterious, visible,
omnipresent in space and stable
in time; but
we have allowed tenuous and eternal crevices of unreality in its architecture
that tell it is false. Jorge Luis Borges. Labyrinths, p. 205.
Notice that paradoxes
issue as questions, not statements. How is one to seek verification of a question?
Does this mean, ala Ayer,
that questions are “cognitively meaningless”??? [Liar telephone history, his
tory of Nabokov’s comment (creativity) the intersection of
poetry, mathematics, philosopy. Paradoxes
are the symbolic/verbal truths that keep on reproducing. So the
best of all three fields.]
And as Borges suggests we make other
paradoxes than the liar, most prominently between
dreamt/hallucinatedappearance and supposed reality. I suspect
that Descartes’s First Meditation
did exactly that
in seducing subsequent philosophy into a near endless attempt to find
“foundations”
that would
defeat a skepticism that questioned the existence of physical objects, other
minds, or
even the first
person I,who raised such question of him/her/itself (and justified Sigmund
Freud’s comment
thatparanoia is a caricature of philosophy).
Before Descartes, Shakespeare played literature with
this theme,
making all the world a stage production and vice versa, flickering between tragic
morass
and incipient raillery, Hamlet joking with Yorick’s skull.
A spokesman for Ayer may well say
that a question is only cognitively meaningful because
the statement “I
am seeing the real world” is verifiable and “I am not seeing the real world” is
verifiable
as well. But surely the question is the truth-bearer here because
the paradox must be resolved
before any
empirical question even can be raised, just as the liar paradox question must
be expelled
as illegitimate,
for either “yes, empirically speaking, we have discovered that the set of all
nonself-membering
sets is a member of itself” or “no, we’ve empirically discovered that it’s not
a member of itself” is deeply
unsatisfactory and unenlightening. J. L. Austin once remarked that
to make a “first
water’ mistake was an impressive contribution to philosophy,[7] but a first water
question with
bells on is surely more salient, as our legendary midwife Socrates exemplifies,
given only to
questions, maintaining he knew no answers, only good questions (one of which
is,sattovoche, “How can you know
that you know nothing?”). It is surely a mistake to think that
there are
thosedefault final truths, the last logical summary of the last true
scientist/observer, and we
are simply out to reach what we can
of them by whatever means. Rather, we play the game,
work the
stories, and the process is the product, with the daisies, Oedipus Rexes,Principia
Mathematicas,
the paradoxes, the proofs, and the stories, allfiring epiphanies to light our
way.
In 1887, Arthur Conan-Doyle creatively modeled a central
personae of our age, the
logical scientist
protagonist, whose triumphant analyses not only nail culprits but also
precisely characterize
limitations in normal human reasoning, capturing back then the
essential features of the Wason Task. Holmes obviously has modus
ponens in view and,
in particular in
Silver Blaze what Wason himself found caused near universal human
failure, namely, when one
had to reason backwards from the absence
of a feature, such
as the watch dog doing nothing in the night (i.e. not barking).[8] Conan-Doyle did not need
more than an acute
diagnosis of limitations in typical human reasoning, perhaps inspired
by his mentor, Dr. Bell. Further, he displayed the insight in
stories that have captured
popular, and professional logician’s, imagination. Conan-Doyle made
it memorable,
enshrining it in the repertoire of a new personae, the painstakingly
brilliant scientific genius.
I
have already explained to you that what is out of the common is usually a guide
rather than
a hindrance. In solving a problem of
this sort, the grand thing is to be able to reason backward.
That is a very useful accomplishment, and a very easy one,
but people do not practise it much.
In the everyday affairs of life it is more useful to reason
forward, and so the other comes to be
neglected. There are fifty who can reason
synthetically for one who can reason analytically. . .
Most people, if you
describe a train of events to them will tell you what the result would be.
They can put those
events together in their minds, and argue from them that something will
come
to pass. There are few people, however, who, if you told them a result, would
be able
to
evolve from their own inner consciousness what the steps were which led up to
that
result.
This power is what I mean when I talk of reasoning backward, or analytically.
(Sherlock Holmes, A Study in Scarlet,)
Ayer is right to say that philosophy is amarshaling of analytic and personal truths (arguments or
proofs) deployed to know,
simulate, and examine our empirical understanding. He is thoroughly wrong
to think that mathematics
and logicare really tautological or purely conventional, or plus that that
the collective sentence of empirical inquiry, is
our sole source of cognitive significance or truth.
References.
Aristotle (1961). Poetics, trans. Richard Janko. Cambridge, Mass.: Hackett Publishing Company.
Ayer, A. J. (1936/1962). Language, Truth and Logic. New York: Dover Publications.
Beers, M. H. &Berklow, R. (1999). The Merck Manual of Diagnosis and Therapy, Seventeenth Edition.
Whitehouse Station, N. J.: Merck Research Laboratories.
Bradley, F. H. (1893). Appearance and Reality. London: Swan Sonnenschon.
Burke, K. (1974). The Philosophy of Literary Form. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Chomsky, N. (1988). Language and Problems of Knowledge: The Mangua Lectures. New York:
Harper
and Row.
Conan-Doyle, A. (1887). “A Study in
Scarlet.” Strand Magazine.
Conan-Doyle, A. (1892). “Silver Blaze,”
Strand Magazine.
Doxiadis, A. (2007). Proofs and Stories: family resemblances and family history. Unpublished.
Kitcher, P. (2011). “Philosophy Inside Out,” Metaphilosophy42: 3.
McKee, R. (1997). Story: substance, structure, style, and the principles of screen writing. New York:
HarperCollins.
Quine, W. V. O.
(1951/1961). “Two Dogmasof Empiricism” in From a Logical Point of View. Harvard
University Press. Pp. 20-46.
Snow, C. P. (1959/1993] The Two Cultures. Cambridge: The University Press.
J. Leiber, “Philosophy, Engineering, Biology, and
History:AVindication of Turing’sViews about the
Distinction between the Cognitive and Physical
Sciences,” Journal of Theoretical and Artificial
Intelligence 14 [2002]: 29–37;
J. Leiber,
“Turing and the Fragility and Insubstantiality of Evolutionary
Explanations:APuzzle
about the Unity of Alan Turing’sWork with Some Larger Implications,”
Philosophical Psychology 13
[2001]: 83–94;
I. Stewart, Life’s Other Secret:
The New Mathematics
of
the Living World [New York: John Wiley, 1998];
A. Turing and C. W. Wardlaw, “A
Diffusion
Reaction Theory of Morphogenesis,” Collected
Works of Alan Turing: Morphogenesis, ed. P. T.
Saunders [Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1953/1992]
230–47;
A. Turing, “On the Chemical Basis of
Morphogenesis,” Philosophical
Transactions of the Royal Society of London, Series B, 237 [1952/
1992]: 37–72; and
D’Arcy Thompson, On
Growth and Form, 1st ed. [Cambridge, Cambridge UP,1917]).
Finally, and similarly, physics and chemistry
proceed ahistorically while also providing the
basis
on which cosmology builds its retrodictions of necessity and chance in the
unique course of this
universe’s
history.
JUSTIN LEIBER
[1] My stalking horse here is Professor Sir Alfred Jules Ayer, my teacher, colleague, and friend (ilmigliorfabbro),
who contended as well with Oxford philosophy and subsequent philosophical developments as with Mike
Tyson. My students and colleagues, John Carpenter, Russ Dancy, and especially Peter Takacs have corrected
and emended this paper.
[2] Daniel Dennett (xxxx). Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, xxxxxxxxxxxxx.
[3] I would credit the “Geometer’s Library” to the Ancients, or Plato’s Meno; on the model of Borges’
“Library of Babel,” Daniel Dennett coined “Mendel’s Library”; and “The Library of Possible Stories” to Homer and humanity.
[6] This is a slightly shortened and amended version. Some cognitive scientists and logicians use “the dog in the night”
as a label for a characteristic error that humans make in Modus Tollens reasoning, particularly when the denial of
the consequent is the absence of something unspecified (“the dog did nothing in the night”). The distinguished
British cognitive psychologist, Peter Wason spent decades studying this inadequacy in human reasoning,
particularly employing what is now called the Wason Task, creating a cottage industry of experiment and
theorizing, eventually producing the trademark experiments that revived sociobiology as evolutionary
psychology (Cosmedes, L. 18XX). Conan-Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes lucidly characterizes this limitation
in ordinary human reasoning in Conan-Doyl4 L
e’s (or Dr. Watson’s) Study in Scarlet, the first recorded appearance
of Sherlock Holmes (Conan-Doyle (1887)
THE WILES OF EVOLUTIONARY
PSYCHOLOGY AND
THE INDETERMINACY OF
SELECTION
JUSTIN LEIBER
Late in the 1960s, Professor
P.Wason began administering a selection task that
ran in one typical instance as follows. You have
told your experimental subjects
that you have some cards,
each with an odd or even number indicated on one side
and a vowel or consonant on
the other (e.g., one card might have “16” on one side
and “e” on the other). Subjects are given four cards
face down so that they can see
one side of each. Subjects are asked which cards do
they have to turn over to find
out whether there are violations of the rule, “If an even number is on one side,
there must be a
vowel on the other”? Logically, one supposes that the rule is p ⊃ q,
where p is even and q is
a vowel. Confronted with four cards (in effect p,
~p, q,
~q),
subjects will usually pick the p card (if even number, then
there better be
vowel on other side or else
the rule is violated) and then the most common second
choice (some just stick with
p) is q and, for less than 10%, ~q (if not a vowel, then
you have to check to make sure that the other side
is not even). So less than 10%
get the right answer and a
much larger percentage choose the wrong answer,
namely, q.Wason
and his colleagues and many other cognitive psychologists from
1966 onward have run scads
of variations of Wason selection task experiments
with convergent results.1 Plainly,
humans perform badly on tasks requiring the
same logical competency as the exemplar.
But
in 1985, Professor L. Cosmides’ experiment showed that if the rule is “If
drinking beer, then must be
over 20 years old” (imagined as a task set a Boston
drink law-enforcing bouncer), then a substantial
majority pick the right cards.
When instead the rule is “If
a person has a ‘D’ rating, then his documents must
be marked code ‘3’ ”
(imagined as the task set a clerical worker, whose job is
to “make sure that student
documents have been processed correctly”), then
1 S. Newstead and J. Evans, eds. Perspectives on Thinking and Reasoning: Essays
in Honor of Peter
Wason (London:
Lawrence Erlbaum, 1995).
©
2008 The Philosophical Forum, Inc.
53
Cosmides got the familiar
bad scores. Therefore, we are firmly told, we must have
a special social exchange,
or “cheater-detector,” module; just what one would
need in a hunter-gatherer
community in which there are important reciprocal
exchanges.
Note that “rule” of course
lends itself, formally speaking, to a deontic or an
alethic reading, depending
on how the consequent is understood to so follow (or
whether, formally speaking,
the consequent is conceived imperatively or declaratively,
directive or descriptive). Imperatively or deontologically
speaking, q may
followfrom p as
a categorical moral/legal necessity (“must”), as a pragmatic article
of prudence, mere custom or
arbitrary fiat (plausibly, Immanuel Kant understood
these to follow by moral
necessity [categorically], following from the actual
human goal of happiness
[pragmatically], or simply as some professional or
convenient means to a possible goal [technically or
hypothetically]). Under
the declarative
interpretation, q may “follow” as a matter of logical or physical
necessity, actuality or probability, or coincidence. The
experimental literature from
Wason on is occasionally
fraught, usually without explicit concern, with this
imperative/declarative ambiguity. However, in the vast majority of
experiments,
the “rules” are spoken of in
terms of “violations” and presented as directing human
behavior, so we may rightly
take them as bearing an imperative reading (and this
reading is often quite explicit syntactically). It is
certainly clear in Cosmides’
exemplar that both tasks are explicitly described as
duties set to employees.
Jerry Fodor, in a brief
article titled “Why We Are So Good at Catching
Cheaters” which is also
appended to his Mind Doesn’t Work That Way, blithely
tells us that the Wason
task’s remarkable difference, to use Fodor’s peculiar
exemplars, simply derives
from a change in wording from the deontic “(1) It is
required that if someone is
under 18 (s)he is drinking coke” to the alethic “(2) If
someone is under 18 (s)he drinks coke.”2
Fodor’s exemplars are
suspicious in that it is hard to think of a situation in
which anyone would actually be
moved to say either (1) or especially (2). It is
clear, from Fodor’s
subsequent argument, that he supposes (1) to be deontic and
imperative and (2) to be
alethic and descriptive; but this seems a gratuitous
assumption.
Consider (2). Imagine we are
looking at a collection of people at a picnic and
you say “If someone is under 18 (s)he drinks coke.”
I point to a young boy doing
a handstand and observe, “He isn’t drinking coke.”
“I mean,” you might reply,
“that
if an under 18-year-old drinks anything at all, it will be coke.” “How so?” I
ask, adding, “Is it that
there is only coke to drink?––But then why the ‘under 18’
bit, if even granny has to
drink coke because that’s all there is?––Or do you really
2 Jerry Fodor, The Mind Doesn’t Work That Way: The Scope and Limits of
Computational Psychology
(Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2000).
JUSTIN LEIBER
54
mean that there’s a law,
not that teenagers have to drink coke but that they may
not drink something else, namely, alcoholic drinks?” It is hard to think of a
situation in which (2) might be said naturally in Fodor’s intended
sense.
It is almost as hard to make
sense of (1)’s requirement that someone
under 18
is drinking coke.
Perhaps an overzealous Coca Cola executive has laid down a
ukase: “Everyone under 18 years at the picnic must be
seen to drink Coca Cola!”
Aside from the horrific
vision of baby bottles bursting with bubbly, one notes
again that granny has been
willfully and counterproductively excluded: Surely the
senior Coca Cola Company
staff cannot be photographed flaunting flutes bubbly
with champagne brut, even if interspersed with cola
quaffing youngsters! Fodor’s
(1) and (2) are obviously
constructed to make a logical point without concern for
any conversational context.
But, leaving all that aside,
Fodor is simply wrong about the supposed “change
in wording,” as Cosmides’
now famous wording reminds us, because, using not
“required” but “must be,”
Cosmides uses a directive “must be” in both her
exemplary conditionals, the
one realistically described as a job direction to a
bouncer and the other to a clerical worker––both are clearly requirements. So
much for Fodor. (For a careful defense of Fodor’s
analysis ofWason’s task and an
excellent critique of
Cosmides’ analysis, see Buller.3)
Earlier of course, Wason had
used “a rule” and talked of identifying “violations”
of the rule in his initial
exemplar and hewed to variations on this in
subsequent instances. Certainly, as I have said, the actual
experimental literature
often does not pay much
attention to sharply distinguishing modalities in a purely
syntactical way. Nonetheless, the deontic reading invariably
predominates: The
“rules” are rules that someone is supposed to follow and
subjects to look for
violations of. The
puzzle remains. Fodor’s criticism is wildly misdirected. Even
though both of Cosmides
instructions are explicitly cast in deontic language and
given a directive context,
the dismal human performance is blatant except in
Cosmides’ drinking violation
instance and related others, where subjects do better.
The wide attention that
Cosmides and her fellow evolutionary psychologists
have given the Wason
selection task suggests three questions:
1. Does Wason task failure
show that formal competence models of
human reason are bankrupt?
2. Given a sketch of how to
individuate what are indisputably exemplary
cognitive modules, should we
recognize, as such a module, Professor
Cosmides’ “social
interaction module” (epitomized as “cheaterdetector”)?
3 D. Buller, Adapting Minds: Evolutionary Psychology and the Persistent
Quest for Human Nature
(Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2005).
THE WILES OF EVOLUTIONARY
PSYCHOLOGY
55
3. DoesWason task research
really show us that such a “domain-specific”
thinking module (among some
others) must be doing the real cognitive
work, as opposed to some
hypothetical general ability at formalreasoning
or model-building?
My short answer to these
three questions is “no.” My longer answers will follow,
plus some reflections on the
methodology of evolutionary psychology and evolutionary
taxonomy more generally.
Professor Cosmides tells us
that we each have a collection of computational
modules. Each module takes a domain- or content-specific
input and, presumably,
may give rise to a behavioral output. This does not
give us much to go on (Are
there “super good mate
detection modules” or “sexual competition detection
modules” of the sort some evolutionary psychologists
might seem to suppose?).
But since Cosmides, among
many others, take vision and language as two wellestablished
modules, perhaps we should
indeed start with the visual faculty (David
Marr is often cited here)
and the language faculty (citations to Noam Chomsky);
and Cosmides cites Jerry
Fodor’s Modularity of Mind for a general account of
modules.4
What constitutes these two
modules?
VISUAL FACULTY
The input would be W. V. O.
Quine’s “retinal irradiations” or rather, whatever
in these irradiations feeds the visual faculty. But
the output certainly is not
“behavioral,”
on anyone’s account in these mentalist days. Rather, the output is
some sort of
three-dimensional (3-D) array that is made available to the conscious
discursive mind (and other
modules, such as those that will collectively fire off, at
the neocortex level, the
outputs that may, on occasion, feed a sequence of lower
brain processes that in turn
cascade through many steps into the musculature,
producing some kind of observable behavior). The “on
occasion” is important; we
are not talking about
automatic reflexes that hardly involve the neocortex or
consciousness (e.g., the
knee-jerk sequence that follows the physician’s tap just
below your patella).
As Fodor also asserts of the
language module, the visual module’s domain is
sense-specific, automatic,
fast, informationally encapsulated, and, like other
4
L. Cosmides, “Deduction or
Darwinian Algorithms? An
Explanation of the ‘Elusive’ Content Effect
on the Wason Selection Task.” Doctoral Diss. Dept.
Psychology, Harvard U, 1985: University
Microfilms,
#86—02206. (The #86
indicates that Microfilms only received the information in 1986.)
L. Cosmides, “The Logic of
Social Exchange: Has Natural Selection Shaped How Humans Reason?
Studies with the Wason
Selection Task,” Cognition 31 (1989): 187–276. J. Fodor, Modularity of
Mind: An Essay in Faculty
Psychology (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1983).
JUSTIN LEIBER
56
biological organs, has a critical period for
acquisition of mature visual ability.
Encapsulation means that the
input and all the automatic processing stages after it
until the 3-D output to consciousness are not available to consciousness. Consciousness
just gets the output, scant milliseconds after the
irradiation. Encapsulation
also means that this fast
automatic process is relatively impenetrable to the
rest of the brain/mind; even
when you are thoroughly familiar with the “illusion”
provided by the Necker cube,
your visual module can vacillate between the two
3-D ways of seeing the cube
(which is really just a figure drawn on a flat surface).
Such a module cannot be
learned in the ordinary episodic, conscious sense of
learning but rather biologically grows through the
critical period. Vision mostly
wires up in the first year
of life, which is why babies born with cataracts have to
have them removed before this
period ends.
Notice how peculiar it would
be to say “there is a rule that if such-and-so 2-D
visual input occurs, then
the output must properly be such-and-so 3-D
display”—it just follows that way automatically as
natural psychological reflex;
the transformation Marr
describes might be described as “follows a rule,” but
there is no choice
involved, nor violation or rectitude, retrospective guilt or virtue,
or any consciousness of a decision made.
LANGUAGE
Here the input would be the
auditory irradiation of our inner ear (description of
this sonic input for
language is what the linguist calls observational adequacy;
it
is like what you hear when
you listen to someone talking in an unfamiliar foreign
language). The output, of course, would be what you hear,
what your conscious
mind perceives, when you listen to someone talking in your
native tongue, an
output which nearly
obliterates your conscious hearing of the actual sounds that a
foreigner hears (descriptive adequacy maps this conscious mental output and,
effectively, the stages that lead to it). As with vision,
the encapsulated in-between
processing levels are not available to consciousness. Again
you cannot hear a
syntactically ambiguous
sentence “neutrally”; your mind vacillates between two
different syntactic
structures just as it can also vacillate between hearing one and
the same sound as the verb “see” or the noun “sea.”
Again there is the critical
period of language growth,
which we honor in recognizing the vast difference
between language acquired in this period and language
confronted as an adult.
(We also know that the
language module, amazingly, does not have to be fed by
sounds; fluent signers of
American Sign Language exhibit much the same kind of
representations as those
found in spoken/heard languages, and there is much the
same critical period. This plasticity of transduction
should not surprise us. Deaf
and sightless Helen Keller
could “hear” English sentences whether the input came
from vibrations her fingers
felt when she was touching someone’s mouth and
THE WILES OF EVOLUTIONARY
PSYCHOLOGY
57
throat while they spoke or through
her companion’s fingers “spelling” into her hand
by tracing letters on her palm. Skilled
telegraphers of the early 20th century report
that initially they were
conscious of tapping dot and dash, only
to find later that they
were tapping letters,
and eventually were conscious simply of words and sentences,
as indeed we do as well when we hear someone
speaking our native tongue.)
Perhaps I should add that
both visual and language faculties seem to be able to
deal with potential discrete infinity of structures.
For language, we have Chomsky’s
hierarchy of grammars and
his decisive proof that finite-state associative
grammars cannot generate a potential infinity of
structures. In operation, both
faculties convert detailed
representations, through stages, to output useable final
representations to consciousness. While automatic, these
faculties are wholly
distinct from
stimulus-response arcs; indeed, their complexity sets a heavy and
demanding task for any
theory of their neurological instantiation, one far, far
beyond the single neurological connection that a reflex
might require. While one
can describe both faculties
in terms of “rules followed,” and both may be understood
as specifying a competence,
neither involves the conscious consultation,
discussion, teaching of, or instruction in such rules.
PUTATIVE SOCIAL INTERACTION
MODULE
When we turn to Cosmides’
“social interaction module,” we find little that
resembles the visual or language modules. Cosmides does
refer, in her thesis, and
in several publications that
repeat much the same citations, to David Marr, Noam
Chomsky, and Jerry Fodor.5 Indeed,
Cosmides casts the three as authorities for a
modular view of cognition (and as mentalists whose work
has cast out behaviorism).
Nonetheless, her social
interaction “module” or “modules” do not seem to
have the characteristic modular features that vision
and language exemplify.
First, while vision and
language have inputs essentially restricted to one sensory
channel, intaking a narrow
range of the electromagnetic and sonic spectrums
(retinal in one case or a
very narrow range of sonic activity in the other), the social
interaction module can
receive any kind of irradiation, so to speak, that stimulates
any sensory channel.You can
use visual information to detect a cheater (the look
in his eyes, his shiftiness,
as well as his gross motor activity of drinking beer, or
the information seen in his
driver’s license), but you can also hear something in his
voice that tips you off, or
maybe to the contrary, you might just hear Joe say of
him, “I saw he was just
drinking cranberry juice, not wine” (a mode that mixes
visual information with
auditory information as well).You can smell liquor on his
5 See Cosmides (1985, 1989); David Marr, Vision:AComputational Investigation of Visual
Information
(New York: Henry Holt,
1982); Noam Chomsky, Syntactic Structures (The Hague: Mouton, 1957);
Noam Chomsky, Reflections on Language (NewYork: Random House, 1975); and Fodor (1983).
JUSTIN LEIBER
58
breath, taste what he is
drinking to make sure its cranberry juice, feel the edge on
the ID photograph that tells
you it has been put on over the original photograph,
and, perhaps combining
almost any mix from the whole sensory gamut, “He acts
like a cheater.” And I have not even mentioned the
memories that may also provide
evidence and the obvious
fact that the whole intentional, folk
psychological
conceptual apparatus is in play.
Cosmides speaks of a social
interaction “domain” but also characterizes it as
“content-specific,”
particularly when talking about cheater-detection and those
familiar and personally
vital interchanges that on occasion allow subjects, because
this vital area is over-learned, to succeed at the
Wason task. Cosmides is right to
differentiate this area as
content-specific in that her differentia clearly is the
“generally very familiar and
personally vital content” that provides Wason task
success. But she is wrong to speak of a content-specific domain because social
exchange ultimately
comprises what Kant and Aristotle understood as the vast
domain of the practical reason and productive reasoning,
where Kant’s imperatives
and Aristotle’s practical
syllogisms apply, where the whole of folk psychology,
law, art, and technology is in play. When such
reasoning concerns social
interaction matters that are
not so vital to persons and not familiar, Wason task
passage is no more likely than with mathematical or
physical cognition. The form
of reasoning, whether
practical or pure, does not determine its personal importance
nor its familiarity. A person can care or not care
about a conditional. And
tribal stone age humans
could care passionately and reason frequently about
purely physical things and
processes as well as human social interactions; logic
belongs to both causal
physical reasoning and practical “folk psychological”
reasoning as well. Certainly, as both Cosmides, the
experimental literature, and
Fodor suggest, average
undergraduates who have been asked to distinguish an
unfamiliar de jure
directive’s pertinence from some pressingly familiar “gotcha,”
will find the drinking and “gotcha” situation
helpfully familiar.
Second, all the
sensory/mental information that leads to the cheater attribution
is quite open to
consciousness (his look, his vocalizations, body stance, memories
of previous conduct, etc., etc.). It is a
mind-wide, person-level, folk psychological
attribution. No encapsulation.Yes, the cheater attribution
can come fairly quickly
(a matter of minutes even
with Cosmides’ now famous cheater-detection Wason
task) but nowhere near the
unconscious processing milliseconds it takes for visual
inputs to become 3-D mental
displays or sound inputs to become the syntactically
formed and meaningful
sentences that the mind takes in.We would be in a pretty
pickle if we consciously
experienced these millisecond sequences of transformations,
hearing, for example, the
auditory pulses transform themselves, via several
intervening steps into
sentences heard by the fluent ear—or seeing, for example,
the remote pattern of
retinal firings followed and overlaid by transformations from
early 2-D through by stages to the full 3-D
representations.
THE WILES OF EVOLUTIONARY
PSYCHOLOGY
59
Third, there is no critical
period for the so-called social interaction module, no
maturation point in the period from birth to adolescence or
beyond. Indeed, people
frequently seem to get wiser
more or less steadily through the decades, and
particularly so about social interaction––until age takes its
toll. This is indeed
what we should expect of a
new, intensely social cognitive arena that one had not
the evolutionary time have
evolved to master quickly and natively but rather one
requiring lots of learning,
the accumulation of many years of forced improvisation,
and reworking against ever-changing social
circumstances. Indeed, social
interaction smarts, like
most kinds of learned skills, seem to be unevenly distributed,
in good measure because some
people are placed to and of a mind to get
better at them, and others are not. But none of this is
so with vision and language.
Adults mostly cannot learn
to see better, although they can learn to pay more
attention to particular things, and visual acuity steadily
deteriorates with age. To
a large degree, our native
spoken/heard language(s) are acquired effortlessly as
part of our first decade or two. Very few of us get much
better at hearing or
speaking our language(s)
after that point (although we can learn to read and write,
for they are not native to us).
As all the pre- and
post-Cosmides investigations of the Wason task show,
subjects can have already
learned, in contexts especially familiar, what is needed
to be more successful
atWason tasks, just as the same body of research shows that
training can correct the
logic-blindness that misleads people in the Wason task,
especially when the task is
set in largely unfamiliar territory or put as a purely
logical puzzle. What cases will you have to check to
find a violation of If p, then
q?––obviously, the p case
and . . . the not q case––yes, but we’ve all had Logic I
or the equivalent, and many
untrained students have a bad time at first even with
modus tollens.
After all, the most famous
case, the Sherlock Holmes one, comes before the last
hundred or so years of experimental investigation of
human reasoning. Here’s how
the doughty but dull
Inspector Gregory questions the great detective and receives
his Olympian answer:
“Is there any point to which
you would wish to draw my attention?”
“To
the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.”
“The dog did nothing in the
night-time.”
“That was the curious
incident,” remarked Sherlock Holmes (pp. 42–43).6
Or, to put Holmes’s modus tollens contextually and informally: If some stranger
entered the stables to
steal Silver Blaze during the night-time, then the dog would
6 C. Doyle, The Complete Works of Sherlock Holmes, I (New York: Putnam, 2003).
JUSTIN LEIBER
60
have barked. The dog did not bark. Therefore: It was an insider
who stole the race
horse. (Q.E.D.) To
surprise not only Gregory but also hisWatson, Holmes gives us
the negative of an indeterminate disjunction. If
Holmes had straight out said, “The
dog did not bark,” rather
than “The dog did nothing,” the reader if not Gregory
might well have gotten it.
Further, what about the
behavioral output? What would that be? One guesses
that the behavior might be
variants of “He cheats!” or “He drank that beer!” or
“Let’s get out of here, that
guy is clearly underage and they’re raiding all the bars
on the strip tonight” or the Bostonian bouncer’s
menacingly laconic “out of here!”
(i.e., he knew it was beer,
he purchased the beer, he intentionally drank it, he is in
violation of the law, and ceteris paribus––he was not forced to by a guy with a
gun; the bartender did not slip it to him, saying it
was non-alcoholic, etc.). In
Cosmides’ experiment of
course, the subject just has to say (intentionally, etc.) “I
would pick that card and
that other one” or perhaps he merely puts a check on the
appropriate box. Most importantly, even this last “behavior”
would involve mindwide
multi-module cognition and
of course a complex of unconscious pre-motor
and motor activity.
It is difficult to resist
the thought that Cosmides et al. are really thinking about
a Pavlov/Cartesian reflex;
for example, tap just below the patella
and the leg goes
up automatically without
any cortical involvement. But, when you put it directly
like that, it is obvious
that “cheater-detection” probably involves some Fodorian
modules and our
conscious, person-level mind that is fed by these modules and,
sometimes, itself outputs to the motor complex.
I don’t know how much of our
conscious mind is learned or grown, how much
selected and how much
spandreled up by the rapid and truly extraordinary (and
anatomically simply scaled
up) expansion of the mammalian brain from 300 cc to
1400 cc––this expansion of
some millions of years in which all 15 odd organic
divisions of the brain just get larger in lock step, so there is no clear evidence as to
which brain part and
combination of parts might have been tweaked by environmental
selection and which might
just be piggy-backing or spandreling; it might be
that no examination of the
current human brain could establish whether, say,
environmental pressure for a
larger hippocampus spurred lock-step brain enlargement
or, on the other hand,
environmental pressure for a greatly enlarged visual
cortex did the job.7We
might call this the indeterminacy of selection
or of selective
history.
And while we can, in astronomy, observe or see the light from stars as they
were billions of years ago,
we simply cannot do the same for behavior in the
Pleistocene.We may
reasonably say that we see (essentially
undistorted light from)
7 See G. Striedter, Principles of Brain Evolution (Sunderland, MA: Sinauer, 2005); and B. L.
Finlay,
R. B. Darlington, and N.
Nicastro, “Developmental Structure in Brain Evolution,” Behavioral and
Brain Sciences 24 (2001): 263–308.
THE WILES OF EVOLUTIONARY
PSYCHOLOGY
61
stars as they were billions
of years ago, but we cannot say that of
yesterday’s
corpse, yesteryear’s snows,
still less last century’s skeleton, amber-shrouded
Paleozoic insects, or
fossilized dinosaur remains––they remain beyond directly
veridical observation in a way that even some very early
cosmic events do not.
However, it is significant
that while nearly everyone believes that the human
brain today is natively
little different, and not smaller or anatomically distinct,
from the one sported by our
hunter-gatherer ancestors 200,000 years ago, these
ancestors simply carried on
in their hunter-gather cognizing for most of this
period (using exactly the same crude chipped-stone tool,
made in exactly the same
way, for hundreds of
thousands of years), and then
suddenly, with the beginnings
of systematic agriculture
and the eventual development of writing, flowered in
such an extraordinary way in
almost every cultural and technological respect over
the last 10,000 years,
suddenly facing a mushrooming number of new problems
and opportunities, and
acquiring or learning an equally incredible number of new
skills, perceptions, and
sensitivities.8 This surely gives those who oppose the
spandrel and exadaptationist view a mighty large burden
of proof.
And yes, perhaps our
ancestors had to exercise some smarts to be good
“cheater-detectors,” but
there are many ways to be a cheater-detector and, characteristically,
it is learned not acquired,
and does not function automatically, nor
is there a critical period. From what we know
directly of tribal hunter-gatherers
and what we may tentatively
infer about their ancestors, they do not spend their
time teaching their
children how to see three-dimensionally or how to speak/hear
language, but they surely do
spend much of their time teaching their children what
they should and should not
do, how they should judge others’ actions and their
own, who owns what and why, and how stuff can be
given or traded, and so on.
This education may be
achieved through instructing, correcting, and of course
exemplifying, but it is also
done through narratives, and of course also constitutes
the fabric of social life,
and of its discussions and negotiations, as explicitly
understood by the natives themselves. No wonder they are
fairly good at it and we
today as well. What is taught is what must be learned.
And what must be learned,
a sensitively worked and
conscious narrative picture, however roughly the statistically
ordered behavioral display approximates this competency.
Paul Eckman has gone from
studying facial expressions of emotion to studying
dissimulation and its
detection.9 His assistants can train you to detect lying
(oddly,
8 See Striedter (2005); Finlay et al. (2001); S.
Mithen, Thoughtful Foragers: A
Study of Prehistoric
Decision-Making (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990); S. Mithen, The Prehistory of the Mind
(London: Thames and Hudson,
1996); S. Mithen, After the Ice: Global Human
History 20,000 to
5,000 BC (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2004).
9 P. Ekman, Telling Lies: Clues to Deceit in the Marketplace, Marriage,
and Politics (New York:
Norton,
2001).
JUSTIN LEIBER
62
policemen without Eckman
training are no better at this than the general public,
while customs inspectors excel). Another quirky Eckman
finding: Children are
good at detecting lies until
they reach adolescence and adulthood––perhaps active
cheating detectors can be a liability in some
environments.
THE WILES OF EVOLUTIONARY
PSYCHOLOGY
In 1975, E. O. Wilson’s Sociobiology revived the evolutionist tradition of
plumbing anthropological
studies to find social universals,10
which could then be
explained as adaptations winnowed by countless years of
natural selection. Evolutionary
psychology has discarded many of the features that
madeWilson a pariah.
Natural selection, we are
assured, has had no time to sculpt humans to any degree
within historical times––we
have been shaped, over the much longer Pleistocene, to
function optimally in a hunter-gatherer community. By the
same token, some of
these adaptations may be no
longer adaptive, and this may explain some apparently
irrational and maladapted
behavior as behavior previously adaptive and natively
retained––such as sometimes lethal barroom brawls over
mating possibilities.
Nonetheless, on this
methodological issue, Cosmides certainly seems to follow
Wilson’s well-marked path in
that theWason task experiments had been proceeding
since the late 1960s,
creating mounds of direct experimental evidence about
this quirk of human reasoning that Holmes had enjoyed
correcting. As Wason
himself puts it:
I first described the
selection task in 1966 but could hardly have suspected that in the next quarter
century it would become the
most intensively researched single problem in the history of the
psychology of reasoning.11
In her 1985 dissertation,
Cosmides proffers her adaptationist explanation of this
already most notable phenomena, adding some experiments
of her own. This
rather reverses her own
strident footnote to her influential Cognition article,
which
notifies us as follows:
Note that the method of
evolutionary psychology outlined here is hypothetico-deductive, rather than
speculative. In a speculative approach, one first discovers
a psychological mechanism, and then one
speculates about what adaptive problem it evolved to solve.
The approach advocated here is the
reverse: first, one uses
existing and validated theories from evolutionary biology to define an
adaptive problem the human
mind must be able to solve, and to deduce what properties a psychological
mechanism capable of solving
the problem must have.12
10 E. O. Wilson, Sociobiology (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard UP, 1975).
11 Newstead and Evans (1995): 295.
12 Cosmides (1989): 190.
THE WILES OF EVOLUTIONARY
PSYCHOLOGY
63
One speculates that practice
did not exactly follow precept here––or perhaps my
detector misfired.
In many different versions,
Wason asked which cards his subjects would feel
they had to turn up to
decide whether there were any violations of the If p, then q
rule. After rightly picking the p card,
they failed miserably, with close to half
incorrectly picking q, and they rarely selected
the correct answer, not-q. Note that
the Wason failure is noticed by contrast with the much more normal pattern of
human performance matching
the competency that logic supplies us.13
So we can
say that the general
reasoning ability native to humans works well over considerable
territory, but falls off
drastically with the Wason selection task unless the
context itself is very familiar and the issue one of
vital importance. In Cosmides’
classical experiment, she
asked Harvard College undergraduates to “finger” those
who might be cheating on
drinking age, a task that her subjects were likely to be
thoroughly familiar with and
potentially of very serious concern; in Wason’s
comparable case, you have to
think abstractly of what numbers are odd or even,
what letters designate
vowels and what consonants, while Cosmides’ version
gives the very familiar
oppositions, alcoholic or nonalcoholic,
of legal drinking
age or not legal age. It is actually quite hard to think of any other content
that
would be more promising for
stimulating Wason test scores among the Harvard
College undergraduates
Cosmides employed.
From Cosmides’ professed
disparaging of the “speculative approach,” one
might suppose that before
her 1985 thesis, she had, while reading theWason task
literature, not discovered a
psychological mechanism and speculated about what
adaptive problem it solved
but instead “used the existing and validated theories of
evolutionary psychology to
define an adaptive problem [. . .] and deduce what
properties a psychological mechanism [that would solve] the
problem must have.”
However, Wason task
experimental psychologists had already come up with the
“drinking problem” years
before in 1980 or so and experimentally determined that
students, not even at
Harvard but at the University of Florida, would be quite
successful when asked to
imagine enforcing, as police, the rule “If a person is
drinking beer, then the
person must be over 19 years of age” (to be sure, students
from the University of
Florida scored less well than students of Harvard on both
problems; still they scored
73% right on the drinking problem and nothing on “If
a card has an ‘A’ on one side, then it has ‘3’ on
the other side.”14 Cosmides could
be quite speculatively
confident, when she did her experiment a few years later,
that the Harvard
undergraduates would do quite well on the drinking problem and
13 P. Wason and P. Johnson-Laird, Psychology of Reasoning (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1972).
14 R. Griggs and J. Cox, “The Exclusive Thematic
Materials Effect inWason’s Selection Task,” British
Journal of Psychology 73 (1982): 407–20.
JUSTIN LEIBER
64
not so well, although better
as it proved than the Floridian U-ers, on the more
abstract version.
Humans are fine at modus ponens and fairly good with explicit modus tollens.
But they are not good with
arguments using negation and especially bad with the
double negation that comes
up when the subject is asked what is the negation of
If p then q, which is Not (If not q then not p), or equivalently in logic, to give the
explicit answer the subject must arrive at, Not (p and not q). This, which Wason
and Johnson-Laird believe
nests the solution in the implicit presence of two
negations, at the atomic and the molecular level, is very
hard indeed for humans.
AsWason and Johnson-Laird
insist, we find something like the following list of
testing possibilities:
1. Disjunctions
indeterminate (particularly if context does not make it
clear whether the “or” is weak [inclusive] or strong
[exclusive]).
2. Same is true of
conditionals (strict and material implication).
3. Modus ponens is easier than modus tollens.
4. Modus tollens is easier with a biconditional than with a conditional; but
no difference for modus ponens.
5. Double disjunctions are
very difficult.
Testing these directly, the
following result was obtained: modus ponens 91%
correct; modus tollens 64% correct; affirmative disjunction 48%; negative
disjunction
30%. This is a formal,
non-contextual regularity that shows the systematic
divergence from competence
in actual performance.15
The difficulty of the Wason
task might be compared with what humans face
with central syntactical
embedding as opposed to progressively left or right
embedding (humans can easily
continue with “This is the cat that ate the rat that
chased the mouse that [. .
.] that lived in the house that Jack built,” while “That that
is is,” is about all the
central embedding that human performance can accommodate,
wholly degenerating with the
merely doubly embedded “That that that is is
is”). Indeed, by way of contrast, humans are not
only good in very familiar social
exchange contexts, but
researchers have also found context-bound Wason problems
that are not obviously
social-exchange problems but are also so familiar that
students can also handle
them as well.16
15
Wason and Johnson-Laird
(1972).
16 See K. Manktelow and D. Over, “Deontic
Reasoning,” Perspectives on Thinking and
Reasoning:
Essays in Honor of Peter
Wason, ed. S. Newstead and J.
Evans (London: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1995)
91–114; Newstead and Evans
(1995); P. Johnson-Laird and R. Byrne, Deduction (London:
Lawrence Erlbaum, 1991);
Patricia W. Cheng and Keith J. Holyoak, “Pragmatic Reasoning
Schemas,” Cognitive Psychology 17 (1985): 391–416; Griggs and Cox (1982); and
Wason and
Johnson-Laird
(1972).
THE WILES OF EVOLUTIONARY
PSYCHOLOGY
65
Of course, justice and
fairness have been explicitly seen to be basic to human
existence by thinkers from
Plato to Hobbes to John Rawls, not to mention a whole
long British empiricist
tradition of modeling rational self-interest into economic
theory (indeed,
anticipatingWilson and Cosmides, Charles Darwin himself wrote
that Thomas Malthus’ work on
human populations inspired him to come up with
the idea of natural
selection).17
“Social exchange” ultimately
comprises what Kant and Aristotle, who both
rightly took humans to be
natively social, understood as the vast domain of the
practical reason and productive reasoning,
a domain where choice is at stake and
we presuppose freedom, and
Kant’s imperatives and Aristotle’s practical syllogisms
apply––indeed, the whole of
folk psychology, law, art, and technology is in
play, for these all issue in imperatives that direct
conduct. Social exchange is
almost by definition
characterized as the source of vital importance respecting
our
personhood and other persons; it is our life. This is a
person-level, holistic,
consciousness-wide domain of
the evaluation and rules belonging to persons, but
it is not a module-like vision or language. It is
consciously learned and relearned
every day; it is the fiber
of persons, and in a sense the mind itself because it must
take account of physical realities as well personal
ones.
You can say that Cosmides
has rediscovered Kant’s faculty of practical reason
as long as you recognize
that Kant, surely plausibly, held that: (1) The faculty of
practical reason takes in
our entire sphere of moral reasoning in the broadest
sense, leaving only one
other comparable faculty, that of pure/causal/physical/
mathematical reasoning; and (2) Logical reasoning is common to
both faculties.
You need to make deductions
in order to formulate plans and to evaluate actions; to determine the
consequences of assumptions
and hypotheses; to interpret and to formulate instructions, rules, and
general principles; to
pursue arguments and negotiations; to weigh evidence and to assess data; to
decide between competing theories; and to solve
problems. A world without deduction would be a
world without science, technology, laws, social
conventions, and culture. [. . .] Psychologists have
accumulated 80 years’ worth
of experiments on deductive reasoning.18
I have suggested that
Fodorian modules provide input to our conscious minds, and
thus to some
structural/functional area of the brain (and one imagines motor
modules that take the
outputs of consciousness by stages into motorized behavior;
the module for speech,
converting sense into sound, has a close relationship to
Fodor’s language module,
because linguistic competency seems to comprehend
both; and one can make
parallel remarks, perhaps, about our spatiotemporal
intuition of a 3-D manipulable world). But it may also be
suggested that there is
17 Charles Darwin, The Autobiography of Charles Darwin (New York: Norton, 1958); Thomas
Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population (London: J. John, 1807).
18 Johnson-Laird and Byrne (1991): 3.
JUSTIN LEIBER
66
some sort of central system
where it all comes together in the language of thought,
which perhaps as well carries the underpinnings of the
phenomena of consciousness.
However, to presume that
some central system both fully comprehends and
fully causally directs a
collection of specific modules (with maybe a smattering of
fail-safe, shortcut reflexes
to save time), it could be just the little-man-in-the-head
fallacy of reading
everything that belongs to the whole, the sensory inputs, motor
outputs, and everything else
between into some dimensionless inner entity; it
certainly also flies in the
face of mountains of evidence about the differential
effects of the varieties of brain damage.
Besides, as far as actual
consciousness goes, Daniel Dennett and others may
well be right to argue that
not only is its information spotty and degraded, but also
it (1) is more like ongoing
multiple drafts than a “Cartesian theater,” and (2) is like
a press agent cum president
who has an undetailed big picture(s), delegates much
of the work, does as much
rationalizing as reasoning, thinks in the intentional
idiom, and is a narrator as
much as a manager.19 It is not implausible to think that
such an arrangement would
indeed be one where problems are faced that require
conscious learning,
reflective decision-making, reasoned justification and condemnation,
planning, and in all the
strange steam of often meandering, selfdoubting,
and plodding our stream of
consciousness affords us, our court of last
and sometimes first resort,
its performance buffeted by many times too much
potential input from a variety of modules. (An inevitably
anecdotal but fascinating
case is the savant, who can
intertranslate between the several languages he has
picked up, and rightfully
prides himself and works at his performance.20
This
savant, otherwise, has major cognitive deficits and
cannot manage his life. He is,
interestingly, quite good at
formal (syntactical) reasoning in language, but very
limited in his appreciation of speech pragmatics and
social implicatures. For
example, he is fine with modus ponens and some of the rest, but leaden, or
literal-minded, about the fact that someone who says Do you have any salt? wants
some salt and is asking you to give it to him.)
ANTHROPOLOGY IS TO COGNITIVE
SCIENCE AS COSMOLOGY IS
TO PHYSICS AND CHEMISTRY OR
AS EVOLUTIONARY BIOLOGY
IS TO GENETIC,
EMBRYOLOGICAL, MOLECULAR,
MORPHOGENETIC, AND
DESCRIPTIVE BIOLOGY
Sometimes the prefrontal
lobes are suggested as a likely site for something like
this putative manager/narrator of the temporal
person. Familiarly, after an explosion
blew a steel rod through his
prefrontal lobes, Phineas Gage, a 19th-century
19 D. Dennett, Consciousness Explained (Boston, MA: Little Brown, 1991).
20 N. Smith, The Mind of a Savant: Language Learning and Modularity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995).
THE WILES OF EVOLUTIONARY
PSYCHOLOGY
67
railroad supervisor, seemed
to have his faculties intact and had lost none of his
mental or physical skills
except that he seemed to lose his moral compass, his
sense of how to live his
life through time; historical accounts suggest that his
behavior became erratic and
offensive, he was demoted, lost his sense of propriety,
and became a confused
wanderer.21
To be sure, Damasio
highlights Gage as a famous historical curiosity, and he
uses Gage’s skull and
yellowed accounts of his behavior, like fossils are used, to
speculate on the actual
character of Gage’s brain damage and his spottily reported
behavioral deficit;
Damasio’s substantial claims about the prefrontal damage
syndrome are based on
current brain and behavioral data about recent cases,
including quasi-experimental
probes (and he uses this information to winnow
historical accounts and reconstruct Gage’s condition and
behavior). Gage is only
of interest as a first
described case, as a genesis original like the diseases that bear
the name of the first
individual that was adequately described as having the disease
(unwittingly, Cosmides et
al. often seem to commit a kind of genetic fallacy in
attributing archetypical
importance to Pleistocene hunter-gatherers but not to
more recent, and recently observed,
hunter-gatherers). Of course Gage and the
many recent cases Damasio
details clearly maintain most cognitive skills; only
some comparatively subtle
managerial/planning functions have been impaired,
not the whole little man inside.
Although the written order
of Damasio’s book is diachronic (historical), ministering
to our human interest in
ancestors and origins, his evidence is synchronic
(current)––he argues from a
foundation of what we can directly determine today
to historical speculations
about what really went on with Gage, and Damasio must
logically take it for
granted that these historical speculations, since they are simply
what can be inferred from
present data, cannot refute, undermine, or call into
question current observational and experimental data.
Present day data is foundational.
And if supposed data about
ancestral cases seem to cast doubt on present
day data, we discard the
speculative historical data (just as Damasio rightly
discards what is in contemporary
newspaper accounts of Gage that contradicts
currently well-established facts about gross brain
anatomy). It is our old friend,
modus tollens:
1. If p, then q (If my speculation about ancient behavior is correct, then
thus and so biological
phenomena would occur today);
2. Not q (But
thus and so biological phenomena does not occur today);
3. Therefore, not p (My
speculation about ancient behavior is false).
21
A. Damasio, Descartes Error (New York: Putnam, 1994).
JUSTIN LEIBER
68
Further, if questions still
arise, we can check and recheck current data, seek new
data, and experimentally manipulate current cases.
(Why indeed don’t
hunter-gatherers of today hold evidential center stage?––and
close to as much of the
stage should surely be held by the massive accumulation
of reports of
hunter-gatherers from 20th- and late 19th-century anthropologists
and the many traveling observers from the last few
hundred years? Instead, we
purvey a priori theoretical
stories about what the Pleistocene environment “must
have” called forth in the
behavior of humans, observations untroubled by any
actual observations of human behavior.)
Where are the behavioral
events of yesteryear? (pace Francois
Villon)––Well,
they certainly aren’t now! Essentially the only real
evidentiary basis for inferring
them is what happens now or close to now or in future
experiments. Therefore, we
cannot use inferred data
about ancient cases to infer new data about
what happens
now. Of course, in addition, we can add the
standard assumption of physicists and
chemists that what is true
in the part of the universe here and now, can be inferred
to be true there and then. We use the assumption of
uniformity (which itself is
based on the observable and
experimentally established data respecting the here
and now), plus any of our
actual here and now data, to infer what happened here in
the past and what will
happen here in the future (if retrodiction works, so does
prediction), and of course, for that matter, the now but
astronomically far away.
Nonetheless, the following
attractive reasoning is a formal fallacy (affirming the
consequent):
1. If p,
then q. (Given p in the Pleistocene, thus and
so would be true
today.)
2. It is true that q.
3. Therefore, p.
But obviously, since all of
our observational and experimental evidence is today
and in the future, the
support provided by what we today infer about the distant
past, namely p,
provides no real further support for the primary data supporting
generalizations about native
human characteristics––nor of course does p provide
any support for claims about current humans.
(We do of course notice that
the hypothetico-deductive method is a version of
affirming the consequent. But when and only when it supports a well-tested
generalization within a
law-like system that is confirmed through systematic
inquiry by today’s
observations and experiments and, of most practical importance,
those of tomorrow.)
The reader may recall that
these primary data about human/gatherer humans are
the domain of social anthropology. In fact,
Darwinian perspectives presided in the
genesis of anthropology in
the last decades of the 19th century (not rare among
THE WILES OF EVOLUTIONARY
PSYCHOLOGY
69
psychologists and
philosophers of that time,William James insisted that humans,
as well as animals, are
bundles of adapted instincts).22 A massive recent work of
scholarship is pointedly
titled Darwin and the Emergence of
Evolutionary Theories
of Mind and Behavior.23 The adaptationist reign continued in anthropology
until it faded somewhat in
the 1930s, given the advent of experimental, behaviorist
psychology and a developing
distaste for applications of nativist and adaptationist
views to the human sphere.
This revised,
the-environment-is-all orientation had not much time to run before
vigorous correction. I recall Edwin Ardner, in his
lectures at Oxford, poohpoohing
relativist empiricist
anthropology, deploring the not-in-my-tribe
antiuniversals
orientation that had characterized
this anthropology and was now
giving way to a new
rationalism that was happy to characterize human nature and
describe psycho-cultural cognitive universals. The year
was 1970; the nowcelebrated
elderly nativist Claude Levi-Strauss had spoken at my
Oxford matriculation.
Anthropology has been
congenial to evolution and nativism for two-thirds
of its history as a science
and it really does not need the old-fogy abuse heaped on
it (and on the cognitive sciences) by the new
evolutionary psychologists.
Even if we were able to
look, through Kripke telescopes, at our entire Pleistocene
career, it would seem not to matter morally all that
much what we saw.
Suppose that, after our
ancestral line split into chimpanzee and bonobo lines,
australopithicene
protohumans for a million years more followed the bonobo
social pattern than that of
the chimpanzee, with the dominant older females
putting up a uniform front
against the physically larger males, with social peace
characteristically achieved
through sexual play (bonobos are nearly continuously
sexually receptive and
mostly perform sexually when conception is impossible––
male–male, female–female,
juvenile–adult, etc., reminding one of the 1960’s
motto “If it moves, fondle it”).
Should it really matter,
except as an historical oddity, whether or not this
occurred? Would the Samson or Delilah who discovered this
have destroyed the
temple of a now outmoded
science?Would current investigations and descriptions
of human behavior have to be totally rewritten?
Isn’t the real question what social
arrangements are possible or
not, with what consequences, etc., for homo sapiens,
not whether it actually occurred or didn’t? It
surely should not matter morally or
politically whether it did
or did not happen except for those who demand that
historical facts have to
confirm their religious beliefs, genesis myths, or politicomoral
agenda. And such folk does not care whether evolution
spandrels or grinds
selectively, whether the
earth’s non-biblical antiquity or even its formation is
22 William James, Psychology: Briefer Course
(New York: Library of America, 1890/1992).
23 R. Richards, Darwin and the Emergence of Evolutionary Theories of Mind and
Behavior (Chicago,
IL:
U of Chicago P, 1987).
JUSTIN LEIBER
70
established by physicists or
biologists, or whether evolution proceeded mostly
cooperatively or selectively,
ala Stephen Gould or ala E. O. Wilson, ala D’Arcy
Thompson or Charles
Darwin––folks on either side of these latter debates can and
should mount the barricades
against the genesis fundamentalists together (p. 64).24
In any case, the available
scientific evidence is here and now.25
Florida State University
24 G. Leavitt, Incest and Inbreeding Avoidance: A Critique of Darwinian
Social Science (Lewiston,
New York: Mellen Press,
2005).
25 Leaving aside human cognition and animal
behavior, it seems possible that somewhat the same
point can be made respecting evolutionary biology more
generally. Since Jean Lamarck and Charles
Darwin, the phylogenetic
“tree” of descent has been taken by many to suggest that the current
taxonomic hierarchy must
derive from the actual structure of historic descent lines (almost as if we
have to believe that
distinctions of descent must be part of the description of present day
organisms,
whether or not this is
reflected in any actual physical, chemical, or genetic feature of the
organisms,
in just the way that we
might say that a drawing is “the original” and another a mere “copy” although
the two are physically indistinguishable). To a
considerable degree, even taxonomic biology has
come to question this
historical mandate at a practical level (as in practice it has always done) and
at a theoretical level as well.
As a recent cladistic text
puts it, Cladograms are statements about character distribution. There
may be several
Evolutionary trees
compatible with one cladogram but most of these make additional assumptions
beyond those of character distribution. [. . .] [A]
cladogram includes no connotation of
ancestry and has no implied time axis. A phylogenetic
tree [on the other hand] is based on
ancestry and time considerations. (P. Forey, et al., Cladistics: A Practical Course in Systematics
[Oxford:
Clarendon, 1992] 18.)
Or, even more emphatically
if not savagely
Another related criticism
often leveled at evolutionary taxonomy is that it uses a narrative
approach for constructing
classifications, in which character data distribution and data are not
explored for equally
parsimonious solution and the classification results solely from the expertise
and authority of the individual worker. (I.
Kitching, et al., Cladistics: The Theory and
Practice of
Parsimony Analysis [Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998] 13)
True, we can today use DNA,
as well as macro characters, to determine taxonomy (and to supplement
our speculations about the past as well). But
considerable historical indeterminacy will still remain.
Apart from descriptive
macrobiology, the fields of molecular biology, embryology, morphology,
and biochemistry proceed
ahistorically as well, bidding fair for unity with the more basic sciences,
while at the same time
providing the foundation on which historical inferences, and the sifting of the
necessary and the accidental in the inferred history of
organic life, are based. This critical view of the
scientific status of
evolutionary speculations is endemic to current biological research and has a
history as what has
occasionally been called Thompson-Turing biology, going back through Geoffrey
St. Hilaire to the classical
materialism of Lucretius and Democritus (see C. Boeckx and M. Piatelli-
Palmarini, “Language as a
Natural Object: Linguistics as a Natural Science,” Linguistic Review 22
[2005]: 447–66; Noam
Chomsky, Language and Nature [Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002];
THE WILES OF EVOLUTIONARY
PSYCHOLOGY
71
J. Leiber, “Philosophy,
Engineering, Biology, and History:AVindication of Turing’sViews about the
Distinction between the
Cognitive and Physical Sciences,” Journal of Theoretical and Artificial
Intelligence 14 [2002]: 29–37; J. Leiber, “Turing and the
Fragility and Insubstantiality of Evolutionary
Explanations:APuzzle about
the Unity of Alan Turing’sWork with Some Larger Implications,”
Philosophical Psychology 13 [2001]: 83–94; I. Stewart, Life’s Other Secret: The New Mathematics
of the Living World [New York: John Wiley, 1998]; A. Turing and C. W.
Wardlaw, “A Diffusion
Reaction Theory of
Morphogenesis,” Collected Works of Alan
Turing: Morphogenesis, ed. P. T.
Saunders [Amsterdam:
North-Holland, 1953/1992] 230–47; A. Turing, “On the Chemical Basis of
Morphogenesis,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society
of London, Series B, 237 [1952/
1992]: 37–72; and D’Arcy
Thompson, On Growth and Form, 1st ed. [Cambridge, Cambridge UP,
1917]). Finally, and
similarly, physics and chemistry proceed ahistorically while also providing the
basis on which cosmology
builds its retrodictions of necessity and chance in the unique course of this
universe’s history.
JUSTIN LEIBER
72