I've just sent off my chapter "Real Behaviorists Don't Wear Furs" for Nandita and Vartan's book Animals in Human Signification or something like that, and I have two little chunks of argument that emerged this morning pursuant to that, I'll split them into two posts, this one and the next.
There is a mistake, I think, in the premise of evolutionary psychology. According to a strong version of this view, adaptationist explanations of behavior (explanations that appeal to the fitness-conferring value of various behaviors) replace intentional explanations (explanations that take intentional states to be causal, as in, "He went to the river because he wanted some water"). (Let me note in passing that to whatever degree evolutionary psychology is a valid way to explain behavior, it is equally valid when applied to humans as when applied to other species; the evolutionary psychologist has no grounds for claiming that humans have "minds" while other species do not. But that is not my point today.) The mistake here is to confuse the "why" with the "how." We are in need of various explanations. One thing that needs to be explained is why the organism behaves the way it does. Adaptationist explanations may serve to satisfy that explanatory need. But how the organism manages to achieve the behavior is a different explanandum entirely.
Here's the little bit of argument that came to me this morning: An adaptationist explanation might explain how a tiger came to have a sharp claw. That doesn't mean that the sharpness of the claw itself is no longer of interest to a zoologist. The sharpness must be referenced if we are to understand how the tiger satisfies its nutritional requirements. It is an indispensable part of the "how" explanation.
Adaptationist explanations, as "why" explanations, lie "upstream" from "how" explanations. As Aristotle pointed out long ago, there are in fact various types of causal explanation. No one would think that the claw's sharpness was causally irrelevant to the tiger's functioning. But evolutionary psychologists (Dawkins) make the same mistake when they suggest that the intentional properties of psychological traits are causally irrelevant on the grounds that the real cause is genetic replication. Thus to explain that the dog is adapted to love you doesn't constitute any kind of argument that the dog doesn't really love you. (Same as in the infant's case.)
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A.B.: " Thus to explain that the dog is adapted to love you doesn't constitute any kind of argument that the dog doesn't really love you. (Same as in the infant's case.)"
ReplyDeleteVery nice post Anderson, but I am curious as to your conclusion, do you feel that evolutionary psychology's message is that "the dog does not really love you" (with an emphasis on "really")or that "your wife does not really love you"? What gives you that conclusion?
Is that in providing a different explanation for the causes of a behavior, other than those of beliefs, or subjective will, somehow those descriptions are thought to be somehow cancelled out? Wouldn't this mean that I really don't like sugar, or even, sugar doesn't really taste sweet to me, just because there are presumed to have been evolutionary advantages to such a predilection?
Or, if I could ask more quietly, what does "really love you" mean for you? I feel that I am missing something in your conclusion. Is there something that Dawkins says which pointedly seems to make the above claim? Isn't it in no way different than saying, the acts of loving have a causal mechanism in brain activity. That wouldn't make them any more unloving, would it?
Kevin's comment illustrates nicely the disconnect between our attitudes towards humans and towards non-human animals. It seems like a "straw man" evolutionary psychology is being criticized if one seems to be suggesting that the evol.psychologist doesn't believe that one's spouse "really loves you." And yet adaptaionist arguments are routinely, even reflexively, used to make exactly this claim regarding animals: that in fact they have no minds at all. My point: there is no more reason to draw such a conclusion here than there is in the human case. As Hume pointed out, a successful psychology will address adult humans, infant humans, and non-human animals alike. AB
ReplyDeleteA.B.: "It seems like a "straw man" evolutionary psychology is being criticized if one seems to be suggesting that the evol.psychologist doesn't believe that one's spouse "really loves you." And yet adaptaionist arguments are routinely, even reflexively, used to make exactly this claim regarding animals: that in fact they have no minds at all."
ReplyDeleteI have seen arguments against the idea that animals have minds at all, and I have seen evolutionary arguments which seek out to explain animal behavior in terms which are not intentional (applied to human as well), but seldom if ever have I seen these two conflated into a single argument. Perhaps though, you are more familiar with the literature. I can see a tendency to treat, for instance, a mother duck's care for his young in a promotion of the survival of its genes kind of way, but for your criticism to carry through for these descriptions, not only would all intentionality be denied by this redescription (again, I have not seen this), but also all affect, that is, that the mother duck feels or experiences nothing when caring for its young. For "loving its young" must be componented of affective experiences, unless love is to been as strictly an ideational event.
Again, I don't know of which specific conflationary theories you find so suspect are, which ones argue that because there are evolutionarily causal reasons behind behaviors, there is either no affect or thought behind their actions. Perhaps you can cite in the future something Dawkins says, which brings your point home. Much more, it seems to be the case, just as you put it, that the sharpness of the Tiger's Claw is exactly the experiences (and at least with humans) the thoughts, by which the meal is gotten. It is the reality of those experiences and thoughts that gets the job done, so to speak, just as a mother duck would never care for its young if it experienced anything.
http://kvond.wordpress.com/
The target here is not some technical argument, simply the popular misconception (shared, however, by many "specialists," go to any conference on comparative psychology or ethology) that is articulated by the claim, "It's just instinct." This explanation is assumed to be a rebuttal to the claim that animals have minds. Kevin is quite right that it is not at all adequate to rebut the claim that animals have minds. But this deployment of the concept of "instinct" to deny predicating mental states to animals is common and widespread, from freshman classes to scientific conferences. AB
ReplyDeleteOne minute with any of Richard Dawkins's discussions of ethology will turn up many versions of the argument I am criticizing here. Just now I opened at random his The Extended Phenotype to p. 119: "Natural selection cobbled together the equivalent of a hard-wired machine-code program....we can usefully imagine natural selction as acting directly on a pool of alternative programs...and treat individual organisms as temporary executors." In The Selfish Gene (can't put my hand on my copy just now) you will find repeated use of the word "automotons" applied to organisms allegedly determined by their "programs." There is an extensive literature critical of evolutionary psychology, S. J. Gould, Richard Lewontin, and important example is Philip Kitcher, Vaulting Ambition.
ReplyDeleteA.B.:" "Natural selection cobbled together the equivalent of a hard-wired machine-code program....we can usefully imagine natural selection as acting directly on a pool of alternative programs...and treat individual organisms as temporary executors." In The Selfish Gene (can't put my hand on my copy just now) you will find repeated use of the word "automatons" applied to organisms allegedly determined by their "programs."
ReplyDeleteI appreciate your thoughts. I suppose I do not have such a sensitivity or fear of either algorithmic descriptions of behavior (being a fan of Dennett, who thinks that all of evolution one day could be reduced to an algorithm), or even the word "automaton" (a Spinoza favorite). I find that much of behavior the that gets given the aura of "choice" or "freewill" or "consciousness" is actually rather automatic. Heck, I've driven for miles in heavy street traffic, making all kinds of choices and delineations, while thinking of a theory or two, and been utterly at a loss for what I had just "experienced" or been "perceiving" the last 20 minutes. Just how much of a non-automatic mind I have is for me really not a big deal. Even if someone were able to discover a single algorithm governing all my behavior, I still would have "a mind" and all the ascriptions of "mind" and intention that currently are used to find my behavior meaningful, would still be in full force.
I have to say, when it is not the arguments of those we oppose, but really the popular misconception of them, or what the people making them "really think" that bothers us, we come upon slippery (but perhaps necessary) ground. As long as their arguments can be appropriated in support of what I believe, it really is no skin off of my nose. (And I believe that evolutionary psychology arguments are quite friendly to my notion of what mind is.)
I too share a desire to focus the question of animal minds within a larger perspective on minds in general, and, as it seems from your writings, in ethics.
But I sense what may be rubbing you the wrong way is the manner in which evolutionary psychology provides descriptions that are of an intentional kind, but vacating the subject of that intention. For instance, "I am going to the river because I am thirsty" can become, ultimately, "[I] am going to the river so that [I] can replicate my genes" or some such evacuation. But this is really a projection of intentionality onto a causal system, and is sloppy description. It comes from the middle ground of "functionalism" which has teleological aspects, without subjectivity. Insofar as evolutionary psychologists have the imp of perversity in them, and perhaps enjoy transmuting, loosely, all our intentional predicates into impersonal imperatives, I just see this as a slippage of language. It is treating "causes" as if they were "reasons". If indeed there is a causal connection between my affection for my wife, and the capacities that needed to be developed for my species to persist, I do not see how this encroaches upon either my pleasure, or my valiancy. A description only is as powerful as it plays out in the "language game". And this goes for the mind of animals as well. The ascription of "mind" or "heart" or "belief" carries its weight in what it reveals. The descriptions of personal intention which you may feel are endangered to so degree by evolutionary psychology (or neuroscience perhaps), persist because they are so damn effective. And all this talk of "folk psychology" is a rhetorical attempt to create "folk science". We learned a while ago that chocolate gives us a brain reaction which is strong than that of love (if I get that right). Instead of the downfall of love, it gave rise to countless jokes, and perhaps the intermingling of chocolate and love even more so in our minds.
I think the same thing of these dangers of causal reductions of intentionality. They are being absorbed by the intentional discourse, because this discourse is paramount to communicability. If anything, what evolutionary psychology does, is make us closer to animals. As the causal pictures of us and them begin to coincide, we are much more likely to identify with their affective states. As we become more "animal", they become (whether the evolutionary psychologists want it or not), more "human".
[there may be more than a few memes speaking in the above, and I cannot be held accountable for what they are saying]
It's all about proximal cause versus ultimate cause. Natural Selection does not care why you do something. All it cares is that you do it.
ReplyDeleteSo evolutionary psychology can develop theories about ultimate causation (in the sense of, "why does this behavior cause fitness?"). But it says nothing about why a person does something at the moment.
So a regular psychologist would say that I get water because I'm thirsty; but an evolutionary psychologist would say that it is because I want to survive to have children, and that dying of thirst is a bad way to do that. After all, the people who don't have a tendency to drink water when they are thirsty (for whatever reason that may be) are the people who don't tend to survive.
The same goes for other animals too. But since we tend not to think of other animals, like dogs, as having intentions (even though I would say they do), we tend to only mention the ultimate cause and ignore the proximal cause. A dog still loves you, even though we can come up with a reason why doing so is advantageous for his genes. The same goes for husbands and wives. They still really love eachother. We just happen to now know why those types of people (people who love their spouses and children) survive better. But this does not take away from the fact that they happen to have real intentions and that they really do indeed love eachother.
Again, evolution does not care why you do something. It just cares that you do it. And so we can ask two types of questions:
(1) Why does a dog behave this way? (Because it loves its master.)
(2) Why is it that this behavior could evolve? Why is it that it exists? (Because doing so is conducive to its Darwinian fitness.)
These are two separate questions; evolutionary psychology asks the latter. Often times people like Dawkins and Pinker will sound as if they are conflating one with the other, but that is only because it is inconvenient to make the distinction time and time again.
And you are right, we proud humans don’t like to think that other animals have intentions, and this may be infecting some of the literature.