• Pierre-Normand
    2.5k
    I would add that a central point of Rouse’s is that our animal nature is not pre-conceptual at all. Also, the Yo and Lo book was by Kukla and Mark Lance.Joshs

    It was indeed Mark Lance (who I also used to confuse with Marc Lange)! I should rely on AI more. Human beings like me are so unreliable and prone to hallucinating...

    Thank for pointing this out about Rouse. I ought to look deeper into it. I wonder, though, whether he believes our animal nature to be conceptual owing to it being shaped by our acculturation and language acquisition (and he is stressing the continuity of the process and substrate) or if he believes other animals and human infants to also have conceptual abilities (and he is stressing the similarities between linguistically informed and non-linguistically shaped conceptuality). If it's the former, then he would seem to be closely aligned with McDowell in that regard.

    Tying this back to the OP, Rouse replaces the concept of conceptual scheme with that of normative discursive practices. Would Rouse respond differently than McDowell and Davidson to the question of whether it makes sense to talk of individuals or communities as living in ‘different worlds’? I think he would. I think Rouse’s treatment of material circumstances as already intertwined with normative practices makes the data of perceptual experience internal to social practices in a way that it is not for either Davidson or McDowell.

    For McDowell, the data of perceptual experience is most definitely internal to social practices. The data is always already informed by those practices. It seems clear also that Rouse endorses much of McDowell's criticism of Davidson, but I'll probably need to read Chapter-2 The Dualism of Nature and Normativity, in 'How Scientific Practices Matter,' to get a better handle on Rouse's positioning between Davidson and McDowell. Meanwhile, I'll happily defer to you.

    Regarding the intelligibility of placing individuals in different worlds, this may also be a matter of stressing the overlaps, following Davidson's ideas about the principle of charity, or stressing the differences owing to the (conceptually informed) empirical content being impotent to serve as a neutral arbiter for resolving the disputes (or islands of mutual unintelligibility) at the boundary. But both stances seem to be consistent with the thesis apparently shared by Rouse and McDowell, that empirical content doesn't reside outside of the sphere of the conceptual.
  • Janus
    16.7k
    But both stances seem to be consistent with the thesis apparently shared by Rouse and McDowell, that empirical content doesn't reside outside of the sphere of the conceptual.Pierre-Normand

    This leaves me wondering just what you mean by "empirical content"?
  • Pierre-Normand
    2.5k
    Since we don't create ourselves by fiat so to speak and given that we have no choice given who and what we are as to whether we are convinced by arguments or not. I'm not seeing much difference between the ideas of being convinced and being caused to be convinced.Janus

    There are two issues here. One concerns autonomous self-origination of one's actions (and mental acts) and the issue of ultimate responsibility. Galen Strawson argued (look up his 'Basic Argument') that if human beings can't be credited with, per impossibile, shaping their own preferences (including the preference for behaving rationally versus irrationally) prior to them having first acquired rational dispositions, then they aren't ultimately responsible for any of their choices and actions. But the rejoinder to this is that responsibility doesn't require ultimate responsibility in the crude sense that one would need to get a hold on the first link in the historical causal chain of events that led to one being bootstrapped in a rational form of live. I'm not ultimately responsible for having been born human and having been provided with a decent enough upbringing. But this lack of ultimate responsibility doesn't entail that I have not become (at some point) rationally autonomous in a way that makes me, now, responsible for my actions.

    Secondly, regarding the difference between the idea of being convinced and being caused to be convinced, there need not be one according to McDowell. That's the whole point of the idea (also endorsed my Eric Marcus) that 'the "space of causes" straddles the non-overlapping "space of reasons" and "space of laws." If the causality at issue is rational causation—finding oneself in circumstances such that one has a good reason for doing X and one does X because one is suitably sensitive to the force of such a good reason, then one is indeed being caused by the obtaining of those circumstances to do X. But the fact that one is sensitive to the goodness of the reason (because one is rational) also is explanatorily relevant to one's action. It is a formal cause of the action, as it were.

    I also want to reiterate that once we look at the world as always already interpreted, then I think the interpreted evidence of the senses, although obviously sometimes mistaken, does provide good evidence and hence rational justification for both animals and humans for at least the basic beliefs about what is observed.

    There was a British version of the Candid Camera TV show that ran in the 1960s or 70s, I think. In one episode they decided to trick dogs who were being walked by their owners and who were, in normal dog fashion, watering the tree trunks and fire hydrants that they were passing by. The crew had set up a tall tree stump that was hanging from a crane and resting on the ground. When a dog would walk by and raise a hind leg to do its job, the tree would suddenly rise up in the air. The viewership, and likely also the planners of the prank, might have been expecting the dogs to display some puzzlement at seeing a tree take flight. But all the dogs being pranked would just immediately discontinue their watering project and walk straight to the next tree without once looking back.

    One might say that the perception of a suitable object, such as a tree, for marking one's territory provides a reason for a dog peeing on it. And then, when this object reveals itself to be unsuitable, the reason lapses. But what the behavior of the dogs highlights, in my view, it the comparative lack of conceptual articulation of the objects and qualities that figure in their world of affordances (or Umwelt). A tree may be an object that the dog tacitly expects to stay put when it pees on it. But if it doesn't, who cares? That doesn't trigger a conceptual revision in the dog's world conception. If this sort of occurrence happens very often, the dog's behavioral proclivity to pee on trees may get progressively extenuated. But that isn't exactly an intellectual achievement.

    Above, I mentioned a comparative lack of conceptual articulation between the elements in a dog's world of affordances. But I must acknowledge the existence of a proto-conceptual means-to-ends articulation of animal affordances. The thirsty dog knows that its water bowl affords drinking from. The dog also knows that walking down the corridor will lead it to the water bowl. The dog's motivation to drink therefore translates into a motivation to walk towards its known location. This is a form of proto-practical reasoning, but it falls short of practical reason in that the means-to-end links that connect basic affordances can't be questioned or revised by the dog other than as a result of conditioning.
  • Pierre-Normand
    2.5k
    This leaves me wondering just what you mean by "empirical content"?Janus

    For instance, that the apple looks red when I look at it. The content of the intentional state "the apple looks red" is empirical since it is passively actualized, as an act of Kantian receptivity, as a result of my visual sensory encounter with it. But it is also conceptual since I am not just perceiving an apple and perceiving redness. I am subsuming it under the concept of a substance, namely the 'apple' sortal concept, and also seeing it as having this or that shape, being in this or that location, and as being red, where the grasping of the location, shape and secondary qualities consist in the passive actualisation of conceptual abilities that I have acquired (and learned to reason with) prior to seeing this particular apple, seeing it as an apple, and seeing it as having its particular primary and secondary qualities.

    Maybe the thesis that empirical content isn't external to the sphere of the conceptual could be stated pitily as: there is no seeing that isn't also seeing as.
  • Joshs
    5.9k


    I wonder, though, whether he believes our animal nature to be conceptual owing to it being shaped by our acculturation and language acquisition (and he is stressing the continuity of the process and substrate) or if he believes other animals and human infants to also have conceptual abilities (and he is stressing the similarities between linguistically informed and non-linguistically shaped conceptuality). If it's the former, then he would seem to be closely aligned with McDowell in that regard.Pierre-Normand

    Rouse believes both animals and infants have conceptuality. The distinction he makes between humans and animals is between what he calls one-dimensional and two-dimensional intentionality. Only humans possess the latter, which not only allows our practical perceptual activities to be guided by conceptual normativity as is the case with other animals, but we can put into question those norms, in terms of what is at stake and at issue for us.


    Not only did we start out with nonlinguistic cognitive and expressive capa­cities alongside the emergence of language, but those capacities have also proliferated and further developed. I think that Dreyfus’s own recognition
    of this important point, coupled with a mistaken inclination to equate conceptual articulation with explicit expression in language, has been an important motivation for his resistance to McDowell’s claim that conceptual
    normativity is pervasive in human engagement with the world.
    We can recognize why it would be a mistake to equate conceptual articulation with linguistic expression when we acknowledge that language is not a self-contained practical–perceptual domain. Our linguistic dis­cursive practices open onto and “incorporate” other sensory/cognitive/ performative capacities, via recognitive, demonstrative, anaphoric, and indexical locutions, even while they are themselves only intelligible as an integral part of our biological capacities for practical–perceptual interaction with our surroundings.

    Conceptual understanding is not something external to our practical– perceptual involvement in the world, that would then have to become “operative” in perception. Conceptually articulated discursive practice is a
    distinctive way in which practical–perceptual bodily skills can develop through an extended process of niche construction and coevolution of lan­guages and language users.

    Rouse treats
    conceptual understanding not only as pervasive within
    perception and practical coping with the world, but as practically–percep­tually constituted. In doing so, we would follow McDowell in providing a normative account of conceptual understanding (while acknowledging
    Dreyfus’s insistence that this understanding can be deployed “mindlessly” and non-thematically). Yet we would also extend Dreyfus’s account of practical–perceptual skillfulness to incorporate the capacities for con­ceptual articulation that accompany the acquisition of a language. We would only challenge as mistaken Dreyfus’s separation of discursive and non-discursive practical–perceptual skills as coextensive with conceptual and non-conceptual domains.

    Regarding the intelligibility of placing individuals in different worlds, this may also be a matter of stressing the overlaps, following Davidson's ideas about the principle of charity, or stressing the differences owing to the (conceptually informed) empirical content being impotent to serve as a neutral arbiter for resolving the disputes (or islands of mutual unintelligibility) at the boundary. But both stances seem to be consistent with the thesis apparently shared by Rouse and McDowell, that empirical content doesn't reside outside of the sphere of the conceptual.Pierre-Normand

    What is key here is that Rouse understands conceptuality in a fundamentally different way than does McDowell. From Rouse’s vantage, Mcdowell treats conceptuality, and language, in a detached and over-intellectualized manner , while Rouse sees both linguistic and pre-linguistic conceptuality as contextually-dependent and purpose-driven.
  • Janus
    16.7k
    So, if a dog sees something as blue or yellow (apparently dogs lack red receptors) does that count as empirical content?

    I'm pressed for time right now—I'll try to respond to your other posts when I have more time.
  • Pierre-Normand
    2.5k
    So, if a dog sees something as blue or yellow (apparently dogs lack red receptors) does that count as empirical content?Janus

    Something's being blue or yellow doesn't represent affordances in the dog's Umwelt, so I don't think those ever are salient features of their perceptual experience. But they might differentiate the blue from the yellow ball if it is only the blue one that their owner makes them play with. In that case, their experience having empirical content is manifested by their expectation, when their owner displays the blue ball to them, that they may soon have an opportunity to play with it. But the blueness of the ball isn't abstracted from the holistic content of this perceived affordance. Dogs discriminate colored objects but don't have abstract concepts of color. They don't see the ball as blue, since this abstract feature of the ball never is salient to them. Lastly, that the blue ball that they see affords being played with is part of their perceptual experience (and is an empirical content in that sense) but it is merely proto-conceptual since it isn't articulated in a two-dimensional space of reasons like our own concepts are, as Joseph Rouse might say. (See @Joshs's latest reply to me). Dogs can't play the game of giving and asking for reasons, and their lack of an ability to do so also limits the scope of their discriminative and practical reasoning abilities
  • Apustimelogist
    674

    I think dogs probably are smart enough to learn tasks which require them to abstract out something like color to perform it.
  • Pierre-Normand
    2.5k
    I think dogs probably are smart enough to learn tasks which require them to abstract out something like color to perform it.Apustimelogist

    We possess a general concept of substance, or object, which allows us to conceive of an object as remaining numerically identical even as its qualities change. In the case of secondary qualities like color, we also distinguish between something looking red (as it might under unusual lighting) and its actually being red. A dog can be trained to respond differently to blue objects than to yellow ones, but this does not amount to abstracting the concept of color in the intended sense. There remains a categorical distinction between a dog’s proto-conceptual perceptual discriminative ability and our ability to form abstract concepts, which we use to articulate propositions and integrate empirical content inferentially within a broader web of beliefs that shapes our understanding of the world and our self-conscious place within it, or so I would argue.
  • Apustimelogist
    674

    Depends what you mean I think. There are animal experiments that require them to learn rules where they have to attend to some perceptual dimensions (e.g. colors) and ignore others (e.g. shape) for sets of stimuli (where they will be shown all possible object/color combinations). Specific colors or shapes will lead to rewards when performing the task. If, say, red gives the reward you have say possible colors and two possible shapes for the animal to choose from, you can change the reward structure by just swapping which color gives the reward and the animal has to change their behavior. You could also swap all old stimuli out for new stimuli; say, changing red & blue for green & yellow, and circles & squares for triangles & vertical lines, so the animal has to learn a new reward structure. It always takes longer for animals to learn the new reward structure when it has been changed from a color to a shape than if the reward structure had stayed with colors. This kind of thing suggests that the animals are attending specifically to colors (or shapes) as an abstract dimension when looking for the reward, and can change so that they are attending to some dimensions while ignoring others. If they were just responding to the stimulus as an object in and of itself there should be no differences when changing reward. I'm pretty sure all mammals are able to do this kind of task, probably others too, I wouldn't be surprised.
  • Janus
    16.7k
    They don't see the ball as blue, since this abstract feature of the ball never is salient to them.Pierre-Normand

    I agree they probably don't see the ball as blue if that means they consciously conceive of it as such. Nonetheless I see no reason to think they don't see the blue ball, that it doesn't appear blue to them. Much of our own perceptual experience is like that—we don't see the red or green light as red or green we simply respond appropriately.
  • Pierre-Normand
    2.5k
    I agree they probably don't see the ball as blue if that means they consciously conceive of it as such. Nonetheless I see no reason to think they don't see the blue ball, that it doesn't appear blue to them. Much of our own perceptual experience is like that—we don't see the red or green light as red or green we simply respond appropriately.Janus

    This is the general nature of affordances, for non-rational (or proto-rational) animals or humans. They structure our perceptual worlds but aren't always salient. But unlike animals, we don't just respond to them when our immediate drives make them salient. We actively pick them up for purpose of practical or theoretical reasoning, which is possible thanks to our conceptual skills being rationally articulated. Although blue objects that we see aren't generally seen as blue, when we don't attend to this property of them, and as cases of change blindness illustrate, we can focus on them (and navigate their implications) at will.

    Furthermore, I would argue that the dog never sees the blueness of the ball as an affordance. What would it afford? Picking another object of the same color? Rather, as I argued previously, they might see the blue ball as affording playing with, since this is the ball (and not the yellow one) that their owner always make them play with. But then, the color of the ball merely enables a discriminative ability, and the salient ground of the discrimination, in the dog's perceptual experience, isn't blue/not-blue, but rather affords-playing/does-not-afford-playing. The dog doesn't know that the blue ball has anything in common with their blue collar or with the blue cabinet in the living room, for instance, unless it's being trained and rewarded with food when it point to blue objects, in which case the salient affordance isn't the blueness, but the promise of food.
  • Wayfarer
    23.5k
    But unlike animals, we don't just respond to them when our immediate drives make them salient. We actively pick them up for purpose of practical or theoretical reasoning, which is possible thanks to our conceptual skills being rationally articulated.Pierre-Normand

    I recall you mentioned Eric Marcus, 'Rational Causation', who writes extensively on this theme. Could you perhaps say a little about him in this context?
  • Pierre-Normand
    2.5k
    I recall you mentioned Eric Marcus, 'Rational Causation', who writes extensively on this theme. Could you perhaps say a little about him in this context?Wayfarer

    I don't recall Marcus discussing the special case of non-rational animal cognition and how (non-rational or proto-rational) mental causation might contrast with, or relate to, the case of rational causation. I think Joseph Rouse, whom @Joshs mentioned earlier, but whom I haven't read much, might be relevant to the issue of the continuities and discontinuities between us and other animals.

    On edit: I think you might like what DeepSeek R1 had to say regarding the differences between AIs and us that stem from AIs, unlike us, lacking an embodied animal nature.
  • Apustimelogist
    674
    The dog doesn't know that the blue ball has anything in common with their blue collar or with the blue cabinet in the living room, for instance, unless its being trained and rewarded with food when it point to blue objectsPierre-Normand

    But whatever cognitive or perceptual abilities an animal has is regardless of whether it has been trained to do something or not. The use of rewsrd is just motivation to get an animal to overtly display capabilities that it always had. It just comes to the simple notion that an animal nor a human is going to arbitrarily do things or display certain kinds of behavior unless it has a motivation to do so. If you observe people just going about their business in a public place, you probably won't be able to tell if someone is color blind; you need to engineer the scenario to make their lack of capability visible, which must involve some motivation or requirement to act in a certain way.

    And this is the task I was talking about just if anyone's interested:

    https://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&as_vis=1&q=intradimensional+extradimensional+shift+task+rat+mice&btnG=

    You can try a human version here:

    https://www.labvanced.com/content/research/en/blog/2023-07-wisconsin-card-sorting-test/
  • Janus
    16.7k
    The dog doesn't know that the blue ball has anything in common with their blue collar or with the blue cabinet in the living room, for instance, unless its being trained and rewarded with food when it point to blue objects, in which case the salient affordance isn't the blueness, but the promise of food.Pierre-Normand

    Of course all of that may well be true. But I see no reason to think the blueness of the ball is not perceptually present even if the dog has no conscious awareness of its presence, just as we most often aren't consciously aware of what we are perceiving. The ability to detect blue is simply a matter of physiology.

    Anyway, the original point at issue was whether the world is always already interpreted for dogs (and other animals), and the idea of affordances seems to suggest that it is.
  • Pierre-Normand
    2.5k
    Anyway, the original point at issue was whether the world is always already interpreted for dogs (and other animals), and the idea of affordances seems to suggest that it is.Janus

    This is indeed something I wholeheartedly agree with. There is no "raw" empirically given data figuring in the phenomenological experience of humans, dogs or slugs. But I also tend to use "interpreted" in a wider sense than "conceptualized".
  • Banno
    26.1k
    The thread became entangled in animal intelligence, a garden path, to my eye.

    Where are you now? Any thoughts?
  • frank
    16.4k


    I was thinking along these lines (imagine Quine and Davidson discussing reference):

    Quine: Because differing conceptual schemes could be in play, reference is inscrutable.

    Davidson: But if there were really differing conceptual schemes, they would have to be incommensurate, because otherwise they would be translatable. And if they were truly incommensurate, you wouldn't be able to detect that.

    Quine. I don't disagree with that. I didn't say anything about detecting differing conceptual schemes, I was saying that they could exist. It's the mere possibility of it that makes reference inscrutable.

    Davidson: Oh. But you have to assume that reference is fixable in order to communicate at all.

    Quine. That may be, but it doesn't change the fact that you don't really know. The appearance of knowing is coming from familiarity with behavioral cues.

    Davidson: And this convinces you of behaviorism?

    Quine. Sort of, not exactly?
  • Banno
    26.1k
    Interesting approach.

    Davidson: Oh. But you have to assume that reference is fixable in order to communicate at all.frank
    I'd suggest rather that Davidson would say reference has a function only within broader theories of truth (or meaning), and there can be no coherent theory of reference per se. Reference is not free-standing.
  • frank
    16.4k
    I'd suggest rather that Davidson would say reference has a function only within broader theories of truth (or meaning), and there can be no coherent theory of reference per se. Reference is not free-standing.Banno

    I'll have to think about that.
  • Banno
    26.1k


    To my eye this thread went awry in considering the intentionality of animals.

    Having said that, there was some interesting stuff in New Scientist last week about statistical analysis of whale song, showing that the sounds matched human language in intriguing ways.

    https://www.newscientist.com/article/2467170-humpback-whale-songs-have-patterns-that-resemble-human-language/

    One of Davidson's core conclusions is that if we are to say that some phenomena is a language, we have to be able to translate that language into our own - that we cannot recognise it as a language unless we understand what is being said. These empirical results challenge that.

    So far the researchers baulk at calling whale song a language...
    However, the researchers emphasise that this statistical pattern doesn’t lead to the conclusion that whale song is a language that conveys meaning as we would understand it. They suggest that a possible reason for the commonality is that both whale song and human language are learned culturally.

    So the topic is... topical.
  • frank
    16.4k

    That's so cool. I'm sick as crap at the moment and that cheered me up. I agree that by the time we understand whale, there is no multiplicity of conceptual schemes. But still, wondering if there's a conversation going on down there that we're being left out of is amazing.
  • Banno
    26.1k
    Not glad you are sick - glad you were cheered up...


    Incidentally, did the link to the NS article work, or was it fire-walled?
  • EnPassant
    695
    Subjective views are part of an overarching reality. 'As above, so below'. Nature is universal and tells us about the world in general. For example, nature tells us a lot about geometry/mathematics but mathematics is also mathematical, obviously, but without the need for nature to tell us so. Induction from experience goes hand in hand with deduction. There are no real contradictions in nature, only more or less accurate perceptions. The spider is right and so are you - to an extent.
  • Ludwig V
    1.8k
    The thread became entangled in animal intelligence, a garden path, to my eye.Banno
    Yes. There are those who cannot conceive of a non-human animal that truly shares any concepts with human beings and those who are quite sure that all animals in this world share that world, to a greater or lesser extent. Never the twain shall meet. Looks like two incommensurable conceptual schemes to me.

    I have questions. I hope someone can enlighten me. (I have read Davidson's article, but it was a while ago...)

    Does Davidson think of us as having just one conceptual scheme? Shared by all humanity, past, present and future?

    Does Davidson recognize in any way how complex translation can be?
  • wonderer1
    2.2k
    The thread became entangled in animal intelligence, a garden path, to my eye.
    — Banno
    Yes. There are those who cannot conceive of a non-human animal that truly shares any concepts with human beings and those who are quite sure that all animals in this world share that world, to a greater or lesser extent. Never the twain shall meet. Looks like two incommensurable conceptual schemes to me.
    Ludwig V

    To further entangle the thread with animal intelligence...

    https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2025/02/250203163756.htm

    To get treats, apes eagerly pointed them out to humans who didn't know where they were, a seemingly simple experiment that demonstrated for the first time that apes will communicate unknown information in the name of teamwork. The study also provides the clearest evidence to date that apes can intuit another's ignorance, an ability thought to be uniquely human.

    It appears bonobos are capable of sharing our ability to conceive of others as knowledgeable or ignorant of some fact.
  • frank
    16.4k
    Incidentally, did the link to the NS article work, or was it fire-walled?Banno

    It popped right up when I clicked on it.
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