Tag Archives: eliminativism

Eliminating Common Sense

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BermudezThe more you know about the science of the mind, the less appealing our common sense ideas seem. Ideas about belief and desire motivating action just don’t seem to match up in any way with what you see going on. So, at least, says Jose Luis Bermudez in Arguing for Eliminativism (freely available on Academia, but you might need to sign in). Bermudez sympathises with Paul Churchland’s wish to sweep the whole business of common sense psychology away; but he wants to reshape Churchland’s attack, standing down the ‘official’ arguments and bringing forward others taken from within Churchland’s own writing on the subject.

Bermudez sketches the complex landscape with admirable clarity. He notes Boghossian has argued that eliminativism of this kind is incoherent: but Boghossian construed eliminativism as an attack on all forms of content. Bermudez has no desire to be so radical and champions a purely psychological eliminativism.

If something’s wrong with common sense psychology it could either be that what it says is false, or that what it says is not even capable of being judged true or false. In the latter case it could, for example, be that all common sense talk of mental states is nothing more than a complex system of reflexive self-expression like grunts and moans. Bermudez doesn’t think it’s like that: the propositions of common sense psychology are meaningful, they just happen to be erroneous.

It therefore falls to the eliminativist to show what the errors are.  Bermudez has a two-horned strategy: first, we can argue that as a matter of fact, we don’t rely on common sense understanding as much as we think. Second, we can look for ways to show that the kind of propositional content implied by common sense views is just incompatible with the mechanism that actually underlie human action and behaviour as revealed by scientific investigation.

There are, in fact, two different ways of construing common sense psychology. One is that our common sense understanding is itself a kind of theory of mind: this is the ‘theory theory’ line. To disprove this we might try to bring out what the common sense theory is and then attack it. The other way of construing common sense is that we just use our own minds as a model: we put ourselves in the other person’s shoes and imagine how we should think and react. To combat this one we should need a slightly different approach; but it seems Bermudez’s strategy is good either way.

I think the first horn of the attack works better than the second – but not perfectly. Bermudez rightly says it is very generally accepted that to negotiate complex social interactions we need to ascribe beliefs and desires to other people and draw conclusions about their likely behaviour. It ain’t necessarily so. Bermudez quotes the Prisoner’s Dilemma, the much-cited example where we have been arrested: if we betray our partner in crime we’ll get better terms whatever the other one does. We don’t, Bermudez points out, need to have any particular beliefs about what the other person will do: we can work out the strategy from just knowing the circumstances.

More widely, Bermudez contends, we often don’t really need to know what an individual has in mind.  If we know that person is a butcher, or a waiter, then the relevant social interaction can be managed without any hypothesising about beliefs and desires. (In fact we can imagine a robot butcher/waiter who would certainly lack any beliefs or desires but could execute the transactions perfectly well.)

That is fine as far as it goes, but it isn’t that hard to think of examples where the ascription of beliefs seems relevant. In particular, the interpretation of speech, especially the reading of Gricean implicatures, seems to rely on it. Sometimes it also seems that the ascription of emotional states is highly relevant, or hypotheses about what another person knows, something Bermudez doesn’t address.

It’s interesting to reflect on what a contrast this is with Dennett. I think of Dennett and Churchland as loosely allied: both sceptics about qualia, both friendly to materialist, reductive thinking. Yet here Bermudez presents a Churchlandish view which holds that ascriptions of purpose are largely useless in dealing with human interaction, while Dennett’s Intentional Stance of course requires that they are extremely useful.

Bermudez doesn’t think this kind of argument is sufficient, anyway, hence the second horn in which he tries to sketch a case for saying that common sense and neurons don’t fit well. The real problem here for Bermudez is that we don’t really know how neurons represent things. He makes a case for kinds of representation other than the sort of propositional representation he thinks is required by the standard common sense view (ie, we believe or desire that  xxx…). It’s true that a mess of neurons doesn’t look much like a set of well-formed formulae, but to cut to the chase I think Bermudez is pursuing a vain quest. We know that neurons can deal with ascriptions of propositional belief and desire (otherwise how would we even be able to think and talk about them) so it’s not going to be possible to rule them out neurologically. Bermudez presents some avenues that could be followed, but even he doesn’t seem to think the case can be clinched as matters stand.

I wonder if he needs to? It seems to me that the case for elimination does not rest on proving the common sense concepts false, only on their being redundant. If Bermudez can show that all ascriptions of belief and desire can for practical purposes be cashed out or replaced by cognition about the circumstances and game-theoretic considerations, then simple parsimony will get him the elimination he seeks.

He would still, of course, be left with explaining why the human mind adopts a false theory about itself instead of the true one: but we know some ways of explaining that – for example, ahem, through the Blindness of the Brain  (ie that we’re trapped within our limitations and work with the poor but adequate heuristics gifted to us, or perhaps foisted on us, bu evolution).

Scott’s Aliens

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blind alienScott Bakker has given an interesting new approach to his Blind Brain Theory (BBT): in two posts on his blog he considers what kind of consciousness aliens could have, and concludes that the process of evolution would put them into the same hole where, on his view, we find ourselves.

BBT, in sketchy summary, says that we have only a starvation diet of information about the cornucopia that really surrounds us; but the limitations of our sources and cognitive equipment mean we never realise it. To us it looks as if we’re fully informed, and the glitches of the limited heuristics we use to cobble together a picture of the world, when turned on ourselves in particular, look to us like real features. Our mental equipment was never designed for self-examination and attempting metacognition with it generates monsters; our sense of personhood, agency, and much about our consciousness comes from the deficits in our informational resources and processes.

Scott begins his first post by explaining his own journey from belief in intentionalism to eliminativist scepticism about it, and sternly admonishes those of us still labouring in intentionalist error for our failure to produce a positive account of how human minds could have real intentionality.

What about aliens – Scott calls the alien players in his drama ‘Thespians’ – could they be any better off than we are? Evolution would have equipped them with senses designed to identify food items, predators, mates, and so on; there would be no reason for them to have mental or sensory modules designed to understand the motion of planets or stars, and turning their senses on their own planet would surely tell them incorrectly that it was motionless. Scott points out that Aristotle’s argument against the movement of the Earth is rather good: if the Earth were moving, we should see shifts in the relative position of the stars, just as the relative position of objects in a landscape shifts when we we view them from the window of a moving train; yet the stars remain precisely fixed. The reasoning is sound; Aristotle simply did not know and could not imagine the mind-numbingly vast distances that make the effect invisibly small to unaided observation. The unrealised lack of information led Aristotle into misapprehension, and it would surely do the same for the Thespians; a nice warm-up for the main argument.

Now it’s a reasonable assumption that the Thespians would be social animals, and they would need to be able to understand each other. They’d get good at what is often somewhat misleadingly called theory of mind; they’d attribute motives and so on to each other and read each others behaviour in a fair bit of depth. Of course they would have no direct access to other Thespians; actual inner workings. What happens when they turn their capacity for understanding other people on themselves? In Scott’s view, plausibly enough, they end up with quite a good practical understanding whose origins are completely obscure to them; the lashed-up mechanisms that supply the understanding neither available to conscious examination or in fact even visible.

This is likely enough, and in fact doesn’t even require us to think of higher cognitive faculties. How do we track a ball flying through the air so we can catch it? Most people would be hard put to describe what the brain does to achieve that, though in practice we do it quite well. In fact, those who could put down the algorithm most likely get it wrong too, because it turns out the brain doesn’t use the optimal method: it uses a quick and easy one that works OK in practice but doesn’t get your hand to the right place as quickly as it could.

For Scott all this leads to a gloomy conclusion; much of our view about what we are and our mental capacities is really attributable to systematic error, even to  something we could regard as a cognitive deficit or disease. He cogently suggests how dualism and other errors might arise from our situation.

I think the Thespian account is the most accessible and persuasive account Scott has given to date of his view, and it perhaps allows us to situate it better than before. I think the scope of the disaster is a little less than Scott supposes, in two ways. First, he doesn’t deny that routine intentionality actually works at a practical level, and I think he would agree we can even hope to give a working level description of how that goes. My own view is that it’s all a grand extension of our capacity for recognition, (and I was more encouraged than not by my recent friendly disagreement with Marcus Perlman over on Aeon Ideas; I think his use of the term ‘iconic’ is potentially misleading, but in essence I think the views he describes are right and enlightening) but people here have heard all that many times. Whether I’m right or not we probably agree that some practical account of how the human mind gets its work done is possible.

Second, on a higher level, it’s not completely hopeless. We are indeed prone to dreadful errors and to illusions about how our minds work that cannot easily be banished. But we kind of knew that. We weren’t really struggling to understand how dualism could possibly be wrong, or why it seemed so plausible.  We don’t have to resort to those flawed heuristics; we can take our pure basic understanding and try again, either through some higher meta-meta-cognition (careful) or by simply standing aside and looking at the thing from a scientific third-person point of view. Aristotle was wrong, but we got it right in the end, and why shouldn’t Scott’s own view be part of getting it righter about the mind? I don’t think he would disagree on that either (he’ll probably tell us); but he feels his conclusions have disastrous implications for our sense of what we are.

Here we strike something that came up in our recent discussion of free will and the difference between determinists and compatibilists. It may be more a difference of temperament than belief. People like me say, OK, no, we don’t have the magic abilities we looked to have, so let’s give those terms a more sensible interpretation and go merrily on our way. The determinists, the eliminativists, agree that the magic has gone – in fact they insist – but they sit down by the roadside, throw ashes on their heads, and mourn it. They share with the naive, the libertarians, and the believers in a magic power of intentionality, the idea that something essential and basically human is lost when we move on in this way. Perhaps people like me came in to have the magic explained and are happy to see the conjuring tricks set out; others wanted the magic explained and for it to remain magic?