Primitive agency and natural norms

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research

Volumn 79, Issue 2, 2009, Pages 251-278

  Burge, Tyler ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

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EID: 70349315418     PISSN: 00318205     EISSN: 19331592     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1933-1592.2009.00278.x     Document Type: Article

References (47)

1. For a fairly full account of my views on perception and on the empirical science of visual perception, see "Disjunctivism and Perceptual Psychology," Philosophical Topics 33 (2005), pp. 1-78. The present paper derives from Origins of Objectivity, where there is much fuller discussion of perception.
2. Ernst Cassirer, "The Concept of Group and the Theory of Perception," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 5 (1944), pp. 1-35-a translation of an article published in French in 1938-advocates the importance of perceptual constancies in understanding perception.
3. I propose perceptual constancies as a mark of perception in "Perceptual Entitlement," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 67 (2003), section II;
4. and in "Perception," International Journal of Psychoanalysis 84 (2003), pp. 157-167. The notion has been common in psychology for over a century.
5. Cf. Larry Wright, "Functions," Philosophical Review 82 (1973), pp. 139-168. There are other notions of function that figure in biology.
6. Cf. Robert Cummings, "Functional Analysis," The Journal of Philosophy 72 (1975), pp. 741-765;
7. Paul E. Griffiths, "Functional Analysis and Proper Functions," British Journal of the Philosophy of Science 44 (1993), pp. 409-422;
8. Peter Godfrey-Smith, "Functions: Consensus without Unity," American Philosophical Quarterly 74 (1993), pp. 196-208. For present purposes, it seems to me unnecessary to discuss various conceptions of biological function. I use the standard Wright-like notion, which is associated with teleology in biology, as a foil to compare and contrast with the notion of a representational function.
9. - 5 As always, these relations might go back through the formation of the animal's capacities through its evolutionary pre-history. They might thus depend on the needs and activities of previous animals that figured in this formation. I believe that the constitutive relations between individual functions and perceptual content, and the explanatory relations between zoology and perceptual psychology, which I am indicating here bear on why Quine's claims of referential indeterminacy are mistaken. I discuss these issues more fully in Origins of Objectivity.
10. Cf. Donald Davidson, "Psychology as Philosophy" in Essays on Actions and Events (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 2001, 2nd edition), p. 229;
11. cf. also Davidson, "Agency" in ibid, p. 46.
12. Some work in this direction can be found in Martha Nussbaum, Aristotle's De Motu Animalium (Princeton, Princeton Univ. Press, 1978), and Brian O'Shaughnessy, The Will vols. I-II (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1980). Cf. especially the chapter "The Sub-Intentional Act" in volumeII of the first edition.
13. Gottfried S. Fraenkel and Donald L. Gunn, The Orientation of Animals (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1940), p. 1.
14. The case derives from the classic work of H.S. Jennings, Behavior of the Lower Organisms (1906) (Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1962 edition), pp. 44-54. I have oversimplified the Paramecium's behavior. With respect to chemical stimulants, its turning behavior is less random than with respect to contact. Similar descriptions apply to planarians and to bacteria, whose rate of movement and frequency of turning depends on the intensity of light, and whose direction of turning is random, relative to the stimulus.
15. Cf. also Fraenkel and Gunn, The Orientation of Animals, op. cit., pp. 43ff. For further discussion of the distinction between taxes and kineses, see M.J. Carlile,"Taxes and Tropisms: Diversity, Biological Significance and Evolution," and J. Adler, "Chemotaxis in Bacteria" in Primitive Sensory and Communication Systems, M.J. Carlile ed. (London, Academic Press, 1975);
16. R. Campan, "Tactic Components in Orientation" in Orientation and Communication in Arthropods, M. Lehrer ed. (Basel, Birkhauser Verlag, 1997).
17. M.J. Carlile, "Taxes and Tropisms: Diversity, Biological Significance and Evolution," op. cit., pp. 14ff. Positive phototaxis steering can be achieved through the response of a single receptor responding to shading by the cell body. Reorientation occurs until the receptor, located at the front of the cell, receives maximum stimulation. This sort of capacity occurs in Euglena. The basis of positive phototaxis is differentiation between intensities at a single receptor at successive times. Here, direction is derived from temporal rather than spatial diversity of stimulations.
18. True taxes in prokaryotes are rare or absent, because the small size of the prokaryotic cells does not admit of much diversity on the cell body or of sufficient capacity to register the small differences that must be differentiated. M.J, Carlile, "Taxes and Tropisms: Diversity, Biological Significance and Evolution," op. cit., p. 23.
19. Judith van Houten, "Chemoreception in Microorganisms" in The Neurobiology of Taste and Smell 2nd ed. Thomas E. Finger, Wayne L. Silver, Diego Restrepo, eds. (New York, John Wiley & Sons, 2000).
20. For discussion of different taxes, see Fraenkel and Gunn, The Orientation of Animals, op. cit.
21. and N. Tinbergen, The Study of Instinct (New York, Oxford University Press, 1969, with new introduction; originally published 1951). For one of the early descriptions of various taxes,
22. see H.S. Jennings, Behavior of the Lower Organisms, op. cit. (There are studies of taxes that go back yet earlier.) The point that unicellular organisms are responsive to all stimuli that higher animals are responsive to is made on p. 261. For a classic account of two basic types of taxis,
23. see Gottfried Fraenkel, "Beiträge zur Geotaxis and Phototaxis von Littorina," Zeitschrift für wissenschaftliche Biologie, vol.5 (1927), pp. 585-597-translated in
24. C.R. Gallistel, The Organization of Action: A New Synthesis (Hillsdale, New Jersey; Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1980). Gallistel gives a rich discussion of various mechanisms involved in animal action. He seems to take a hierarchy of simpler mechanisms to underlie all action. This picture is surely accurate for relatively complex animals. I believe, however, that even unicellular organisms have a primitive type of agency. There is no evident hierarchy of mechanisms in these cases, but there is a minimal specialization for certain capacities such as self-propulsion, reversal, and eating. This specialization allows some scope to the idea that there is a type of coordination in the active behavior of the whole organism.
25. The klino-kinetic turning contrasts with its default swimming in that it is the immediate result of outside stimulation, and contrasts with the reversal in that its direction is unrelated to the direction of the stimulus. The turning seems to be more like a random body jerk in response to external stimulation than an internally caused behavior or a piece of steering. At any rate, I think it at best unclear whether this aspect of the Paramecium's behavior is action.
26. Judith van Houten, "Chemoreception in Microorganisms," op. cit..
27. Perhaps Venus Fly Traps are borderline cases, or even special exhibitors of behavior. For a description of bacterial "swimming" that provides some basis for seeing bacteria as agents,
28. see Judith van Houten, "Chemoreception in Microorganisms," ibid. For a useful discussion of the generic kind behavior,
29. see Ruth Garrett Millikan, "What is Behavior? A Philosophical Essay on Ethology and Individualism in Psychology" in White Queen Psychology and Other Essays for Alice, op. cit. Millikan's emphasis on function in individuating behavior is valuable, at least insofar as one is concerned with primitive organismic behavior. The main drawback in her account is that it is too inclusive. It includes maturation and growth. It also includes peripheral changes such as sweating and protein transfer that are not imputable to the individual. There are loose uses of "behavior" that include such peripheral changes perhaps. But I think that such uses do not figure in the life sciences. No serious science includes maturation or growth in behavior.
30. In understanding the ordinary language involved in attributing processes to individuals rather than their sub-systems, it is perhaps important that these processes involve animals' heads.
31. If one is on a wheel and one knows that a knife thrower will accurately miss one's head if one remains stationary, one still might move one's head at the approaching knife-to one's own peril. The example is Sean Foran's.
32. I have long been indebted to a remark by Harry Frankfurt for my interest in primitive animal action. Cf. Harry G. Frankfurt, "The Problem of Action" (1978) in The Importance of What We Care About (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1988). Frankfurt remarked that a spider acts when it walks, but does not act when its legs are moved (in anatomically the same way) by an external agent. I think, however, that Frankfurt's own account of action is incorrect. Frankfurt explicates the notion of action in terms of guidance of behavior by the individual during the behavior. He does not develop his notion of guidance. But his view seems vulnerable to both the ducking example and the examples of instinctive behavior, such as the grouse's, that I am about to discuss. Action does not seem, to require guidance by the individual during the act (or even before the act). Intuitively the grouse's action and the ducking are guided by the individual's perception. But the action is not under the control or guidance of the individual in the sense that the individual need not endorse the behavior and could not monitor or adjust it, given the initial perceptual input. These are, of course, matters that need development. I have invoked, tentatively, the more liberal notion of coordination, with allowances for questions as to whether the notion applies straightforwardly to action by very simple organisms. The key notion is issuance from central behavioral capabilities of the individual.
33. N. Tinbergen, The Study of Instinct, op. cit., p. 36. Tinbergen's tentative definition of "instinct" is "a hierarchically organized nervous mechanism which is susceptible to certain priming, releasing, and directing impulses of internal as well as of external origin, and which responds to these impulses by coordinate movements that contribute to the maintenance of the individual and the species," p. 112,
34. N. Tinbergen, The Study of Instinct, op. cit., pp. 85-87. I doubt that the proprioceptive sense that yields the orientation to gravity here counts as perception. Whether or not this is correct, there is clearly no perception of any objective (the food) of the activity of gaping.
35. Jennings, Behavior of the Lower Organisms, op. cit., pp. 189ff, 261, 285ff.
36. "It would fly up to an elevated look-out position..., perch there and gaze upwards continuously as if searching the sky for flying insects. Suddenly, the bird's entire behaviour would indicate that it had spotted an insect. The starling would extend its body, flatten its feathers, aim upwards, take off, snap at something, return to its perch and finally perform swallowing motions....there were really no insects to be seen." Konrad Lorenz, "A Consideration of Methods of Identification of Speciesspecific Instinctive Behaviour Patterns in Birds" (1932) in Studies in Animal and Human Behaviour, volume I, R. Martin trans. (Cambridge, Massachusetts; Harvard University Press, 1970).
37. Cf. Konrad Z. Lorenz (who cites work of Paul Leyhausen), The Foundations of Ethology (1978), K. Z. Lorenz and R.W. Kickert trans. (New York, SpringerVerlag, 1981), pp. 135-135
38. Sean Foran, "Animal Movement," read in manuscript, highlights the role of perception in animal movement. I think that he is on to the more sophisticated animal agency that is guided by perception. I believe, however, that his notion of animal movement either blurs the distinction between pre-perceptual agency and perception-guided agency, which I think so important; or it simply applies to the more sophisticated type. The case of the nestling thrushes and the case of endogenously engendered action seem to me to pose problems for applying his account to all animal agency. Similarly, for the cases of activity in very simple organisms. Despite these differences, I have found Foran's very original paper a source of stimulation. I read the paper in draft several years ago, and have returned to it, in later drafts, several times since.
39. The attention need not be conscious. For a development of the point that attention need not be tied to consciousness, see A. David Mllner and Melvyn A. Goodale, The Visual Brain in Action (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 181ff.;
40. also D. Ingle, "Selective Visual Attention in Frogs," Science, vol.188 (1975), pp. 1033-1035. On the other hand, there are delicate issues here involved in distinguishing the individual's directing attention and the grabbing of attention by a stimulus. I am just gesturing toward an area that needs exploration.
41. As Judy Thomson has pointed out. Cf. her Normativity (Chicago, Open Court, 2008).
42. - 28 From, the Oxford English Dictionary: "Norm. 12. a. A definite level of excellence, attainment, wealth, or the like, or a definite degree of any quality, viewed as a prescribed object of endeavour or as the measure of what is adequate for some purpose." I think that the level of measure of adequacy does not have to be viewed in order to be in place, or in order to be a norm.
43. - 29 One can see this sort of error not only among philosophers but among some of the more generalized characterizations of psychology by popularizers. Cf. Steven Pinker, "So How Does the Mind Work?" Mind and Language 20 (2005), p. 19: "The subject matter of psychology is the functioning of the brain." Pinker does not connect his apparent view that biological function is the only notion of function relevant to psychology with actual explanations in vision science, for example. As I have been emphasizing, biological function has several, roles to play in the explanatory methods of the science of psychology. The central mode of explanation in vision science-at the representational, as opposed to explicitly neural level-gives veridicality a central position that his account does not account for, and in fact does not even seriously address. I believe that the same point applies to any other account that takes biological function to be the only relevant conception of function in psychology. Psychology must, of course, be compatible with accounts of biological function. But psychology is not biology in disguise.
44. - 30 For further discussion of the role of veridicality in explanation of perception see "Disjunctivism and Perceptual Psychology," op. cit. and "Five Theses on De Re States and Attitudes" in The Philosophy of David Kaplan, Joseph. Almog and Paolo Leonardi eds. (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2009).
45. Cf. "Perceptual Entitlement," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, op. cit. for some development of the notions of representational, function and representational norm. For the distinction between representational norms for perception that do and do not require reliability, see p. 533.
46. The conditions of applicability of moral norms are, of course, controversial. In my view, moral norms are, strictly speaking, natural norms: Their applicability does not depend on any individual's setting them or acceding to them. An important respect in which moral norms differ from the biological and representational norms that I have been discussing is that, at least at some level of abstraction, they must be representable by individuals to whom they are applicable. They require some meta-representational capacities. An individual who does not understand the difference between right and wrong does not fall under moral norms, in the sense that moral failures and. successes are not possible for that individual. Nevertheless, I think that moral norms are similar to biological and. representational natural norms in that the applicability of the norms to an. individual depends on the individual's having certain capacities or being of a certain kind. Applicability does not depend on prescription of the norm, or acceptance of the norm, by any individual.
47. What I am calling the simplest norm is essentially an instrumental norm. An act that falls under this norm always falls under more global norms that concern the same act and its goal. For example, an act that fulfills the agent's representational content can be evaluated under biological or other practical norms, such as whether it contributed to the individual's evolutionary fitness, or the individual's flourishing. Similarly, the goal set in. the act can be evaluated as to whether it contributes to fitness or flourishing. Of course, when more sophisticated global practical norms-such as moral norms-are in place, an instrumentally successful act and its goal, may or may not meet those more sophisticated norms. But all these issues arise only once agency is supplemented by representation-initially, perceptual, representation-and thus becomes constitutively associated with representational functions and representational norms.