Taking solipsism seriously: Nonhuman animals and meta-cognitive theories of consciousness

Philosophical Studies

Volumn 103, Issue 3, 2001, Pages 315-340

  Ridge, M ^a  

^a AUSTRALIAN NATIONAL UNIVERSITY   (Australia)

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EID: 52549108495     PISSN: 00318116     EISSN: 15730883     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1023/A:1010311102118     Document Type: Article

References (68)

1. Many thanks to Simon Blackburn, Robin Flaig, Dien Ho, William Lycan, Michael Martin, Jay Rosenberg, David Rosenthal, Dan Ryder, J.J.C. Smart, Kim Sterelny, and Ralph Wedgwood for useful discussion of earlier drafts of the present material.
2. Peter Carruthers, "Brute Experience," Journal of Philosophy, LXXXVI, (1989), 258-269, p. 258.
3. in fact, Carruthers offers two arguments for his thesis, and eventually rejects one of those arguments in favor of the other.
4. In this vein Guven Guzeldere has argued that the HOP theory, if it is to be plausible, collapses into the HOT theory. See Guven Guzeldere, "What Passes in One's Own Mind," in Conscious Experience, ed. Thomas Metzinger, (Schoningh: Imprint Academic, 1995), 335-359.
5. David Armstrong, A Materialist Theory of the Mind (London: Routledge, 1968),
6. Paul Churchland, Matter and Consciousness (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1988),
7. William James, The Principles of Psychology (New York: Dover, 1950),
8. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (New York: Dover, 1959),
9. William Lycan, Consciousness (Cambridge: MA, 1987),
10. David Rosenthal, "Two Concepts of Consciousness," Philosophical Studies XCIV, 329-359,
11. Norton Nelkin, Consciousness and the Origins of Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996),
12. Daniel Dennett, Consciousness Explained (Boston: Little Brown, 1991)
13. and Dennett, "The Message is: There is no Medium." Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 4, 919-931, p. 928.
14. One interesting wrinkle here is that it is intuitive to suppose that the best form of happiness consists in being so engrossed in what you are doing that you are not conscious of your own happiness. in fact, I have considerable sympathy for this point. Still, it seems that in the case of pain and things that are bad from a moral point of view, that there is no clear analogue of this point. In any case, I shall put this objection to one side for present purposes. Thanks to Kim Sterelny for bringing this point to my attention.
15. See Carruthers, op. cit., Peter Harrison, "Do Animals Feel Pain?" Philosophy, LXVI (1991), 25-40,
16. Joel Feinberg, "The Rights of Animals and Unborn Generations," in Philosophy and Environmental Crisis, ed. William Blackstone, (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1974), 43-68,
17. and Rene Descartes, "The Correspondence," in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, III, ed. John Cottingham et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 148.
18. See Donald Davidson, "Rational Animals," in ed. LePore, E. and McLaughlin, B., Actions and Events (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1985),
19. R.G. Frey, "Why Animals Lack Beliefs and Desires," in ed. Tom Regan and Peter Singer, Animal Rights and Human Obligations (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1989), 39-42,
20. Norman Malcolm, "Thoughtless Brutes," Presidential Address delivered before the Sixty-ninth Annual Eastern Meeting of the American Philosophical Association,
21. Roderick Chisholm and Wilfrid Sellars, "The Chisholm-Sellars Correspondence on Intentionality," Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol. II,eds. H. Feigl et al. (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1958), 214-248,
22. Stephen Stich, "Do Animals Have Beliefs?" Australian Journal of Philosophy, LVII (1979), 15-28.
23. Jonathan Bennett, "How to Read Minds in Behavior: A Suggestion From a Philosopher," in ed. Andrew Whiten, Natural Theories of Mind (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991), 97-108,
24. Carruthers, op. cit., Daniel Dennett, The Intentional Stance (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987),
25. Dorothy Cheney and Robert Seyfarth, How Monkeys See the World (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1990),
26. Richard Byrne and Andrew Whiten, "Primate Tactical Deception," in Whiten, op. cit., 127-141,
27. and David Premack, " 'Does the Chimpanzee Have a Theory of Mind?' revisited," in ed. Richard Byrne and Andrew Whiten, Machiavellian Intelligence (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 160-179.
28. Bennett, Machiavellian Intelligence op. cit., p. 103.
29. Importantly, 'unreflective' is used attributively here - the creatures in question are meant to be unreflective qua solipsism. They are incapable of entertaining the thought that other creatures might have any mental states, so they are incapable of considering solipsism and its negation as competing hypothesis. In another sense, of course, the creatures I have in mind are quite reflective - they have thoughts about their own mental states.
30. Fred Dretske, Naturalizing the Mind (MIT Press: Cambridge, MA, 1995), pp. 110-111. Dretske here cites developmental psychologists like Wellman; I present my own interpretation of their work below.
31. Alex Byrne also presses this sort of worry against the HOR theorists, under the heading of the "dog problem," but concludes that they should simply accept the consequence that many nonhuman animals indeed lack conscious mental states. See Alex Byrne, "Some Like it HOT: Consciousness and Higher-Order Thoughts," Philosophical Studies, 86 (1997), pp. 103-129, esp. pp. 112-113.
32. There is also the position that while having thoughts does not require language, having meta-thoughts does require having language. This position is less extreme than the Davidsonian position, but I am unaware of an argument for it whose premises would not also entail the more radical Davidsonian thesis. I return to this sort of position in a later footnote. For a defense of the view that some nonhuman animals do employ concepts, see Colin Allen and Marc D. Hauser, "Concept Attribution in Nonhuman Animals: Theoretical and Methodological Problems in Ascribing Complex Mental Processes," Philosophy of Science, 58 (1991), 221-240.
33. For an explicit defense of the view that thought does not require language (even a "language of thought"), see Ruth Barcan Marcus, "Some Revisionary Proposals about Belief and Believing," Philosophy and Phenomenalogical Research, 50, Supplement (Autumn, 1990), pp. 133-153.
34. David Rosenthal, "Two Concepts of Consciousness," Philosophical Studies, XLIX (1986), 329-359.
35. Rosenthal, Philosophical Studies, op. cit., p. 330.
36. Rosenthal, Philosophical Studies, op. cit., p. 335.
37. See David Rosenthal, "Consciousness, Content, and Metacognitive Judgments," Consciousness and Cognition, IX, 1, January, 2000.
38. Though we presumably will be conscious of the content of that thought, since it is the content of the HOT, and not the content of the target state, that determines the qualitative character of our experience - indeed, there need not even be a target state, as Rosenthal himself is happy to admit. Cases in which we confabulate about our own mental states are a nice case in point of this phenomenon.
39. See, for example, especially Rocco Gennaro, "Brute Experience and the Higher-Order-Thought Theory of Consciousness," Philosophical Papers, XXII (1993), 51-69).
40. Peter Carruthers, The Animals Issue (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 137.
41. See Dan Dennett, "Conditions of Personhood," The Identities of Persons (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), p. 184.
42. Interestingly, Morgan himself was willing to attribute second-order thoughts to some nonhuman animals. See Lloyd-Morgan, The Animal Mind (London: Edward Arnold, 1930).
43. Carruthers, The Animal Mind , op. cit., p. 130.
44. See H.M. Wellman and J.D. Wooley, "From Simple Desires to Ordinary Beliefs," Cognition, XXXV (1990), 245-275.
45. Thanks to Kim Sterelny for emphasizing the importance of this worry.
46. Rosenthal himself would respond to this argument by questioning premise (2) as well, though along rather different lines from the ones pursued here. On his view, one might have a HOT about a given mental state M but the HOT might nonetheless not involve any mental concepts: "HOTs need not characterize their targets as mental, but only as states" (David Rosenthal, "Consciousness, Content, and Metacognitive Judgment," Consciousness and Cognition, IX, 1, January, 2000). In that case, creature might have HOTs but be utterly incapable of deceit because the creature lacks the concept of a belief. I eschew this strategy for two main reasons. First, without some specification of what the content of these HOTs might be, the approach seems like trying to have all the benefits of honest toil through theft (to paraphrase Russell). As it stands, the most natural characterization of the content of the relevant HOTs would be as mploying mentalistic concepts - if we are to consider alternative contents, then we need an explicit articulation of them to see whether they are really more or less plausibly attributed to non-linguistic creatures. Second, and more importantly, on Rosenthal's own view, it is the character of the HOT, rather than the character of the relevant first-order state, that determines the qualitative character of one's experience. So, for example, if I have a HOT whose content is that I am seeing a blue pen and that HOT is caused by and about a perception of a red pen, it will seem to me that I am seeing a blue pen. In that case, though, it is hard to see how having a HOT whose content included no mental concepts could ground the relevant qualitative character. Imagine trying to articulate, even in very coarse-grained terms, what one's experiences are like without employing concepts like "painful," "tasty," "loud," "bright," etc.
47. Karen Bartsch and Henry Wellman, Children Talk About the Mind (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 27.
48. These utterances were collected from ten different children at very different points in time, and by different investigators, where each investigator had different research goals, none of which included examining talk about mental states (at least, when the data were collected), as Bartsch and Wellman note in Children Talk About the Mind (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 25. This makes it unlikely that the children were in any way specially primed to talk about the mind or exposed to parents or investigators who were especially likely to prompt such talk. That the data were taken from ten different children also makes it somewhat unlikely that the results are simply the result of unusual precocity or language ability of a given child. Finally, Bartsch and Wellman made a point to exclude what, from the context, seemed to be "merely conversational uses" of belief and desire terms. In particular, "a term was not counted as a genuine belief or desire reference if it served only such conversational functions as getting someone's attention (e.g., 'You know what?'), turning over the conversation to someone else (e.g., 'Let's go to the park, what do you think?'), or softening a command or request (e.g., 'I wonder, Mom, can we have spaghetti?' or 'I think its time to watch Sesame Street'). Also excluded were short, unumbellished, or idiomatic phrases, such as 'You know,' 'I think so,' 'Don't know,' and 'I wanna.'"
49. (Bartsch and Wellman, Children Talk about the Mind , op. cit., pp. 31-32).
50. See Henry M. Wellman, "From Desires to Beliefs," in Natural Theories of the Mind, op. cit., pp. 19-38, 33.
51. Peter Carruthers, for example, has offered the following explanation of why such a simple-desire psychology might have developed, in evolutionary times apart from an ability to attribute beliefs. A simple desire psychology might have conferred an evolutionary advantage because it would allow desire-based predictions with a fairly high success rate. By contrast, a belief psychology with no desire component would have a poor success rate. So, one might conclude, a desire psychology would evolve first, followed by a more complex belief-desire psychology. Paul Harris attributes this position to Carruthers in a footnote to his, "Desires, Beliefs, and Language," in Peter Carruthers and Peter K. Smith, eds., Theories of Theories of Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 200-220, 219. Carruthers' suggestion is purely speculative, but worth giving serious consideration nonetheless.
52. See Bartsch and Wellman, Theories of Theories of Mind op. cit., pp. 85-86.
53. See Alison Gopnik, "How We Know Our Minds: The Illusion of First-Person Knowledge of Intentionality," Behavioral and Brain Sciences XVI (1993), 1-14.
54. Patricia Smiley and Janellen Huttenlocher, "Young Children's Acquisition of Emotion Concepts," in ed. Carolyn Saarni and Paul Harris, Children's Understanding of Emotion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 27-49, p. 27.
55. Smiley and Huttenlocher, Children's Understanding of Emotion , op. cit., pp. 38-39.
56. "That is, the cues associated with another person's distress evoke an upset state in him, and he may then seek comfort for himself. Consider a colleague's 11 -month-old daughter who, on seeing another child fall and cry, first stared at the victim, appearing as though she were about to cry herself, and then put her thumb in her mouth and buried her head in her mother's lap - her typical response when she has hurt herself and seeks comfort." M. Hoffman, "Developmental Synthesis of Affect and Cognition and its Implications for Altruistic Motivation," Developmental Psychology, 11 (1975), 607-622, p. 614.
57. Simon Baron-Cohen, Mindblindness (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995), p. 5.
58. Simon Baron-Cohen, "The Theory of Mind Deficit in Autism: How Specific is It?" in ed. George E. Butterworth et al., Perspectives on the Child's Theory of Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 301-314, p. 301.
59. Greg Currie and Kim Sterelney, "How could social intelligence be modular?" joint paper delivered at the 1999 Australasian Association of Philosophy, July 2-10th, Melbourne, University of Melbourne.
60. See Temple Grandin's Thinking In Pictures (New York: Doubleday, 1995) for some firsthand evidence.
61. Cheryl Seifert, Case Studies in Autism (Lanham: University Press of American, 1990), p. 60.
62. Uta Frith and Francesca Happe, "Theory of Mind and Self-Consciousness: What is it Like to Be Autistic?" Mind and Language, 14 (1999), pp. 1-22, p. 8.
63. Frith and Happe, p. 7. Many thanks to Michael Martin for bringing this work to my attention.
64. Dennett, The Intentional Stance, p. 246.
65. See Nelson Goodman, Fact, Fiction, and Forecast, fourth edition (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983),
66. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971),
67. and J.L. Austin, Philosophical Papers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961), p. 185.
68. I should note in passing, however, that in another paper, in which I analyze the distinction between pain and suffering, I speculate further along these lines. See my "Beastly Suffering," unpublished manuscript.