Abstract
In their most recent book, Evolving Enactivism: Basic Minds Meet Content (MIT 2017), Dan Hutto and Eric Myin claim to give a complete and gapless naturalistic account of cognition, but it comes with a kink. The kink being that content-involving cognition has special properties found nowhere else in nature, making it the case that minds capable of contentful thought differ in kind, in this key respect, from more basic minds. Contra Hutto and Myin, I argue that content-involving practices are themselves simply a further extension of action and do not therefore warrant being called ‘different in kind’ or ‘kinky’. With the help of Ludwig Wittgenstein and John V. Canfield, I show that Enactivism meets the challenge of explaining higher-level cognition; and, contra continuity sceptics, offer ‘a philosophically cogent and empirically respectable account’ of how human minds can emerge from nonhuman minds.
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Notes
‘According to REC [Radical Enactive account of Cognition], the basic sorts of cognition that our brains help to make possible are fundamentally interactive, dynamic, and relational. REC’s signature view is that such basic forms of cognition do not involve the picking up and processing of information that is used, reused, stored, and represented in the brain. The usual form of what REC calls basic, contentless cognition is nothing short of organisms actively engaging with selective aspects of their environment in informationally sensitive, spatiotemporally extended ways.’ (2017, p. xiv).
In fact, this—‘the claim that we must recognize a sharp discontinuity … in the natural history of our species’—is what Bar-On calls the diachronic deep-chasm claim which she distinguishes from the synchronic deep-chasm claim 'that there are deep and important differences between present-day humans and all the nonhuman animals around us' (2013, p. 294).
For elaboration, see Moyal-Sharrock (2013).
The continuity thesis – the idea that things change gradually, not by leaps or bangs – is explicitly maintained by many language acquisition theorists, who stand in stark opposition to Chomsky’s Big Bang theory. According to Chomsky (see 1988), language suddenly appears as a kind of evolutionary accident where humans, to the exclusion of all other animals, were somehow accidentally blessed with a fully functioning prefabricated language organ. Deacon (1997) abundantly demonstrates that Chomsky’s scenario is unsupported by evolutionary anthropology which evidences a gradual adaptation of the human brain and vocal chords to the use of language rather than the sudden appearance of a language organ containing a complete set of parameters enabling all grammars—Chomsky’s ‘Big Bang’ theory.
Though some sophisticated higher-level practices (e.g. mathematics) are exclusive to humans, it will become clear in the paper that I don't see 'content-involving cognition' as exclusive to humans.
Though in principle remaining open to animals.
It is a 'well-known fact that animals are able to learn small sets of arbitrary signal-meaning relationships. The most celebrated trained apes, Kanzi (Savage-Rumbaugh and Lewin 1994) and Nim (Terrace, 1987), have been able to acquire arbitrary symbolic vocabularies of several hundred items' (Hurford 2004, p. 554–555).
Richman (1976) found that gelada monkeys can produce sounds hitherto thought to be exclusive to human speech, such as vowel and consonant sounds and sounds articulated in different parts of the vocal tract such as labials and dentals. Richman (1987) also notes that the gelada's highly synchronised exchanges of contact calls share many of the rhythmic and melodic properties of human speech patterns (see also Richman 1978), and relates this to the need to resolve emotional conflicts inherent in many social situations.
For a related, perhaps complementary, set of sufficient, general holding conditions at the basis of language, see Gallagher: 'With exceptions for pathological cases, we arrive on the scene already attuned to other people's faces and their emotional expressions; we come already perceptually attentive to biological motion; we come already prepared for embodied interaction with others—and we are immediately pulled into such processes by caregivers and other persons.' (2012, p. 208). I see these—which Gallagher proposes as 'social interaction processes of primary intersubjectivity' that get ‘social cognition off the ground’—as more of the pre-symbolic interaction conditions or necessary starting-points of language.
'This is how calculation is done, in such circumstances a calculation is treated as absolutely reliable, as certainly correct' (1977, OC 39); 'This is how one calculates. Calculating is this. What we learn at school, for example. Forget this transcendent certainty, which is connected with your concept of spirit' (1977, OC 47).
Their being conditioned by facts that unassailably pertain to the human form of life makes some of our rules of grammar universal – that is, they are the bounds of sense from which any normal human being must begin to make sense. Alongside these, more local grammars emerge from the different forms of human life. See Moyal-Sharrock (Forthcoming).
This passage provides an apt illustration of Doris Bar-On's suggestion that 'our commonsense descriptions of the expressive behavior we share with existing nonhuman animals—as well as those provided by ethologists—can guide us towards a natural intermediate stage in a diachronic path connecting the completely unminded parts of the animal world with the fully minded, linguistically infused parts that we humans now occupy' (2013, p. 39).
See Moyal-Sharrock (2000).
As psychologist Richard Gipps summarizes: 'In place of … an intellectualist, disengaged, cognition-focused psychology, we are offered perspectives that stress the primitive foundational character of our prereflective (noncognitive) engagement with one another, our emotion, our expression, and our embodiment' (2004, p. 195).
See especially Tomasello (2016), but also Tomasello et al (2016): That great apes operate, at least on an implicit level, with an understanding of false beliefs suggests that this essential TOM skill is likely at least as old as humans' last common ancestor with the other apes' (p. 113). But Tomasello is not alone; see Jill Byrnit's Primate Theory of Mind: a state-of-the-art review. Journal of Anthropological Psychology 17:2006, pp. 1–21.
In philosophy, a similar position is adopted by Michael (2011) who claims that interaction complements, and may even contribute to mindreading, but does not replace, and Kim Sterelny who similarly defends a gestural origins hypothesis while hanging on to a complementary representationalist Theory of Mind (e.g., Sterelny 2012).
We do not normally theorize about whether other human beings have mental states (and only in some cases do we even ask ourselves what our interlocutor is really thinking or feeling). Our 'certainty' about someone having a mind is not an implicit conclusion we come to, but an instinctive, nonepistemic attitude; not resulting from inference, it is not open to falsity or mistake. It may be open to pathological failure, but then this is only the exception that confirms the rule. See xxx. Wittgenstein rightly rejects the notion that we can never really be certain of what another thinks or feels, so it is spurious to attribute to us a Theory of Mind: 'But of course it isn't true that we are never certain about the mental processes in someone else. In countless cases we are' (1992, LW II, p. 94); 'It is only in particular cases that the inner is hidden from me; and in those cases it is not hidden because it is the inner' (1992, LW II, p. 33). Indeed, in many cases where a feeling or thought is explicitly manifested, it may not be a genuine feeling or thought.
Dunbar imports the mentalistic picture elsewhere (e.g., Dunbar (2009), p. 568), but it is sufficiently absent in this paper to offer a clearly enactive hypothesis.
Dunbar suggests that the switch from manual to vocal grooming began with the appearance of Homo erectus, around two million years ago (1996, p. 115).
It is—to use the terminology used by Dunbar on his website—one of many 'cognitive tricks' used to overcome the constraints that time places on an individual’s ability to manage their relationships. Dunbar notes that this explanation stands in direct contrast to the conventional wisdom that language developed, and brain size increased, in the context of hunting communication and tool-making development. In fact, ‘the markedly improved tool designs of the Upper Palaeolithic can… be better interpreted as a consequence rather than a cause of enlarged brain size’ (1993, p. 15).
He sees this development as a 'small step' (1996, p. 141). Dunbar notes that Cheney and Seyfarth (1982) have shown that slight differences in the acoustical form of the calls allow the audience to infer a great deal about the event or situation on which the caller is commenting, even in the complete absence of any visual information' (Dunbar 1993, p. 17; my emphasis). Of course, I disagree that what is being understood here is so as a result of inference.
In the broader, Wittgensteinian, sense of grammar: as the often unarticulated, customary rules that govern our use of words and, by extension, our intentional actions (gestures) or nonverbal vocalisations.
For more on this, see Moyal-Sharrock (2000).
'A dog believes his master is at the door. But can he also believe his master will come the day after to-morrow?—And what can he not do here?—How do I do it?' (1997, PI, p. 174).
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Acknowledgements
A first iteration of this paper was presented at the ‘Getting Real about Words and Numbers: Enactive Approaches to Language and Mathematics’ workshop at Erasmus University Rotterdam June 12–13, 2017. My thanks to the workshop participants for a fruitful discussion. I am also immensely grateful to an anonymous reviewer for comments which prompted key clarifications in the paper.
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*Professor Emeritus at the University of Toronto, Jack (as he liked to be called) was an eminent philosopher of language, philosopher of mind, Wittgenstein scholar—and a dear friend. Among his many publications are: ‘The Community View (Philosophical Review 1996); ‘The rudiments of language’ (Language and Communication 1995); ‘The Passage into Language: Wittgenstein and Quine’ (in The Cambridge Companion to Wittgenstein 1996); ‘Pretence and the Inner’ (in The Third Wittgenstein, 2004); ‘Back to the Rough Ground: Wittgenstein and ordinary language’ (in Wittgenstein and Analytic Philosophy: Essays for P. M. S. Hacker 2009); and Becoming Human: The Development of Language, Self and Self-Consciousness (Palgrave 2007). This paper pays tribute to his deep and sensitive understanding of what it means to be(come) human.
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Moyal-Sharrock, D. From deed to word: gapless and kink-free enactivism. Synthese 198 (Suppl 1), 405–425 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-019-02218-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-019-02218-5