Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
From: lupton@luptonpj.demon.co.uk (Peter Lupton)
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Subject: Re: Is Common Sense Explicit or Implicit?
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Date: Sat, 17 Sep 1994 19:26:30 +0000
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In article: <35ak50$d3v@mp.cs.niu.edu>  rickert@cs.niu.edu (Neil Rickert) writes:
> 
> In <35af8j$4r9@agate.berkeley.edu> jerrybro@uclink2.berkeley.edu (Gerardo Browne) writes:
> 
> >Neil Rickert (rickert@cs.niu.edu) wrote:
> 
> >: My objection to folk psychology as a design principle for cognition,
> >: is that it presupposes that creationism is true and that evolution is
> >: false.  Or, to explain it more clearly, folk psychology is the sort
> >: of thing you would expect from a design engineer. 
> 
> >But wouldn't a designer possibly have the creation of beliefs as a
> >*goal*, if  not as a method of approach?  After all, a bridge
> >designer has a bridge as a goal.
> 
> >: It seems to me
> >: that it could not develop under the incremental engineering of
> >: evolution.
> 
> >But this sounds odd.  Do you mean that beliefs could not themselves
> >evolve slowly from nothing?
> 
> Sure, they could.  But, in my view, beliefs are tied to propositions,
> and these in turn are tied to language.  

This sounds right enough.

> Our linguistic species
> evolved from ancestors which are not linguistic.  

So does this.

> Yet, although they are not linguistic, there is much in 
> the behavior of apes to suggest that their cognition is 
> very like ours. That suggests to me that evolution does 
> not need beliefs.  

Evolution of what? Clearly *evolution* does not need beliefs.
But only in the sense that evolution does not need anything
which evolves!

> Thus I see the existence of beliefs
> more as an incidental side effect than as an important cause.

Cause of what? Of what it is to be human rather than ape? I think not.
Further, being an incidental side effect (which beliefs might be)
is not, in itself, a good reason for saying that beliefs are not
also an important cause (of something else). 

> In order to understand the cognitive development of homo sapiens from
> earlier apes, we need to think about what is required for early
> hunter-gatherer man.  And it seems to me that deductive inferences
> from beliefs could not have been of central importance.

Animals certainly have many cognitive abilities that we share. 
I will also agree that our linguistic and propositional abilities are
grounded in abilities which cannot themselves be expressed in entirely
propositional terms.

Indeed, I have argued that simplificational abilities are exactly
of that non propositional sort. Although animals do not have language
and propositions, they do learn and this involves trial and error. 
That is, there is a notion of error which can be properly attributed 
to animals which learn. This, I claim, is accounted for by the 
disposition of animals (and not rocks) to simplify sensory data. 
Although simplification is not propositional, there is a clear
relationship between simplicity and the notion of fit we associate
with propositional content.

Although non-human animals have many cognitive abilities these are,
in the main, limited to the here-and-now. In order to release those
abilities from such constraints, simplificational abilities must
be instrumented in some way. This instrumentation permits humans 
to consider possibilities, to organise their future actions in a 
way that non-human animals can do in only a very limited way.

Public language permits a community to develop a shared world
of possibility, organisation and planning.

These abilities imply a revolution in the rate at which early
man could adapt to the environment and these adaptations can,
with public language, be shared rapidly.

> ...it seems to me that deductive inferences
> from beliefs could not have been of central importance.

What is lost by removing deductive inferences? It depends,
of course, on how narrowly or how widely the notion of 
deductive inference is drawn. Beliefs are to do with, not 
deduction per se, but with symbolic forms capable of 
being manipulated, combined, modified in a rational way 
even when that manipulation is far away from the time and 
place at which the underlying knowledge (fixed in the 
simplificational substrate) was initially gained. Now 
it seems to me that this ability - the ability to piece 
together bits and pieces learned at various times and 
various places to make a coordinated whole, a plan of 
action - would be of very real importance to early humans.

-------------------
Peter Lupton
