[lit-ideas] Re: Pirots and Squarrels: Grice on Ethology
- From: Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 29 Apr 2013 10:33:46 -0400 (EDT)
We are discussing various views on what Grice calls "philosophical
psychology", which, in the words of Perry, "for Grice, starts with fictional
ethology".
McEvoy's reference to an inbuilt programme may have related to innateness.
In a message dated 4/29/2013 11:37:27 A.M. UTC-02,
donalmcevoyuk@xxxxxxxxxxx writes:
"As to innateness, Popper's position [without checking] is that while a
theory of "innate ideas" is mistaken, there are innate dispositions and these
constitute innate dispositional knowledge: they are prior to experience yet
pertain to reality and so are close to Kant's synthetic a priori knowledge
except this dispositional knowledge is conjectural and fallible rather
than necessarily correct."
Good to learn. Indeed, the whole terminology of 'ideas', as used by
Locke, is possibly dated by now. Grice entitled his book, "Way of Words", to
echo Locke's "Way of Ideas", but then _he_ (Grice) was a reactionary.
The point by Locke is that ideas have _content_, as they do; so it's good
that McEvoy focuses on the _truth-value_ of the content of such ideas --
innate, or not.
McEvoy goes on:
"Chomsky's theory of innate grammar is mistaken [it is something akin to a
theory of "innate ideas"] and Chomsky is wrong to think that grammar is
essential to language or 'fixed' and wrong in that grammar comes a fairly late
stage in the development of language. Nevertheless, there is an innate
human disposition to grasp and learn language and this disposition must be at
the heart of how we learn language - and much of what Chomsky says by way
of showing the untenability of an empiricist theory of language [a la Locke]
is correct."
Well, indeed. J. L. Austin and H. P. Grice, in the latter meetings of the
Play Group at Oxford (usually St. John's college) would discuss, even
sentence by sentence from Chomsky's theory. But they never focused on the
innateness aspect. More on the transformational-generative aspect, which
indeed,
is sort of interesting to compare vis-à-vis a Lockean theory of
understanding. What's wrong with having the set of RULES as fixed and the
potentially
infinite set of outputs as not? -- or something like that.
Chomsky's theory is based on the idea of the 'poverty of stimulus', and
indeed, his campaign was against Skinner, Watson, and a few other theorists of
semiotics that were a bit of a rage in the days of Unified Science. He
became clearer as to what he was proposing in his "Cartesian" (rather than
Lockean) linguistics" book.
McEvoy goes on:
"There are many reasons why this Darwinian account of knowledge is not more
widely accepted: one is lack of understanding of Darwinism and its
philosophical implications but some derive from the widely held prejudice that
all
knowledge is derived from observation. For these 'dispositions' are not
directly observable, only their effects are observable. In terms of what is
observable we might observe that a chemical has certain properties, we might
observe that in a sufficient dose it is poisonous, and we might observe
the reaction the chemical produces in an organism [say nausea, thereafter
aversion]: it is tempting to analyse this so that the observable chemical and
its observable properties cause an observable reaction of nausea and
thereafter an observable aversion, where the "cause" is explained in terms of
a
"conditioning" arc - in this way we avoid positing invisible or unobservable
dispositions. Yet aversion is not the only response to nausea: and nausea
may produce errors of aversion [the ice cream dessert made me sick not the
fish main course but, ever since, fish sets my teeth on edge but I still
enjoy ice cream] - this indicates that any explanation cannot be limited to a
"conditioning" arc but must involve a disposition to connect the nausea
with something [say, something eaten]: and that disposition is not a product
of "conditioning" a la the conditioning arc [which is a Lamarckist
explanation in terms of 'instruction from without'] but of 'natural
selection'."
Another interesting bit to add to this is Grice's idea of the 'ceteris
paribus'. Indeed, there is so much variation in the formulation of the
psychological 'law' and its corollaries, that it's best to represent it as
'ceteris paribus' in nature. This may avoid some of the complications that
McEvoy
sees for the empiricist (Lockean) programme. Or not.
McEvoy goes on:
"The "conditioning" arc fails to explain why creatures, including humans,
connect certain events and not others - in other words, bare
'associationism' cannot explain why we make the associations we do and not
others: it
cannot explain why the mechanisms in making connections here are selective and
do not select equally from any logically possible association. The
explanation for such 'selection' lies in prior dispositional knowledge."
At this point, I may want to explore the idea of 'knowledge' again -- Cfr.
'intuitions'. Can one's intuitions get wrong? This Darwinian-Popperian view
of lexical items like 'know' and 'intuit' may well hold that one's
intuitions CAN get wrong. Similarly, a Darwinian-Popperian may not regard the
following as a contradiction: "I knew but I was wrong" (on knowing-the-false).
"Dispositional" sounds a bit like Rylean -- For Ryle, all knowledge is
dispositional, and he played with collocations like 'know-that' and 'know-how'
which may relate. Grice, rather, thinks, alla Gettier, of knowledge as a
type of _belief_.
The idea of 'a priori' may complicate things. The idea of the a-priori
false is an interesting one, too.
I will re-read McEvoy's commentary on Garcia, as it pertains to the
scientific methodology involved -- and will try to reformulate it in terms of
specific _contents_ for specific beliefs or desires which may be viewed as
'dispositional' (and false). And so on. The idea of the 'ceteris paribus'
should also be taken seriously in that it allows for a 'psychological law' to
display a range of variability that may exclude a few alleged
counterexamples. Or not.
Cheers,
Speranza
Refs.:
Grice, "Method in philosophical psychology", repr. in his book, "The
conception of value" -- now in paperback, Oxford Clarendon Press.
Locke, on parrot.
Carnap on pirot.
Grice on squarrel (squirrel) Toby.
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