The reactions against Cartesianism in analytic philosophy of mind have made possible a revival of the Aristotelian term for a human being -- the idea of a rational animal. Descartes famously (or infamously) dismisses this description in Meditation II, where he denies that the cogito can be identified with the Scholastic animale rationale, on the grounds that it is requires categories that cannot be derived from the solipsistic stance of self-consciousness.
By contrast, in the work of Donald Davidson, Alastair MacIntyre, and especially John McDowell, the idea of a rational animal has resurfaced. In doing so, we must confront two questions: (a) what makes an animal rational? and (b) why must the rational entity, so conceived, be an animal?
To be rational, on a model broadly shared between Davidson and McDowell, is to capable of making moves within what Sellars called "the space of reasons": it is to be capable of asserting, of giving reasons for ones assertions, and to be capable of asking others for the reasons for their assertions. McDowell emphasizes that this point holds not only for episodes of knowing, as in Sellars, but for all thought as such. To put the point in terms developed by Bob Brandom, to think is to make a material inference.
An animal is rational if it is not merely sentient but also sapient. "Sentience" entails consciousness, affectivity, and responsiveness to changes in its environment. An animal may be sentient and yet be extremely clever in manipulating objects in its environment, even its fellow creatures. "Sapience" differs in that sapience entails a capacity for reasoning and for recognizing that it is taking up a view on the world and not merely occupying a place in an environment. (Heidegger's distinction between Welt and Umwelt, mediated through Gadamer, is an important influence on McDowell's version of this distinction.)
But McDowell, more than his fellow Sellarsians Brandom and Rorty, insists that the bearer of rationality must be an animal. It must be something intrinsic to the way of life of a particular kind of animal, a human being -- an animal that can acquire culture, Bildung, Geist. Thinking and knowing are part of how we are as animals, as web-weaving is part of how a spider is as an animal. And it is part of McDowell's critique of "para-mechanism" in philosophy of mind -- Millikan and Dennett in particular, also fellow Sellarsians -- that they lose their grip on the fact that what is rational must be animal, and what is animal must be rational.
Thursday, April 5, 2007
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Hey Carl,
Finally got around to reading this post, and I found it very interesting. I haven't thought much about the "animal" part of the rational animal equation and I think your right to raise the question of what role it plays for contemporary philosophy of mind.
As you suggest, I think most contemporary thinkers would want to cash it out in terms of sentience, and in particular in the notion of consciousness. If a machine could learn to play the game of giving and asking for reasons as well as any one of us, then we might still want to resist calling it a person inasmuch as it lacked consciousness.
I've only grown more confused by the literature on consciousness over recent years, though, so would not want to cash out the animal in rational animal in this way. It just wouldn't be that enlightening.
But then I’m trying to see precisely what Sellarsians should say about our animal nature. Your suggestion seems to be that it is only because we are animals of a certain sort (the kind that exchanges reasons) that we could be rational animals (as opposed to a web-spinning animal, say). I don’t quite see how this provides an argument for the place of our animal nature, though, as much as for the relevance of it. Is this what you are getting at? Or is there something that I’m missing?
I think a related question would be: What do you mean by saying that “they lose their grip on the fact that what is rational must be animal, and what is animal must be rational”? I can see that Dennett, etc., might be said to lose their grip on our animal nature, but what does it mean to say that they lose their grip on the fact that “what is animal must be rational”? You’re not ruling out the possibility of irrational animals, surely. But then I guess I don’t see what you’re getting here…
I hope you aren't at Virginia Tech.
WW
WW --
No, I'm in Fredericksburg. Neither myself nor anyone I know personally was affected by the shooting, but it's shaken up the collective consciousness pretty badly. If it can happen there . . .
I got into a lot of trouble with Phillip Pettit in a graduate course I took a million years ago on this one. But the unsucessful argument turned into my Master's thesis. You see, Sellars isn't exactly committed to the 'animal' part of the rational rational animal definition. Check the conclusion of "Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man," where he discusses the principles of community and reherasals of intentions. "It follows that to recognize a featherless biped or dolphin or Martian as a person requires that one thinks thoughts if the form, "We (one) shall do (or abstain from doing) actions of the kind A in circumstances of kind C." For all intents and purposes, I was inclined to determine that Sellars was minimally inclined to accept in principle that any non-human entity that met *this* condition, would count as a person. But the implication of this "liberalism" (to use Ned Block's phrase) is that the material stuff isn't what counts metaphysically for this condition. It is far from a metaphysical claim at all, but is a lingusitic claim, and Sellars has left it open that other physical systems could count. So, for instance, a "Neuromancer" (William Gibson's novel) scenario in which AIs form a community that can rehearse intentions is one sufficient for considering AI's persons. On the other hand, Brandom, in a paper that no one reads (I'll try to find it for you), tries to restain this Sellarsian condition ad hoc, but ends up excluding non-communicative communities in the process (think of indigenous tribes that give up on Modernity, having historically be excluded for so long that their world views become exclusionary in the process). It's a nightmare. Refusal to give reasons (participate in that space) can have many other reasons. The "animal" part of this trend isn't quite supported by Sellars, and is a metaphysical bias that won't hold up in the end. Think about it. If things like language communities are supporting the definition of rationality to begin wih, this behavior is simply not tied necessarily (think box) to one specific physical system that implements it. If you claim it is, what exactly is so special about that physical system that across all possible worlds binds it necessarily to the language behavior? If you want to make an *empirical* claim, then you've stopped with the modal talk entirely. The modal talk (necessity) and the bias go together.
I read a book by Hannah Arendt years ago (regrettably I cannot remember the name). She made an interesting point. The phrases that are usually rendered "rational animal" and "social animal" were in greek "zoon logikon" and "zoon politkon". "logikon" in this context carries connotations of both "thinking" and "speaking", and "politikon" is fairly obvious. Her main point was that the two phrases, telling of a political and speaking animal are very closely related. of course such an animal is also operating within the space of reasons.
Oh dear, I haven't heard of many of your philosophers much less read them, but when Kant stipulates in his book Logic that animals aren't capable of judgment because a judgment is an "idea about an idea," I thought that that pretty much closed the books on animal reasoning.
Many animals do have a cortex, but few of them have a neo-cortex. The neo-cortex (from what I understand) is where our ability to do math comes from -- someone like John Nash -- for instance -- is impossible among dogs or pigeons much less spiders.
The cortex is capable of simple rational decisions (to flee or to fight), but it can't do higher mathematics, or think about the elegance of two different equations having to do with game theory.
Game is game.
At any rate, I'm with Kant, I suppose, for now, but I realize a lot of my contemporaries want to emphasize the connection between animal and human that has been made by the Darwinians.
I watched the Bee Movie this morning with my play schooler. It stars a dissident bee who wants to sue humanity for stealing their honey. He not only wants this to stop, but he wants reparations, as well.
Almost all hit movies for kids are moving in that direction: Free Willie, etc. It's a new frontier for rights -- animal rights.
I think it distracts what moral force we may possess toward human rights (which the Tibetans for instance lack), into a conduit that dissipates all that CHRISTIAN energy into a vacuum where everything is more or less upside down and haywire.
Should Trees Have Standing? is perhaps the nadir of this movement. Have you read that?
Do Animals Think?, by Wynne, puts bees in their place and shows us how they are hard-wired and do relatively little.
Is it a kind of orientalism to posit a human spirit for bees? Will at some point this whole movement be arrested as a kind of spurious nonsense?
I don't know.
At any rate, I like to think about the negatives of anything that's getting too popular.
Thanks for letting me blather a bit.
Btw., I enjoyed the film immensely, just the same.
I'm trying to read Mary Midgley, who also likes animals, but isn't willing to call them our brothers and sisters.
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