Chris asks:
That's Davidson, not Hume.
I think it's a complex story. (I used to do the following sort of thing for a living.) Davidson, like Quine, is a holistic behaviorist about people too. "Radical interpretation," what Q&D call the project of imputing mental states to people mainly by interpreting their linguistic behavior, is all on the outside: psychological explanation, the explanation of behavior by the hypothesizing of mental states, is a stance we take towards being when we can rationalize their behavior.
But it's not a matter of imputing internal states over which, as Q would say, we quantify existentially, that is, say that they exist. It's a way of pruning the bush of behavior so it looks like that behavior is rational. It doesn't matter what's inside, what input-output connections produce the behavior. That's neurology, not psychology. In a very deep sense, from the perspective of radical interpretation theory, it would not matter if our heads were filled with straw, like the Scarecrow's, as long as our behavior can be rationalized.
In other words, Radical interpretation does not involve a representational theory of mind, it rejects the idea that there are mental states in the head that represent external events and objects, which are caused by interaction with stuff outside us, and the causal interaction of which, inside us, produces behavior.
OK, now here's the double kicker. Davidson thinks that without linguistic behavior there isn't enough to go on to rationalize the animals' behavior and so treat the animal as a rational being, taking that stance towards it. There re just too many different possible interpretations and no plausible way to choose among them. I think Miles was saying something like this.
But real bite is that Davidson and Quine think that's in a very deep sense true even with linguistic behavior. Given a set of utterances and a body of behavior, different and incompatible interpretations can be imposed on it. Quine's infamous example is the issue of whether the sentence "There's a rabbit" should be translated, "There's an animal whose attributes satisfies the criteria for rabbit hood" or "There's a bunch of undisconnected rabbit parts." Quine calls this the indeterminacy of translations: any set of utterances is susceptible to different interpretations depending on the translation manual. Quine also has an argument that reference, the way "rabbit" is supposed to pick out rabbits, is opaque,s o we can't say to what "rabbit" refers. As Q puts it, there's just no matter of fact about that sort of thing. Or, since mental states are characterized linguistically, about what mental states we may be in. That goes for us as well as others; there is no first person point of view.
Unsurprisingly at the end of the day Quine thinks that there are no mental states, the deep language of the universe contains no mental terms, all there is are point masses in space time. Mental talk, including about linguistic beings, is just as pragmatically useful way of talking. Davidson doesn't disagree with any of this, except he thinks that pragmatically useful way of talking is just fine, and if it's good enough to help us navigate, we can say that the things we talk about when we take the mentalistic stance exist as much as the point masses do. But not as internal states, rather as a global way of approaching beings whose behavior can be rationalized.
But Davidson does think you need language for that, and nonlinguistic animals don't qualify. That not only goes for prelinguistic chimps and gorillas, it goes for prelinguistic humans, like little babies. I don't think he ever wrote that down anywhere, although I didn't keep up with his last 15 years' work, but I heard him say it in answer to a question.
Does all this mean that Q and D think we are automata, machines without ghosts, beings to whom no one has any moral obligations or responsibilities? No, they don't deny that beings whose behavior can be rationalized can be moral agents and objects, anyway. Beings whose behavior can't be are more problematic, but this is an issue for any moral theory that identifies morality with rationality -- Kantianism, consent theory.
Q&D don't have to deny that nonlinguistic animals are sentient in that they can feel pain and pleasure, and Rorty, who follows them in most of what I've said above, but they would have to deny that an explanation of animal behavior that refers to qualia could be rationalized or that there was a definite, ascertainable matter of fact about whether the cat suffers pain if you pull its tail or runs away because of that pain.
I'm just explaining this perspective, it's not mine. And I did say that it was a long story. If it's still opaque, try another couple of years in grad school.
;->
--- Chris Doss <lookoverhere1 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> Hey, you wrote "I suppose he'd exempt
> chimps, gorillas, where there is demonstrable
> language
> use."
>
> How would that work? The animal is a mindless
> automaton, until you teach it sign language, and
> then
> presto a mind is born ex nihilo?
>
That's Davidson, not Hume.
I think it's a complex story. Davidson, like Quine, is a holistic behaviorist about people too. "Radical interpretation," what Q&D call the project of imputing mental states to people mainly by interpreting their linguistic behavior, is all on the outside: psychological explanation, the explanation of behavior by the hypothesizing of mental states, is a stance we take towards being when we can rationalize their behavior.
But it's not a matter of imputing internal states over which, as Q would say, we quantify existentially, that is, to say that they exist. It's a way of pruning the bush of behavior so it looks like that behavior is rational. It doesn't matter what's inside, what input-output connections produce the behavior. That's neurology, not psychology. In a very deep sense, from the perspective of radical interpretation theory, it would not matter if our heads were filled with straw, like the Scarecrow's, as long as our behavior can be rationalized.
In other words, Radical interpretation does not involve a representational theory of mind, it rejects the idea that there are mental states in the head that represent external events and objects, which are caused by interaction with stuff outside us, and the causal interaction of which, inside us, produces behavior.
OK, now here's the double kicker. Davidson thinks that without linguistic behavior there isn't enough to go on to rationalize the animals' behavior and so treat the animal as a rational being, taking that stance towards it. There re just too many different possible interpretations and no plausible way to choose among them. I think Miles was saying something like this.
But real bite is that Davidson and Quine think that's in a very deep sense true even with linguistic behavior. Given a set of utterances and a body of behavior, different and incompatible interpretations can be imposed on it. Quine's infamous example is the issue of whether the sentence "There's a rabbit" should be translated, "There's an animal whose attributes satisfies the criteria for rabbit hood" or "There's a bunch of undisconnected rabbit parts." Quine calls this the indeterminacy of translations: any set of utterances is susceptible to different interpretations depending on the translation manual. Quine also has an argument that reference, the way "rabbit" is supposed to pick out rabbits, is opaque,s o we can't say to what "rabbit" refers.
As Q puts it, there's just no matter of fact about that sort of thing. Or, since mental states are characterized linguistically, about what mental states we may be in. That goes for us as well as others; there is no first person point of view.
Unsurprisingly at the end of the day Quine thinks that there are no mental states, the deep language of the universe contains no mental terms, all there is are point masses in space time. Mental talk, including about linguistic beings, is just as pragmatically useful way of talking.
Davidson doesn't disagree with any of this, except he thinks that pragmatically useful way of talking is just fine, and if it's good enough to help us navigate, we can say that the things we talk about when we take the mentalistic stance exist as much as the point masses do. But not as internal states, rather as a global way of approaching beings whose behavior can be rationalized.
But Davidson does think you need language for that, and nonlinguistic animals don't qualify. That not only goes for prelinguistic chimps and gorillas, it goes for prelinguistic humans, like little babies. I don't think he ever wrote that down anywhere, although I didn't keep up with his last 15 years' work, but I heard him say it in answer to a question.
Does all this mean that Q and D think we are automata, machines without ghosts, beings to whom no one has any moral obligations or responsibilities? No, they don't deny that beings whose behavior can be rationalized can be moral agents and objects, anyway. Beings whose behavior can't be are more problematic, but this is an issue for any moral theory that identifies morality with rationality -- Kantianism, consent theory.
Q&D don't have to deny that nonlinguistic animals are sentient in that they can feel pain and pleasure, and Rorty, who follows them in most of what I've said above, but they would have to deny that an explanation of animal behavior that refers to qualia could be rationalized or that there was a definite, ascertainable matter of fact about whether the cat suffers pain if you pull its tail or runs away because of that pain.
I'm just explaining this perspective, it's not mine. And I did say that it was a long story. If it's still opaque, try another couple of years in grad school. If after that you believe it, then you're insane.
;->
--- Chris Doss <lookoverhere1 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> Hey, you wrote "I suppose he'd exempt
> chimps, gorillas, where there is demonstrable
> language
> use."
>
> How would that work? The animal is a mindless
> automaton, until you teach it sign language, and
> then
> presto a mind is born ex nihilo?
>
> --- andie nachgeborenen
> <andie_nachgeborenen at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> >
> > Even Hume didn't believe in Humean skepticism
> > outside
> > the study -- he didn't think it was possible to do
> > so.
> >
> > --- Chris Doss <lookoverhere1 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> >
> > >
> > > I didn't say it was monstrous. I said it was
> > insane,
> > > like seriously believing in Humean skepticism or
> > > radical solipsism.
> > >
> > > --- Miles Jackson <cqmv at pdx.edu> wrote:
> > > >
> > > > Let me put it this way: what is so monstrous
> > about
> > > > saying that some
> > > > particular species does not experience
> empathy?
> > > >
> > > > Miles
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