Abstract
The chapter approaches the topic of models as mental models by a survey of animal cognition studies linked to camouflage, to sustain the claim that biological camouflage can be seen as the operationalization—also in extremely rudimentary cognitive systems—of mental models representing the other’s cognitive system. In this same chapter, by analyzing the inferential operations (supported by the aforementioned modeling activity) underpinning camouflage-breaking strategies, I will try to explain how the same tacit use of models representing the other’s cognitive abilities is at play in human communication, when enacting and uncovering linguistic deception.
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Notes
- 1.
A recent special issue of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, introduced by Stevens and Merilaita (2009), does provide both the state of the art and new insights in the field.
- 2.
If all inference is, in fact, a form of sign activity—as received from the Peircean tradition—and we use the word sign to include feelings, images, conceptions, and other representations, then we must include unconscious thought among the model-based ways of moral thinking.
- 3.
It might be unfair to acknowledge plants only as passive elements being part of an environment, only passible of efficient causation: it has been suggested that even plants can be described as displaying a kind of embodied cognition (Calvo and Keijzer 2009) and are therefore concerned by semiotic causation as well. The perceptual and inferential horizon at play is of course radically incommunicable with respect to ours and to that of non-human animals we able to refer to.
- 4.
- 5.
Originally belonging to the conceptual toolbox of ecological psychology, an affordance is a resource or chance that the environment presents to the “specific” organism, such as the availability of water or of finding recovery and concealment. Of course the same part of the environment offers different affordances to different organisms. Part II will further rely on the notion of affordance, and hence provide a deeper understanding.
- 6.
When dealing with intraspecific predation, competition over sexual mates or available resources (such as food or nesting room), it seems apter to consider the external environment as related to every single organism; conversely, if we want to frame interspecific dynamics such as predator-prey ones, symbiotic relationships and so on, it might be simpler to consider the notion of environment as related to a species or at least to a localized population.
- 7.
One could start by arguing that these hypotheses could be questioned by referring to the famous handicap principle (Zahavi and Zahavi 1993) and honest costly signaling theories: part of the handicap principle theory concerns cases in which sign suppression is abandoned favoring a loud semiotic activity by which the predator or the prey signals to its counterpart that the latter has been spotted and will not manage at catching the former off-guard. The (maybe over-)notorious example is that of the gazelle’s “stotting” (i.e. jumping several times up and down): biologists following the handicap principle theory maintain that the stotting behavior is de facto a waste of energy that could be employed to run away immediately, but instead this waste of energy (that is, the handicap) is afforded by energetic specimens that therefore convey the message “I am so full of energy that I can even waste it like this, I am not going to get tired that easily!”: the aim is to achieve a win-win balance so that both the predator and the prey avoid an energy-consuming chase or struggle whose outcome is not foreseeable. Nevertheless, it should be considered that honest signaling is enacted only after recognition is accomplished: stealth attack and defense remain the highest-success strategies for both predators and preys. If this was not the case, it would be legitimate to expect from all living creatures to be flashily colored in orange and pink and extremely loud, all the time, while even the long-time favorite gazelle displays colors useful to blend in the savanna grass. Furthermore, tt should be considered that the factuality of the handicap principle has become a hotly debated topic over the past few decades. Since its introduction, it witnessed alternating periods of popularity and periods of decline: such alternation was caused on the one hand by a growth in popularity in humanities and economics separate and unmatched by its biological counterpart, which was on the other hand strongly opposed by influential biologists such as Maynard-Smith, who claimed—among several others—the impossibility to find actual evidence of the handicap principle in nature (Grose 2011).
- 8.
Refer Sect. 1.3.2 for a better introduction to the issue of abduction and further references.
- 9.
Semiotic brains, their role in defining human cognition and supporting many kinds of inference will be a pivotal topic in Part III, especially in Chap. 10.
- 10.
Especially when comparing animal fitness and cultural evolution, the concept should be understood in a “loosely Darwinian” connotation. In this book, when I refer to fitness I intend a very informal notion, hinting towards both a rigorous definition of fitness and to the one of welfare, the latter being less geared towards reproduction and inheritance and more towards the well-being of an organism.
- 11.
A belief can be true inasmuch it corresponds to a state of affairs in reality, and we can communicate this belief, build further inferences on it and so on, and we expect the positive or negative outcome of those processes to depend on the truthfulness of the original beliefs.
- 12.
This argument is akin to Gigerenzer’s famous treatment of more is less heuristics (Gigerenzer and Brighton 2009).
- 13.
I will analyze the abductive inferences informing the whole complex of perception in the first part of Chap. 10, dedicated to religious cognition.
- 14.
This view can be surely related to the discourse on modularity (Fodor 1983; Barrett and Kurzban 2006; Carruthers 2007), and it would probably be coherent with a postulation of an “agency detection module,” but I would rather not tackle that (formerly?) hotly debated issue if not, again rather marginally, in Part III, Chap. 10.
- 15.
The stick insect, Phasmatodea, enriches its structural camouflage by faking a typically atmospherically-induced way of moving, shaking and trembling like a small branch moved by gushes of wind (Bedford 1978).
- 16.
Chapter 10.
- 17.
- 18.
- 19.
I will discuss a similar point in the next Part, Chap. 6: specifically, I will analyze how the knowledge-richness of a given environment affects the attitude one should adopt towards different regimes of rationality, for instance fallacies and what is commonly, but also academically (sic!) known as bullshit (Frankfurt 2005).
- 20.
- 21.
Here, I am not addressing the whole range of subliminal conversation where signals are subliminally—involuntarily—produced and not only received, as far as pheromones, body language or even lapsuses for instance are concerned.
- 22.
Blowfishes, ink-shedding cephalopods such as cuttlefishes, squids and octopi, frill-necked lizards are all masers of ad baculum and ad ignorantiam equivalents in the animal kingdom.
- 23.
Here again fitness should not be intended in a strict Darwinian connotation: but rather be considered as a local trait, relating to the survival and the welfare of the single individual, without long-term evolutionary implications.
- 24.
Most of the following Part will be devoted to cognitive niche construction and maintenance, this definition is therefore just a stub for the sake of present discourse.
- 25.
Cognitive science, evolutionary psychology and paleoanthropology have thoroughly studied the pivotal role played by hunting in the development of many contemporary human endowments. Epistemologist Giuseppe Longo puts forward a fascinating hypothesis linking the development of an abstract concepts such as Euclides’ line without thickness to the rapid eye movements from one point to the other (saccade) by which a hunter precedes the trajectory of the prey in order to capture it (Longo 2005).
- 26.
Italics not in the original. cf. Peirce’s “Pragmatism as the logic of abduction”, in Peirce (1992–1998), pp. 227–241, the quotation is from footnote 12, pp. 531–532.
- 27.
Phenomenology’s toolbox includes the pivotal concept of adumbration (Husserl 1960, §17), referring to how only one partial aspect of an objects is manifest to the observer at one time, and this single aspect foreshadows the rest of the thing by an interplay of hinting and hiding. Such a concept is interesting for the philosophical investigation of camouflage inasmuch as to spell out a camouflage instance could also mean to look for the most relevant possible adumbration, and this is achieved also by the kinesthetic control of perception. The kinesthetic control of perception is related to the problem of generating the objective notion of three-dimensional space, that is, to the phenomenological constitution of a thing as a single body unified through the multiplicity of its appearances (Husserl 1960, §44). The “meaning identity” of a thing is of course related to the continuous flow of adumbrations: given the fact that the incompleteness of adumbrations implies their synthetic consideration in a temporal way, the synthesis in this case—kinetic—involves eyes, body, and objects. This kinesthetic synthesis of adumbrations increases the inferential knowledge-base on which agents can perform abductions concerning possible camouflaged agents, by noticing for instance parts of the—initially—irrelevant background that are mismatching, moving or unexpected in other ways.
- 28.
- 29.
I will analyze the role of repeated experimentation as a manipulative way to conquer true beliefs in the final chapter of this Part, when dealing with a new framework to understand experimentation (Chap. 4).
- 30.
As suggested by Herbert Simon, human beings have to cope with limited mental processing capabilities taking place in limited temporal settings (Simon 1955).
- 31.
I will analyze the environmental deployment of fallacious (and sometimes careless) knowledge into one’s epistemic environment in Part II, Chap. 6. It is already possible to argue, though, that phenomena such as bullshitting might be analogous to engaging in meaningless linguistic camouflage efforts.
- 32.
According to Paul Thagard, from an epistemological outlook we should prefer beliefs displaying a greater explanatory coherence, that is connecting in a deep and consilient way. A computational algorithm can be easily programmed to select explanations with the highest explanatory coherence, nevertheless human cognitive behavior can be better approximated making use of an algorithm which also takes into consideration emotional coherence: “according to the theory of emotional coherence, inferences about what to do and believe are affected not only by hypotheses and evidence, but also by the emotional values that are attached to representations whose coherence is assessed” (Thagard 2005, p. 62).
- 33.
The analysis of this issue could be widened resorting to the concept of epistemic bubble (Woods 2005), that I will elaborate in the Part III (Chap. 12). To introduce the matter very briefly, let us remember that there is no causal correlation between explanatory and emotional coherence: therefore, there is no guarantee that an emotionally coherent argument will be explanatorily consistent as well, and vice versa an explanatorily coherent argument might not spark any particular emotional preference. It is also true that particular mechanisms affect the attainment of truth: “truth is a fugitive property. That is, one can never attain it without thinking that one has done so; but thinking that one has attained it is not attaining it” (Woods 2005, p. 746). Therefore an emotionally coherent claim, camouflaged as an explanatory coherent one, can easily trigger the receiver’s acceptance and thus entrap her in an epistemic bubble. Once in an epistemic bubble, the agent is unable to commend her real knowledge from her ignorance concerning the subject at stake (that is, she cannot tell her knowing P from her thinking that she knows P, inasmuch as her emotional-abductive appraisal is satisfied by the argument, and she is consequently unable to effectively revise her beliefs concerning that topic.
- 34.
Transposed in a different philosophical outlook, the debate about the strategic use of camouflage is strictly connected with the construction of cognitive niches (Part II), and the selection of ecological chances. As camouflage is about either hiding real chances/affordances, or simulating non existent ones, some interesting connections can be drawn between linguistic camouflage and what is commonly referred to as “bullshit” (cf. Sect. 6.2.1).
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Bertolotti, T. (2015). On Biological and Verbal Camouflage: The Strategic Use of Models in Non-Scientific Thinking. In: Patterns of Rationality. Studies in Applied Philosophy, Epistemology and Rational Ethics, vol 19. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-17786-1_2
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