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mercoledì 15 febbraio 2023
Is the mind really just an articulation of many modules? Animal minds, perhaps, but, critics argue, surely not the human mind! Animal inferences might be exclusively performed by modules that exploit regularities without ever representing them. Humans, on the other hand, are capable not just of exploiting but also of representing many empirical regularities. Regularities in the world aren’t just something humans take advantage of, as do other animals; they are also something that humans think and talk about. Humans, moreover, are capable of consciously using representations of empirical regularities to discover even more general regularities. We are not disputing this. How could we? After all, it is by exercising this capacity that we scientists make a living. More generally, doesn’t the very existence of reasoning demonstrate that humans are capable of going well beyond module-based intuitive inference? Doesn’t reason stand apart, above all, from these specialized inference modules? Don’t be so sure. Reasoning, we will argue, is a form of intuitive inference. The classical contrast between intuition and reasoning isn’t better justified than the old hackneyed contrast between animals and humans beings (and its invocation of reason as something humans possess and beasts don’t). To contrast humans not with other animals but simply with animals is to deprive oneself of a fundamental resource to understand what it is to be human and how indeed humans stand out among other animals. Similarly, to contrast reason with intuitive inference in general rather than with other forms of intuitive inference is to deprive oneself of the means to understand how and why humans reason. Folk Ontology If reason is based on intuitive inference, what, you may ask, are the intuitions about? The answer we will develop in Chapters 7, 8, and 9 is that intuitions involved in the use of reason are intuitions about reasons. But first, we need to set the stage. Intuitions about reasons belong to a wider category: intuitions about representations. The ability to represent representations with ease and to draw a variety of intuitive inferences about them may well be the most original and characteristic features of the human mind. In this chapter, we look at these intuitions about representations. Humans have a very rich “folk ontology.” That is, they recognize and distinguish many different basic kinds of things in the world, and they do so intuitively, as a matter of common sense. Folk ontology contrasts with scientific ontology, much of which is neither intuitive nor commonsensical at all. As humans grow up, their folk ontology is enriched and modified under the influence of both direct experience and cultural inputs. It may even be influenced by scientific or philosophical theories. Still, the most basic ontological distinctions humans make are common to all cultures (and some of these distinctions are, no doubt, also made by other animals). Everywhere, humans recognize inanimate physical objects like rocks and animate objects like birds; substances like water and flesh; physical qualities like color and weight; events like storms and births; actions like eating and running; moral qualities like courage and patience; abstract properties like quantity or similarity. Typically, humans have distinct intuitions about the various kinds of things they distinguish in their folk ontologies. This suggests—and there is ample supporting evidence—that they have distinct inferential mechanisms that to some extent correspond to different ontological categories.1 Modules may evolve or develop, we have argued, when there is a regularity to be exploited in inference—and, needless to say, when it is adaptive to exploit it. Many of these regularities correspond to ontological categories. For instance, animate and inanimate objects move in quite different ways, and their movements typically present humans and other animals with very different risks and opportunities. There is a corresponding evolved capacity to recognize these two types of movements and treat them differently. Some relevant regularities, however, have to do less with basic properties of an ontological category than with a practical interest of humans (or of other animals). Various omnivorous animals, including humans, may have special modules for making inference about the edibility of plants, for example, although edible plant is not a proper ontological category. Actually, modules are task specific, problem specific, or opportunity specific as often as domain specific, if not more often. Still, ontology is a terrain that inferential modules typically exploit. Not only do humans represent many kinds of things in their thoughts and in their utterances, they also recognize that they are doing so. In their basic ontology—and here humans seem quite exceptional—there are not only things but also representations of things. In fact, for most things humans can represent, they can also represent its representation. They can represent rocks and the idea of a rock, colors and color words, numbers and numerals, states of affairs (say, that it is raining) and representations of these states of affairs (the thought or the statement that it is raining). Representations of things are themselves a very special kind of things in the world. Representations constitute a special ontological category (with subcategories), for which humans have specialized inferential mechanisms. Representations of representations, also known as higher-order representations or as metarepresentations, play a unique role in human cognition and social life.2 Apart from philosophers and psychologists, however, people rarely think or talk about representations as such. They talk, rather, about specific types of representations. People talk about beliefs, opinions, hopes, doubts, fears, desires, or intentions—all these occur in people’s minds and brains; they are mental representations. Or they talk about the public expression of such mental representations, spoken or written utterances as well as gestures or pictures—they are public representations. Mental and public representations are concrete objects that are differently located in time and space. A belief is entertained at a given time in someone’s head; a spoken statement is an acoustic event that occurs in the shared environment of interlocutors. A written statement or a picture is not an event but an object in the environment. What makes these mental and public representations representations isn’t, however, their location, duration, or other concrete features. It is a more abstract property that in commonsense psychology is recognized as “meaning” or “content.” When we say that we share someone’s belief, what we mean is that we have beliefs of closely similar content. When we say of someone that she expressed her thoughts, what we mean is that the meaning of what she said matched the content of what she thought. Often, when people think or talk about a representation, they consider only its content, and they abstract away from the representation’s more concrete properties. They may say of an idea that it is true, contradictory, confused, profound, or poetic without attributing it to anyone in particular either as a thought or as a statement. When they do so, what they talk about are representations considered in the abstract (or “abstract representations” for short). Cultural representations such as Little Red Riding Hood, the Golden Rule, or multiplication tables are, most of the time, considered in the abstract, even though they must be instantiated in mental and public representations in order to play a role in human affairs. Since representations are recognized in our commonsense ontology, the question arises: What cognitive mechanisms do we have, if any, for drawing inferences about them? What kinds of intuitions do we have about representations? As we saw, there are several kinds of representations, each with distinct properties. There is no a priori reason to assume that humans have a module for drawing inferences about representations in general. It is not clear what regularities such a module might exploit. On the other hand, various types of representations present regularities that can be exploited to produce different kinds of highly relevant inferences.
martedì 14 febbraio 2023
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lunedì 13 febbraio 2023
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