If humans are part of the organic world, we expect that our capacities of understanding and explanation have fixed scope and limits, like any other natural object – a truism that is sometimes thoughtlessly derided as “mysterianism.”
Noam Chomsky, “Of Minds and Language.”
Abstract
In this paper, I aim to show that McGinn’s argument from analogy for the possibility of human cognitive closure survives the critique raised on separate occasions by Dennett and Kriegel. I will distinguish between linguistic and non-linguistic cognitive closure and argue that the analogy argument from animal non-linguistic cognitive closure goes untouched by the objection Dennett and Kriegel raises.
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Notes
See, for instance, Kirk (1991), Kukla (1995), Rowlands (2007), Sacks (1994). I believe mysterianism has not received the due attention it deserves and am largely in agreement with Kriegel’s following observation: “The literature on mysterianism has so far been somewhat dogmatically dismissive. Critical discussions of the merits and demerits of the view are few and far between. In particular, McGinn’s argument is rarely if ever engaged” (2009, p. 455). The current paper may be read as a modest attempt to remedy this unfortunate situation.
The support the premises of an analogical argument are intended to provide for its conclusion, as Bartha notes, “can vary considerably” (2013, p. 2). Some analogical arguments that one can find in physics and mathematics are demonstrative (i.e. the truth of their premises guarantees the truth of their conclusions). And, some analogical arguments attempt to establish “no more than minimal plausibility” for their conclusions or “to persuade people to take [their conclusions] seriously” (Bartha 2013, p. 2): for instance, Reid famously made the analogical inference to the plausibility of the hypothesis that there might be life on other planets from observing certain similarities between those planets and Earth such as getting illuminated by the sun and having moons. I take McGinn’s argument for the possibility of human cognitive closure as akin to Reid’s argument for the possibility of life on other planets and assume that its point is to establish the plausibility of the hypothesis that human cognitive closure is possible.
The point of the caveat “inter alia” is that there are certainly other ‘textbook-style’ dimensions along which an analogical argument can be evaluated such as the number of similarities and the number of differences between the two domains compared. However, as Bartha (2013, p. 9) notes, relevance is “the all-important” dimension to be considered when evaluating an analogical argument, and that will be the focus of this paper. It is notoriously difficult to have a satisfying account of the relevance condition. The condition as I conceive it here can be illustrated as follows. Take the analogical inference to the proposition that a particular book is worth reading from the proposition that its cover is similar in color to that of another book that is worth reading. What makes this analogical inference (very) weak is its clear violation of the relevance condition, i.e. that the color of the cover of a book is not relevant to its being worth reading.
It is worth noting that McGinn’s central similarity claim about monkey minds and human minds is that both are “biological products” that “come in different shapes and sizes, more or less capacious, more or less suited to certain cognitive tasks” (1989, p. 350).
We need this qualification simply because, as stated above in fn. 4, there are other criteria that can be used to evaluate the plausibility of an analogical inference.
I follow Kriegel (2003, p. 184) in taking problems to be a sort of question (and, accordingly, solutions to be a sort of answer). In what follows, I will use “problem” and “question” (and, accordingly, “solution” and “answer”) interchangeably.
Note that Kriegel also writes that “There can be problems whose solution evades us” (p. 179) and that “Surely we cannot presume that a biologically evolved mind can be immune to all forms of principled ignorance” (p. 183). Given these remarks, it is hard to see how Kriegel’s argument can “target the very possibility of human cognitive closure” as such and hence his advertisement is at least misleading.
Dennett assumes that the analogy argument for the possibility of human cognitive closure as such can succeed only if one shows that there is a question such that an animal mind is cognitively closed to its answer while being open to that question. As my defense of the analogy argument will show, this assumption is false: the analogy argument can succeed even if one does not show that there is such a question as specified by Dennett. I thank an anonymous reviewer for the comment that leads to this clarification.
Animal cognitive closure can be accounted for by their incapacity to understand certain questions if understanding certain questions is necessary for cognitive openness. The explanation would evidently go as follows: it is because understanding certain questions about such-and-such properties is necessary for cognitive openness, and also because animals do not understand those questions, that animals are cognitively closed with respect to those properties.
Obviously, taking the capacity to understand questions merely as a sufficient condition for cognitive openness would not explain animal cognitive closure because that would leave the possibility of there being other sufficient conditions that they might satisfy: from the fact that animals fail to satisfy a sufficient condition for cognitive openness, it does not follow that they are cognitively closed. Further, one might reasonably ask whether D&K might really need the stronger idea if the weaker one can be plausibly considered as blocking the analogical inference. The reason why I mention the stronger idea despite its evident redundancy will be clarified in the following paragraph.
Note that arguing for the stronger idea in question is not the same as arguing for the impossibility of human cognitive closure as such. The stronger idea—that humans are cognitively open with respect to the answers of the questions that they can formulate—might be true while human cognitive closure as such is possible.
Dennett writes: “If we can understand all the sentences (in principle), couldn’t we understand the ordered sets of sentences that best express the solutions to the problems of free will and consciousness? After all, one of the volumes in the Library of Babel is—must be—the best statement in fewer than five hundred pages of short grammatical English sentences of the solution to the problem of free will, and another is the optimal job in English on consciousness” (1996, p. 382). And, Kriegel writes: “The thesis that there is no problem we can formulate without being able to formulate its solution is a conceptual truth, not a substantive claim… Understanding a question is thus necessarily coupled with understanding its possible answers” (2003, p. 184).
It seems reasonable to think that at least some philosophical questions are questions whose answers systematically evade our understanding. Note Stroud’s “mysterian” position with respect to the philosophical understanding of the possibility of human knowledge: “The threat I see is that once we really understand what we aspire to in the philosophical study of knowledge, and we do not deviate from the aspiration to understand it in that way, we will be forever unable to get the kind of understanding that would satisfy us” (2000, p. 100). According to Stroud, we are “constitutionally unable to arrive at an answer to a perfectly comprehensible question” (2000, p. 100), namely the philosophical question regarding the possibility of human knowledge. For a general metaphilosophical framework that places a good number of central philosophical problems such as self, meaning, and freewill outside the constitutive structure of our minds, see McGinn (1993).
Of course, Dennett would deny that we are cognitively closed in principle to what it is like to be a bat just as he (2007) denies that Jackson’s (1982) Mary would learn a new fact upon release. However, the point above is that those who think we are ignorant in principle of what it is like to be a bat still think that we can understand the question. Thanks to Elizabeth Schier for pressing on this issue.
Chomsky writes: “[T]he language faculty…has certain definite properties [that] permit the human mind to acquire a language of a specific type, with curious and surprising features. The same properties exclude other possible languages as “unlearnable” by the language faculty” (1998, p. 149).
The assumption that understanding questions requires a sort of language faculty animals lack might perhaps be reasonably challenged. One might claim that animals do represent certain questions to themselves such as “what causes that smell?” in a non-linguistic way. This might well be true but nothing substantive in my defense of the analogy argument below depends upon assuming that there is no sense in which animals can understand questions. My defense will be based on the idea that there is a sort of animal cognitive closure for which it is irrelevant whether animals do understand questions about certain properties. I would like to thank an anonymous reviewer for pressing on this issue.
Also note Dennett’s following remark: “What is inaccessible to the dog or the dolphin may be readily grasped by the chimp, but the chimp in turn will be cognitively closed to some domains we human beings have no difficulty thinking about” (1996, p. 381). Here Dennett acknowledges that there are some properties that some animals (chimps in particular) might be cognitively open to. What Dennett opposes to is the subsequent move, i.e. the attempt to derive the possibility of human cognitive closure as such from relatively innocuous observations like this one.
That humans have the capacity to understand questions about any properties appears to be an assumption D&K make in their objection against McGinn’s analogy argument. (If humans have the capacity to understand questions only about some properties but not all properties, then it is at best unclear how having that capacity is supposed to stop the argument from animal cognitive closure.) I concede, for the sake of the argument, that humans can understand questions about any properties. Further, I believe that this is a reasonably weak assumption. This is because I take it that in order to understand a question about a property, one need only to conceptualize it in some way—there are no specific conceptualizations that one has to acquire. So, understanding a question like “What is that property that theoretical physicists call ‘space–time’?” counts as understanding a question about space–time. Thus understood, it seems intuitively clear that we can understand questions about any properties.
See, for instance, Stainton (1996). After noting the implausibility of “the idea that there is no connection between thought and language,” Stainton claims that one’s failure to grasp some properties like being a particle accelerator and being a dollar might be due to one’s having a language that “lacked the phrase ‘particle accelerator’ and the word ‘dollar’” (p. 3).
Dennett writes: “I once saw a cartoon showing two hippopotami basking in a swamp, and one was saying to the other: “Funny—I keep thinking it’s Tuesday!” Surely no hippopotamus could ever think the thought that it’s Tuesday. But on the other hand, if a hippopotamus could say that it was thinking any thought, it could probably think the thought that it was Tuesday” (1994, p. 182).
See fn. 17 above.
I would like to note, in passing, that McGinn’s central claim in (1989) is not that we are cognitively closed with respect to the features of our conscious states but that we are cognitively closed with respect to the brain property P that is causally responsible for those states. Our access to our conscious states is simply through the deployment of the faculty of “introspection,” thanks to which “we catch consciousness in all vivid nakedness” (p. 354). Further, McGinn’s argument for our cognitive closure with respect to P is, roughly, that we can get to P neither through introspection nor through perception, and that these are the “two possible avenues open to us in our aspiration to identify P” (p. 397). It is not clear whether our cognitive closure to P is, on McGinn’s view, linguistic or non-linguistic. That is, it is not clear, on McGinn’s view, whether it is necessary for our cognitive openness to P that we understand questions about it. (If the answer is yes, then our purported cognitive closure is linguistic; if no, it is non-linguistic.).
Thanks to Elizabeth Schier for raising this objection.
I take McGinn to be articulating a close relative of this worry when he writes: “We try to think of this unthinkable property and understandably fail in the effort; so we rush to infer that the very supposition of such a property is nonsensical” (1989, p. 365). I suspect that this worry might well be the core motivation that lies behind D&K’s attack against McGinn’s analogy argument.
Of course, a complete assessment of McGinn’s mysterianism needs to address the worry just mentioned because McGinn (1989) claims to have found a particular property that is not graspable by us (namely, the brain property that is responsible for consciousness).
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Demircioglu, E. On an Argument from Analogy for the Possibility of Human Cognitive Closure. Minds & Machines 26, 227–241 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11023-016-9396-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11023-016-9396-z