Monthly Archives: February 2017

Dennett and the Evolution of Language


“To my own surprise, I’ve come to believe that there is an element of truth in the apparently less plausible Platonic story that’s easy to miss, one that seems to be almost completely obscured by the paradox that both Quine and Plato have described. It isn’t that our languages were deliberately invented by particular groups of people, legislators of syndics in the formal sense of these words, sitting around particular tables, at particular times in the past. It seems to me that they’re more like our dogs, our wolfhounds and sheepdogs and dachshunds, our retrievers, and pointers and greyhounds. We didn’t invent them exactly, but our ancestors did repeatedly make deliberate more or less rational choices in the process that made them what they are today, choices among a long series of slightly incrementally different variants, unconsciously shaping the dogs into precisely what their human breeders needed them to be. ( Cloud: The Domestication of Language p. 8)


Dennett’s chapter on the evolution of language is very vague. Dennett notes from the outset that discovering the origins of language is one of the major unsolved problems in science on a par with explaining the origins of life. His explication of the origins of language is meant as a general sketch of how a naturalistic account of the evolution of language could occur without any of what he calls “a skyhook”. By “a skyhook” he typically means some kind of miracle. In that sense his theory of language while vague is truistic as every adult doing research on the evolution of language rules out miracles. But Dennett also classes Chomsky’s theory as a skyhook; as he views it as an improbable theory or hopeful monster with little evidence to support it. In this regard I think Dennett’s reasoning is very weak he sketches his own vague theory about how the evolution of language occurred and offers a critique of Chomsky that is little more than a caricature.


Dennett segments the chapter on the origin of language into two sections


(1) The Chicken-Egg problem:


In the first section he argues that all he needs for the purpose of his book is a bird’s eye view on various different takes on the evolution of language. He notes that language may originally have been an ungainly mess that was later streamlined by evolution. As always in thinking about the origin of an entity or behaviour Dennett asks the question who benefited from the proliferation of languages? He notes that scholars traditionally would claim that people were the beneficiaries of language but Dennett argues that when we take the memetic point of view another approach becomes possible. Dennett argues that in the beginning language may have been more of a hindrance than a help.


            He gives a list some of the key functions that language served: (1) Communicative Utility (2)Productivity (3) Digitality (4) Displaced Reference (5) Ease of Acquisition. He briefly considers the possibility a key precursor to language would have been the unique way humans co-operate (a possibility discussed in detail in Tomasello 2014) and goes onto discuss the work of Boyd and Richardson on the precursors to language. Dennett notes that in our search for precursors we should open minded to precursors that weren’t necessarily immediately beneficial to humans:


“Instead of looking only at the prerequisite competences our ancestors needed to have in order for language to get underway, perhaps we should also consider vulnerabilities that might make our ancestors the ideal hosts for infectious but nonvirulent habits (memes) that allowed us to live and stay mobile long enough for them to replicate through our populations.” ( Dennett ‘From Bacteria to Bach and Back’ p. 254)


He asks us to consider the possibility that language was at first like a virus that infected us. He argues that the memes which stood the constant selection pressures of their environment; the ones who survived, would be structured in such a manner that they would fit the brains of their human hosts better than the other memes that didn’t pass selection muster. As a result of this he claims:


“Innovations in memes that made them more effective reproducers in brains that were not yet well designed for dealing with them could provide the early “proof of concept” that would underwrite, in effect, the more expensive and time-consuming genetic adjustments in brain hardware that would improve the working conditions for both memes and their hosts” ( ibid p. 255)


Given that culture is such a key feature of what made homo-sapiens special Dennett notes that any sensible theory will need to show why homo-sapiens developed culture but other mammals, as well as fish and birds have not. There must be some threshold that they needed to pass but didn’t; Dennett considers a variety of different possible innovations that could act as a threshold e.g. Bipedality, Social intelligence, Imitation etc. His discussion is curiously vague he considers a variety of different theories and notes that there isn’t enough data to solve the problem.


While Dennett’s sketch is thus far very unspecified it does bare a resemblance to other theories that were sketched in more detail e.g. Deacon’s theory as sketched in his Symbolic Species, and Christiansen and Chater’s theory as written in their “Language as Shaped by the Brain”. Dennett notes that his position is similar to the position held by Christiansen and Chater’s but he argues that they misconstrue the nature of memetics and that they exaggerate the case against genetic evolution (ibid. p.279)


(2) The Winding paths to human language:


In this section he discusses how once we have our proto-language in place it could have developed into full blown language: he considers three routes: (A) It began as a proto-language where short utterances like the Vervet Monkey’s alarm calls which were appropriate to the situation but which lacked productivity and any distinction between imperatives and declaratives (B) Perhaps a gesture language came first used for attention grabbing and emphasis (ibid p. 266) (C) Perhaps an auditory “peacock’s tail” arms race for vocal signals and improvisations. After this he goes on to explicate Hurford’s work on the origins of language he does a good job of describe Hurford’s work ( interestingly when I read Hurford I was critical of him from a partially Dennett point of view But Dennett endorses his views.


Dennett’s discussion of the fact that; though we can describe people’s linguistic behaviour interms of rules; this doesn’t mean they represent those rules in the brain (they may be free floating rationales) was important. Though it should be noted Quine and Davidson made similar points before him. To see the importance of considering free-floating rationales and the idea of competence without comprehension in relation to language evolution it is worth having a detour and considering a conjecture of Dan Everett’s in his recent paper ‘Grammar Came Later: Triality of Patterning and the Gradual Evolution of Language’.


 According to Everett there is evidence that language of some sort has been around 1 million years. Acheulean tools were not developed 1.76 million years ago. Chomsky and Berwick speculate that long lag between language development may have been a result of the fact that language did not exist at this time. Everett admits that this is a possibility but that it is just as likely that it resulted from ‘saticificing’ we look for good enough not for perfection. (Everett). Homo Erectus immigrated from Africa to Europe around 900,000 years ago, Everett argues plausibly that it strains credulity that such a feat would have been possible without some kind of language. Surely some kind of complex communication would have been necessary in order for boats to be built. Everett’s claim is plausible; it is indeed hard to imagine how a person could learn to build boats to sail across the continent without some kind of linguistic skills. However despite the plausibility of Everett’s claim there is reason to doubt it. Dennett’s uses the slogan “competence without comprehension” throughout his book, he gives examples of creatures who are competent at certain behaviours but do not internally represent reasons for those behaviours. He notes the behaviour of Antelope Stotting where the Antelope’s who can jump high when being chased are much less likely to be attacked by Lions. There is an evolutionary reason we can give for the Antelope’s behaviour as Dennett notes it is almost like the Deer is saying “Don’t bother chasing me I am hard to catch; concentrate on one of my cousins who isn’t able to stot-much easier meal” (Dennett ‘From Bacteria to Bach p. 91). One can also imagine the Lion using similar logic as a reason to guide his behaviour towards the stotting Antelopes. But of course implausibly attributing such complex propositional attitudes to the Antelopes and the Lions is not needed. The logic of natural selection dictated that stotting Antelopes survive better than their non-stotting cousins and Lions who attack stotting Antelopes are less like to feed and hence to survive. There is a reason why the Antelope behaves as it does but the Antelope doesn’t need to represent these reasons. Similar considerations apply to the behaviour of newborn Cuckoo’s kicking the eggs of non-Cuckoo’s out of the nest as soon as she is born. There is a reason for the Cuckoo’s behaviour but the Cuckoo’s doesn’t have to represent those reasons. Similar considerations apply to Australian Termite castles; the Termites build the complex structures without speaking to each other and instructing each other (ibid p. 238)


            A defender of Everett’s thesis could argue that the case of building a termite castle is not remotely comparable to building boats to sail to another continent. But this is not necessarily the case. Dennett cites a passage from Rogers and Ehrlich (2008):


“Every boat is copied from another boat…Let’s reason as follows in the manner of Darwin. It is clear that a very badly made boat will end up at the bottom after one or two voyages and thus never be copied…one could then say, with complete rigor, that it is the sea herself who fashions the boats, choosing those which function and destroying others” (ibid p. 214)


Now this is a striking passage where the sea plays a role of “designer” of the boat. Various different shapes are tried but only the shapes that work are selected.  Foresight is not a necessary condition of building complicated ships rather trial and error “decides” what the best design is. People can copy designs that appear to work and modify them in ways that may or may not work. Furthermore the people who built boats that (with the help of the sea or natural selection), obviously wouldn’t have to represent where they want to go. An instinct for discovery would do the job to get them sailing, and luck as well as “design”  would play an important a role in whether these people ended up in another continent. Everett could be right that language played role in the Homo-erectus emigrating to Europe but he hasn’t established this position nor ruled out the alternative theories. One of the strengths of Dennett’s book is that he gets us to search for ‘Free-Floating Rationales’ for evolutionary cheap tricks which give creatures the competence to perform a task without the creature necessarily having comprehension of why they are doing what they are doing. Dennett offers us an alternative to Everett’s proposal and thus gives us further theory to test. Everett’s story still has some plausibility to it but considerations of Dennett’s idea of ‘Free-Floating Rationale’s’ show that things are not as clear cut as Everett seems to think.


But while there are strong points to Dennett’s book his discussion of Chomsky was a non-engagement; he didn’t even try to understand where Chomsky was coming from. Dennett has long been a critic of Chomsky’s views on the evolution of language. In his ‘Darwin’s Dangerous Idea’ Dennett discussed how he attended a conference on AI and psychology in Tufts in 1978 and was shocked to see Chomsky reject engineering approaches to the faculty of language. Chomsky seemed to be fixated on language being something which could either be described interms of fundamental laws of physics or failing that as something which we could only describe in a similar manner that literary theorists describe human behaviour.  Dennett whose life work has involved trying to reverse engineer the mind obviously rejects this dichotomy of Chomsky’s noting that Chomsky is ignoring engineering solutions. I think there is a real degree of truth to this claim. But it is not the case that Chomsky ignores engineering solutions he rather adopts a different philosophy of science than Dennett. Linguist and Chomskian Cedric Boeckx discussed Chomsky’s attitude to science in his (2006) ‘Linguistic Minimalism’. Boeckx correctly noted that that Chomsky’s attitude to biology is different to a lot of main stream biologists. Chomsky as a formalist seeks to abstract from messy details and construct formal models which he thinks can capture certain core competencies. But a lot of evolutionary biologists seek to explore messy detail using functional explanations and reverse engineering. Both methods are scientific and Darwin used similar methods of a lot of evolutionary biologists while Newton’s used the methods preferred by Chomsky. Boeckx cites Freeman Dyson’s paper ‘From Manchester to Athens’ (1982) where he distinguishes between two styles of scientists the unifiers and the diversifiers. These different styles are best exemplified Newton and Darwin. Boeckx notes that looking back over the history of science we see that the greatest successes in science have been made by the unifiers. Boeckx is probably correct on this point but it is no indication that this pattern will continue nor is it true of evolutionary biology where the greatest success have been achieved by the diversifiers. Obviously in the debate between Chomsky and Dennett the unifier is Chomsky and the diversifier is Dennett. The point is that both positions are perfectly respectable positions to take in scientific theorising so Chomsky not adopting the engineering approach that Dennett recommends is not automatically a black mark against Chomsky. A scientific theory is to be judged by its successes in prediction and explanation and in this sense Chomsky’s theory has more than paid its way. Dennett’s conjectures on the evolution of language are just conjectures that may in the future pay their way but as of yet have not done so.


 Dennett’s criticisms of Chomsky in both his ‘Darwin’s Dangerous Idea’ and his ‘From Bacteria to Bach and Back’ centre on what Dennett perceives to be Chomsky’s uncomfortableness with language being tool created by natural selection:


The Idea that words have evolved by natural selection was obvious to Darwin, and one would that Noam Chomsky, who pioneered the idea of an innate Language Acquisition Device in the brain, would look with favour on evolutionary accounts of how languages in general, and words in particular, came to have their remarkable features, but he has disparaged evolutionary thinking in linguistics in almost all regards” ( ‘From Bacteria to Bach’ p. 187)


But Chomsky made the claim suspect in many quarters through his adamant resistance to any attempt to account for the design of the LAD by natural selection!” (ibid p. 277)


If Dennett was making this claim in 1995 he would have some justification as Chomsky’s few remarks on the evolution of language were pretty sceptical of the possibilities of us being able to explain the evolution of language. But since that that date Chomsky has written dozens of articles and co-authored a book explicitly designed to demonstrate how language evolved. So Dennett’s remark is simply incorrect and has little to justify it. Chomsky and Berwick in their recent book on the evolution of language ‘Why Only Us’ do argue that merge that was selected for its use in thinking. They call this the faculty of language narrow. But they also discuss the faculty of language broad which consists of the sensory motor system and the conceptual intentional system. Both the sensory motor system and the conceptual intentional system are according to Chomsky adaptations built up by tinkering processes of natural selection. So it is unfair to say that Chomsky is adverse to explanations interms of adaptations he uses them when he thinks they are appropriate. Furthermore Chomsky presents evidence as to why he thinks merge was a mutation by citing archaeological evidence that indicates a great leap forward about 60,000 years ago which indicates a sudden leap in intelligence. Now many theorists such as Everett, Tomasello, and McNeill have critiqued this but they addressed Chomsky’s actual argument and evidence. Dennett doesn’t do this instead resorting to a weak just-so story:


“What’s more, we could plausibly conjecture that Merge itself was no fortuitous giant step, no saltation in design, but a gradual development out of more concrete versions of Merge that can be seen in the manipulations of children (and adults) today: put block on block; use your big hammer stone to make a smaller hammer stone; put berry pile in bigger pile, put bigger pile in still bigger pile; put pie in cup in bowl in bag, and so forth. But are any of these processes real recursion? That is a misguided question, like the question: are the hominins real Homo sapiens? We know that gradual transitions are the rule in evolution, and a gradual emergence of (something like) real recursion-real enough for natural language would be a fine stepping stone, if we could identify it ( ibid pp. 279-280)


And then offering rhetoric:


“And notice that if something like Merge eventually proves to be a hard-wired operation in human brains, as Chomsky proposes, it wouldn’t then be a skyhook. That is, it wouldn’t be the result of a chance mutation that, by cosmic accident, happened to give our ancestors an amazing new talent. The idea that a random mutation can transform a species in one fell swoop is not a remotely credible just so story; it has more in common with comic book fantasies like the Incredible Hulk and all the other action heroes whose encounters with accidents grant them superpowers” (ibid p. 280)


Dennett is here engaging in nothing more than rhetoric and ignoring Chomsky’s actual arguments.


A further problem with Dennett is that while he is dismissing Chomsky’s views on the evolution of language (with little evidence) he sits on the fence on whether Chomsky’s proposed theory on the nature of language is correct:


I am not taking sides in the controversies, even where I have convictions; I have more than enough to defend without defending how much bias, how much “Universal Grammar,” as the Chomskyans say, must be genetically installed in the “Language Acquisition Device” nor do I stipulate in any way what form this biasing must or might take. One way or another, without deliberate (let alone conscious) theory construction of any kind, the infant homes in on habits that it will share with its parents, responding sensitively to  semantic information present to its senses.” (ibid p. 194 )


Dennett’s approach here is simply wrong; one cannot abstract from which theory of the nature of language  is true when you are sketching a theory of how language evolved. Noam Chomsky has long argued that any theory of the evolution of language will need to be informed about what language actually is. It is pointless in speculating about how language evolved without understanding the nature of language itself. Chomsky is surely right about this. Any theorist goes into a discussion of the evolution of language with a theory about what the nature of language is. A false theory about the nature of language may send one down a wrong path trying to discover how it evolved. Thus if you think that a key feature of language is that it is an internal computational procedure used for thinking primarily, or if you think that language is primarily a shared system symbols used to communicate meanings; these different theories about the nature and function will have serious effects on how you will understand what the archaeology is telling you about the nature of language. Thus  if we consider some facts about the evolution of our ancestors we will see how these facts will appear depending on the theory of language one accepts. In his (2016) ‘Grammar Came Later’ Dan Everett notes some key facts about our evolutionary history. Over 6 million years ago a new type of ape arrived on earth, this bipedal ape was called Australopithecus. According to Everett (2016) Australopithecus could recognise iconicity. To support the claim that they recognise iconicity Everett points out that they collected pebbles, he cites the example  Makpansgat Manuport pebble 3million years old which was an icon shaped like a face collected by Australopithecus. Everett goes on to note that up to  2.7 million years ago we have evidence of an icon shaped like an phallus called the Erfoud Manuport. Aside from our use of icons Homo Erectus was using crude Oldowan tools at 2.6 million years ago (Everett 2016).


            Now obviously for someone like Everett who thinks that the evolution of symbols is the key factor in the evolution of language these facts will be pure gold. Everett following Peirce notes that the movement from index to icon to symbol is one of the key features of our linguistic capacities. So the fact that Australopithecus was using icons 3 million years is clear evidence that our ancestors were starting on a process of developing a language 3 million years ago. Though obviously the use of an icon is not a linguistic practice but it is evidence of cognitive capacities which may have offered an entering wedge into language. However for a Chomskian who defines a language as the ability to use merge; language is an all or nothing capacity. So a Chomskian will be less than impressed with these empirical details and will believe that they are irrelevant to the details of what Chomsky thinks of as the key feature of language: Merge. We can see from the different ways that Everett and Chomsky treat archaeological details that your evolutionary theory of language is deeply connected to the theory you hold about the nature of language. Dennett being vague in his theory of how language evolved be an untended result of his not taking sides on debates on the nature of language.


Overall while Dennett’s discussion of plausible candidates for a naturalistic explanation of language explanation was interesting he left too much detail out. His competence without comprehension thinking tool is useful as a way of reminding linguists to not just assume that complex behaviours Must be evidence of comprehension. However his treatment of Chomsky was much too cursory to be of any real value.


Quine: Emotions and Death

“When one is alone and it is night and so dark and still that one hears nothing and sees nothing but…the slow irresistible approach of the wall of darkness which will eventually engulf everything you love, possess, wish, strive, and hope for-then all our profoundities about life slink off to some undiscoverable hiding place, and [dread] envelops the sleepless one like a smothering blanket ( C.G. Jung)[1]

In this short paper I will discuss Quine’s life, as described in his autobiography, what his description of his life revealed about his psychological attitude; and speculate about how his psychology may have influenced his philosophical outlook. To do this I will demonstrate how key facts about Quine’s life as described in his biography are mirrored in his philosophical system. In particular it will be shown that Quine’s inability to deal with emotions were mirrored by a strange avoidance of any real dealing with emotions in his philosophical theorising.

One notable fact about Quine that becomes apparent when reading his autobiography is his persistent narrow obsessions in things like stamp collecting, and map making when he was younger. This behaviour continued throughout his life as evidenced by his travels which seemed more about ticking off that he had been to a new country rather than something to enjoy for its own sake. Quine even admitted as much:

“I detect two deep traits which the reader will already have divined from my compulsion in childhood to compile, from my preoccupation with political boundaries, from my early collecting of stamps, and later collection of countries, and from my professional concern for mathematical elegance: namely I am orderly, and I am frugal” (Quine: The Time of My Life p. 476)

Another notable feature of Quine’s psychology was the difficulty that he had with dealing with intense negative emotions:

It was settled that Naomi would come to Harvard with me and we would marry. Nothing was said to my parents on the point. This was not from fear of disapproval, but from diffidence over matters of sentiment. Actually I was not eager for the marriage. At one point sitting with Naomi in a car in Portage Path, I even ventured to voice my doubts, but a stronger will prevailed. I tend to shy away from present emotional stress and tend not to consider what stresses the future may bring.” (Quine: The Time of My Life p. 74)

“This book has mainly been a factual account of external things and events as they have impinged on me and I in my faltering way on them. A perceptive reader may, however, have gained from these indices a clearer picture of my drives and character than I myself enjoy; for I have little bent for soul searching. This deficiency was evident in the way I brought peace of mind in 1930 and 1944 at the price of subsequent misery. My way of coping with spells of nostalgia, loneliness, anxiety or boredom over the years has been to escape into my projects. ( Quine ‘The Time of my Life’ p. 475)

While it is not unusual for a person to avoid emotional stressors where possible Quine’s avoidance of negative emotions bordered on the pathological. To marry someone you don’t want to marry as a way of avoiding a difficult talk; indicates that Quine had extreme difficulties in handling emotional stress. It is notable that Quine’s way of dealing with emotions was to avoid the stressful encounters at all costs and to throw himself into his projects. This fact indicates that Quine’s early collecting of stamps, and making of maps may have been a way that he had of coping with childhood trauma. Keeping himself busy on analytic tasks may have helped him deal with aspects of his life that he couldn’t cope with.

This way of coping with stress by throwing oneself into busy work to avoid dealing with trauma is well known clinically. Both existentialists and psychotherapists have discussed this way of coping in detail. Psychoanalyst and Heidegger Scholar Robert Stolorow described this approach as follows:

…Heidegger also uses the term falling to denote a motivated, defensive, tranquilizing flight into inauthentic illusions of the “they” in order to evade the anxiety and uncanniness inherent in authentic Being-toward-death. As I noted in Chapter 4, Heidegger’s discussions of such retreats from existential anxiety closely resemble clinical descriptions of the covering over of traumatized states.” (Robert Stolorow ‘World, Affectivity, Trauma’ p. 84)

Quine’s behaviour throughout his life filling his time up with busy work and aimless moving from place to place could be construed as a way of avoiding emotional suffering and anxiety at all costs. We know from his autobiography that Quine suffered from Anxiety around the time of his divorce and that saw a psychoanalyst for this anxiety. In his autobiography Quine doesn’t go into great detail on the nature of his anxiety nor on why the psychoanalysis was unsuccessful. One of the primary aims of psychoanalysis is to discover how early trauma and relations establish patterns in childhood that unconsciously effect the behaviour of people into their adulthood. Quine who by his own admission tried to avoid any real contact with emotions may have found a process of undergoing psychoanalysis and dragging up intense emotions extremely uncomfortable; cognitive behavioural therapy invented a few years later may have suited Quine’s temperament better. However since Quine didn’t give any indication as to why the psychoanalysis was ineffective it is hard to say for sure why it didn’t work for him. An example of Quine’s aversion to even speaking about emotions was in his description of his first wife Naomi he notes that she was prone to mood swings and was diagnosed with bi-polar disorder. Bi-polar disorder can have a devastating effect on the family of those diagnosed with it as well of those suffering on it. But Quine just vaguely mentions the mood swings and moves on to describe his travels in a dispassionate manner. Obviously no thinker is obliged to describe personal matters in their autobiography; the detail they go into is their own choice. Nonetheless for a reader wanting to know about his life Quine’s brief mention of his emotional experiences being instantly turned into a description of further travels is very strange. Now it is possible that as a committed behaviourist Quine was just writing his book in the externalist manner that his philosophical theories legislated. However it is notable that Quine’s behaviour in his description of his wife’s bi-polar disorder is in keeping with his overall attitude to something with real emotional punch; to move away quickly, and throw himself into busy work, in Quine’s case dispassionately describing places that he had been.

Quine’s attitude to deep emotions can even be seen with his views on poetry. Quine notes:

I am deeply moved by occasional passages of poetry, and so, characteristically, I read little of it. I respond similarly to passages of grand opera, and this is due to the liberto as much as to the music. Otherwise I have a poor memory for fiction, for it resists integration to my system of the world” ( Quine: The Time of My Life p. 476)

Again we see Quine’s attitude towards emotions very clearly; if something evinces strong emotions, it is to be avoided.

Even in Quine’s theoretical work spanning over 60 years he manages to avoid any serious engagement with emotions. Now to some degree this is to be expected Quine’s work on the mathematical logic and set theory is hardly an area congenial to reflecting on emotions. But Quine’s work on naturalised epistemology, on how we go from stimulus to science is an area where one would expect to find some reflection on emotions. Quine did discuss emotions at various different points of his career. Early in his career when lecturing on Hume he briefly discussed Hume’s claim that reason is the slave of the passions. However Quine added little to Hume’s claims on the topic as his primary role was as an expositor of Hume’s ideas. Later in his career he argued that the emotions should be thought of along the lines of sensations (see his The Pursuit of Truth p. 86) and that these sensations should be thought of  as propensities of the human body that could be cashed out in dispositional terms (see ‘Quine in Dialogue’ p. 8). Again we can see that the subjective feeling of the emotion is pushed to the background and it’s physical status and behavioural manifestations are noted. Obviously Quine has to argue in this manner because of his physicalism and his behavioural commitments but it is worth noting that his theoretical attitude to emotions is the same as his attitude in his lived experience; avoid them at all costs and at the very least minimise their impact.

One area where Quine did discuss emotion and it’s psychological manifestation was in his later writing on the Indeterminacy of translation. In his two last books ‘From Stimulus to Science’ and ‘The Pursuit of Truth’ Quine gave empathy a key role in both the child learning his first language and the linguist learning a language of an unknown tribe:

“Empathy dominates the learning of language, both by child and by field linguist. In the child’s case it is the parent’s empathy. The parent assesses the appropriateness of the child’s observation sentence by noting the child’s orientation and how the scene would look from there. In the field linguist’s case it is empathy on his own part when he makes his first conjecture about ‘Gavagai’ for the native’s assent in a promising subsequent situation. We all have an uncanny knack for empathizing another’s perceptual situation, however ignorant of the physiological or optical mechanism of his perception…Empathy guides the linguist still as he rises above observation sentences through his analytical hypotheses, though there he is trying to project onto the natives associations and grammatical trends rather than his perceptions. And much is true of the growing child.” ( Quine: ‘The Pursuit of Truth pp.43-44)

Quine’s discussion of empathy is important as it does seem to be a necessary tool in the child his parents and others in the intersubjective sphere where they can communicate with each other about their shared feelings and their shared world. But Quine’s attitude to this topic was strangely tepid. Emotions play little role in helping child learn about their world; for Quine basic empathy is necessary for the child and adult to triangulate on shared objects of experience but there any discussion of emotion ends. Quine was familiar with the work of people like Piaget on children’s relation to their world and he even expressed admiration for Piaget. However Quine’s description of children avoids any discussion of strong emotions or feelings. This is a big oversight on Quine’s part. We know how intertwined with our emotions are with our cognitive apparatus ( see James 1992, Hurley et al 2011, and Damasio 1994). Obviously Quine didn’t have any access to our contemporary knowledge of the relation between emotion and cognition. Nonetheless as a theorist discussing how a child goes from stimulus to science his not discussing the role of emotions in any detail (even to just explain them away) was extremely strange. This fact cannot be just explained in terms of Quine being a behaviourist. Firstly Quine didn’t deny that sensations, emotions existed; he just argued that they could be cashed out in physicalistic terms. But Quine never discussed what role our emotions played in us developing our theory of the world. Yet Quine went out of his way to explain intentional locutions could be explained away (and the degree that they couldn’t be avoided). Why the asymmetry between how Quine treated emotional states and intentional states. My conjecture is that Quine’s discomfort with dealing with strong emotions in his own life led him to minimize their role in his theoretical study of reality.

I mentioned above that Quine’s express attitude towards emotion was similar to the views which Heidegger critiqued in his ‘Being and Time’ where people immerse themselves in busy work to avoid their relation to anxiety and death. Ironically Quine and Heidegger’s projects have some areas of commonality in that both emphasise the non-Cartesian notion of embeddedness in our environment and our intersubjective ways of dealing with and understanding reality. But despite these areas of commonality there are clear differences between Quine and Heidegger; notably that you won’t find Quine brooding on death, anxiety, and authenticity. It is a legitimate question as to why Quine doesn’t deal with these issues. Quine is a naturalist; who accepts the truth of the proposition that all humans are mortal and hence all humans will eventually die. He noted in his biography that he stopped believing in God and morality at the age of nine.  Quine would presumably been cognisant of the fact that as language using thinking creatures, humans would be aware that they would eventually die and would have an attitude towards this fact. Yet Quine rarely discusses the concept of death in his philosophy. This fact may seem unsurprising given Quine’s philosophical influences and the tradition he was working in. The tradition that Quine worked in involving logical analysis of language etc wasn’t exactly a tradition known for emphasising death. Nonetheless being from the analytic tradition didn’t stop philosophers like Russell, Ayer and Wittgenstein discussing their attitudes towards death. Russell in particular was very articulate when discussing the tragedy of death. Quine on the other hand avoids the issue. By avoiding the issue he avoids the anxious thoughts that can go with reflecting on your death and the death of loved ones; and of course avoids any strong emotional feelings. Death and the limits it imposes on us all has real consequences for how we go from stimulus to science; all our projects for dealing with the world are formed against the background of the limits posed on us by our finite nature. Quine along with Wittgenstein was responsible for breaking with the Cartesian tradition in analytic philosophy of noting our embeddedness in the world and the contingent ways we have of dealing with this world. But his almost pathological avoidance of emotions meant that his philosophical adventure left out half of the picture of how we manage to develop into who we are.

[1] The Jung quote was taken from Robert Stolorow’s ‘World, Affectivity, Trauma’ p. 35


Dehaene begins his discussion of the unconscious with a critique of Freud’s conception of the unconscious. Dehaene notes that despite Freud’s claims to originality in his discovery of the unconscious it was actually discovered years before Freud. Upon hearing this one probably assumes that Dehaene goes on to discuss Schopenhauer and Nietzsche’s work which refers to unconscious emotional drives which unknown to us govern our so called rational conscious behaviour. Schopenhauer’s unconscious ‘will to live’ and Nietzsche’s ‘will to power’  bear a close resemblance to Freud’s unconscious as they involve emotional drives which we are not aware of influencing our conscious behaviour. However, Dehaene doesn’t mention either Schopenhauer or Nietzsche, and he goes on to give an idiosyncratic list of people who discovered unconscious processes, all the while collapsing a lot of important conceptual distinctions.

The unconscious as Freud understood it was intended to refer to unconscious mentalistic processes. Freud didn’t deny that there were bodily processes that we had no knowledge of; and nor did most theorists prior to Freud. Dehaene takes this fact as a kind of refutation of Freud’s originality but the examples that Dehaene gives are examples of non-conscious processes. Thus Dehaene gives the example of Galen noting almost two thousand years ago that our breathing and our ability to walk is not under our conscious control. Now Galen was obviously correct on this point; but it doesn’t really speak to Freud’s concerns. Freud was concerned with unconscious mental states, not with bodily processes which we have no conscious control of. Cell division in the body is not under conscious control but it would be very strange to speak of the body unconsciously dividing cells; rather we would call cell division a non-conscious process. When Dehaene speaks of Hall’s discovery of reflex arcs linking sensory inputs to motor outputs, and our movements originating in our spinal cord (which we have no conscious control over), or Galen’s comments on breathing, he is not showing that Freud was anticipated by these thinkers. Rather Dehaene is merely confusing non-conscious bodily processes with Freud’s mentalistic unconscious. This fact can be seen by the fact that Dehaene even argues that Descartes anticipated Freud in postulating the existence of the unconscious. Descartes is famous in philosophy for denying that unconscious mental states were possible; for Descartes the mind was synonymous with consciousness. Dehaene doesn’t offer much to defend his idiosyncratic interpretation of Descartes; he merely states that Descartes noted that “human actions are driven by a broad array of mechanisms that are inaccessible to introspection, from unconscious motivations to hidden desires” (Consciousness and the Brain p. 51). Dehaene didn’t cite any sources to support his claims about Descartes, which is very strange given the extremely controversial claim he is making. Dehaene is right that Descartes was aware that our body (including the brain) operates according to mechanical principles that we are not aware of. But these non-conscious facts are of an entirely different logical order than the unconscious mental states Freud was concerned with. I am unaware of any textual evidence that Descartes argued for unconscious desires, or motivations of the Freudian kind as Dehaene claimed. I would be interested in any evidence that support’s Dehaene’s claim that Descartes believed in unconscious motivations and desires. But in absence of such evidence I will stick with the standard interpretation of Descartes that he eschewed any talk of unconscious mental processes. Descartes equated consciousness with the ego and the ‘I think’ and argued that it was the conscious mind that controlled the non-conscious body (via the Pineal gland), and not vice versa. So Dehane’s claims about Descartes, Galen et al prefiguring Freud on the issue of the unconscious do not stand up to critical scrutiny.

Dehaene intellectual history doesn’t get it all wrong, he notes that thinkers like Leibniz, Janet, and James to some degree beat Freud to the punch. Leibniz deserves credit for being the first theorist to explicitly argue for unconscious mental processes. This quote from Leibniz in 1704 shows his explicit views on unconscious perception:

“There are hundreds of indications leading us to conclude that at every moment there is in us an infinity of perceptions, unaccompanied by awareness or reflection; that is, of alterations in the soul itself, of which we are unaware because the impressions are either too minute or too numerous, or else too unvarying, so that they are not sufficiently distinctive on their own. But when they are combined with others they do nevertheless have their effect and make themselves felt, at least confusedly within the whole. (Leibniz: New Essays on Human Understanding p. 53)

Leibniz’s unconscious was a mental unconscious and one that prefigured that of Freud by a couple of hundred years, while the non-conscious processes that Descartes, Galen et al discovered had little relation to Freud’s unconscious.

While Dehaene is guilty of confusing unconscious mental states with non-conscious processes such as cell division occurring in the body; it is important to make a further division between the Freudian Unconscious and the Cognitive Unconscious. Both cognitive scientists and psychoanalysts speak of unconscious processes. But in cognitive science the emphasis is less on feelings governing our behaviour that we are not aware of, rather the emphasis is on computational processes that make certain cognitive capacities possible. Thus in areas like perception and language acquisition these capacities are explained interms of computational processes that the brain uses but which we are entirely unconscious of. These computational processes are supposed to be aspects of the mind/brain but we have no conscious awareness of the structure of these cognitive competencies, the structure can only be discovered through detailed scientific research.

There is an ambiguity in how these unconscious cognitive processes are to be interpreted. We saw above that many theorists pre-Freud spoke about non-conscious bodily processes and we discussed how these processes differed from Freud’s mental unconscious. The next question we need to ask is how does the cognitive unconscious relate to the both non-conscious bodily processes and Freud’s mentalistic unconscious?

Given that these unconscious computational processes are supposedly part of our general cognitive structures; then one could argue that despite their different natures the Freudian unconscious is aiming at the same target as the cognitive unconscious, both theories are indirectly describing brain processes. On this view, a possible aim for science could be to integrate cognitive science with the findings of contemporary psychoanalysis. In his 2009 book ‘Freudian Unconscious and Cognitive Neuroscience’ psychoanalyst Vesa Talvite attempts such an integration, and in the process argues that certain tenants of psychoanalysis (in particular the idea of a mentalistic unconscious), will have to be rescinded. Talvite based his conclusion on an argument by philosopher John Searle in his 1992 book ‘The Rediscovery of the Mind’. In that book Searle argued against the existence of the mentalistic unconscious, and Talvite notes that if psychoanalysis is to be integrated with cognitive science then as a result of Searle’s arguments psychoanalysts need to drop the idea of a mentalistic unconscious. What Talvite failed to notice is that Searle’s arguments actually call as much doubt into the existence of the cognitive unconscious as they do on the Freudian unconscious.

In Searle’s 2015 book ‘Seeing Things As They Are’ he has further developed his arguments on the nature of the unconscious. Part of Searle’s reason for discussing unconscious perception is that he thinks that the concept is used to down play the importance of consciousness in our interaction with the world. Searle notes that three phenomena which are sometimes appealed to as a way of undermining the importance of consciousness are (1) Blindsight, (2) Readiness Potential, and (3) Reflexes. Searle notes that while readiness potential and reflexes are very important in making perception possible these processes are not unconscious processes rather they are non-conscious processes like, for example, cell division. He argues that in order for these processes to be counted as conscious they would need to be the type of thing that could be made conscious. Searle makes the following point about unconscious processes:

“There is a level of intentionality, indeed several levels, and there is a level of the neurobiological realisation of the intentionality, indeed, several levels; but there is no psychologically real, but unconscious level of algorithmic processing. The idea is that these mental processes in the intermediate level are supposed to be psychologically real, though totally unconscious. They are not the sort of thing that one could be conscious of, but they provide a scientific explanation of operation of the visual system. No clear sense has been given to the notion that there is any psychological reality to the level of computer implementation…The argument against there being a psychologically real level of the deep unconscious is simply that any intentionality requires aspectual shape…representation is always under some aspect or other. But what is the reality of the aspectual shape when the system is totally unconscious? What is the difference between the unconscious desire for water and the unconscious desire for H2O, both of which may be psychologically real? An Agent might not know that water is H2O, he might mistakenly believe that H2O is something disgusting and want water but not H2O. What fact about him when he is totally unconscious makes him have one desire over the other? ( Searle: ‘Seeing things as they are’ pp. 204-205)

Searle’s argument goes against the grain of both the Freudian unconscious and the Cognitive unconscious he is arguing that both theories are incorrect in postulating deep unconscious processes that cannot be made conscious. Searle thinks that once we see that our perception is made possible by non-conscious processes as opposed to unconscious ones we will see the importance of consciousness. There is nothing psychological about our nonconscious bodily processes, so while they clearly make possible our conscious perceptions they are not in a position to undermine the importance of the conscious act of seeing.

This argument has clear consequences for both cognitive science and psychoanalysis so it needs to be evaluated very closely. Firstly it should be noted that Searle is not denying the existence of unconscious mentality; he has no problem with what Freud would call the subconscious. Something that is subconscious is something that we are not currently conscious of but we can bring to awareness if need be. Thus a person may not be currently thinking of their dogs name but if asked they can access the relevant information. Searle has no problem with this type of unconscious. Where Searle has a difficulty is with supposed unconscious knowledge that we are incapable in principle of accessing. Chomsky has long been a defender of this type of unconscious knowledge:

“There is no reason to suppose that we have any privileged access to the principles that enter into our knowledge and use of language, that determine the form and meaning of sentences or the conditions of their use or that relate the “mental organ” of language to other cognitive systems” (Chomsky: ‘Language and Unconscious Knowledge’ p.244)

Chomsky’s claim that the principles that govern our knowledge and use of language are entirely unconscious is precisely the claim that Searle rejects as simply incoherent.

One of the key problems that Searle has with the picture sketched by people like Chomsky, and Marr is their three sphere explanation of things like vision and language. Marr is generally credited with making this three sphere view explicit in his 1982 book ‘Vision’. In ‘Vision’ Marr noted that there were three levels of explanation (1) The Neurobiological, (2) The Computational, and (3) the psychological.  Searle has no problem with either 1 or 3 but he has serious difficulties with 2; from Searle’s perspective a computational level which is not intentionalistic, nor neurobiological, but is still supposedly mentalistic is incoherent. Searle sees no reason to have any level beyond the neurological and the psychological. This is not merely an argument against the computational theory of the mind it is an argument against unconscious computational processes. Searle thinks that the only real computation is the conscious computation that emerges when a person is actually calculating. So he denies that a computer actually uses computation and he denies that the brains do as well. Searle distinguishes between what he calls intrinsic intentionality and derived intentionality. On Searle’s view humans and other animals are the bearers of intrinsic intentionality, now while it is possible to describe brains, the digestive system, or thermostats as computational devices such descriptions are observer relative (hence non-intrinsic). Searle thinks that describing certain devices as computational may be pragmatically useful but it should be remembered that such devices don’t actually use computation (the computation is in the eye of the observer i.e. the human interpreting the device).

So for Searle, except in the case of creatures with intrinsic intentionality actually doing conscious calculations, there is no computation in the world other than observer relative computation. The obvious question is what does this argument have to do with the unconscious (of either the cognitive or Freudian variety)? Well in the case of the cognitive unconscious the link is pretty obvious. If we consider language acquisition; according to cognitive scientists like Chomsky we acquire our language because of innate computational mechanisms that we use to organise our experiences. These computational mechanisms are unconscious. For Searle while we can describe the brain as using computational mechanisms for certain theoretical purposes this description is observer relative. Take away the scientific observers making these attributions and it makes no sense to say that children’s brains are using computational devices.

Now a critic of Searle could claim that when Searle argues against the idea of unconscious computation this amounts to nothing more than a bizarre decision to use the word ‘computation’ in an idiosyncratic manner. This critic could further argue that attacking the foundations of cognitive science on the basis of a stipulation as to how a word must be used is not very convincing.

Searle however offers more than just an idiosyncratic definition of the word ‘computation’ he also offers an argument as to why computation cannot be unconscious. We will call this argument The Aspectual Argument. Searle asks us to consider the following case: (1) It is claimed that John unconsciously desires Water. (2) Water and H2O pick out the same objects. Therefore (3) If John unconsciously desires Water he Unconsciously desires H20. But (4) John doesn’t know that Water = H20 in fact John thinks that H20 isn’t a pleasant substance but that Water is. Therefore (5) John doesn’t unconsciously desire H20 even though he does unconsciously desire Water. So we can see from the above argument that (3) and (5) contradict each other.

Searle claims that the above is not a problem if we are talking about subconscious knowledge. Thus in the case of subconscious knowledge that can be brought to conscious awareness we can question John. Thus John can discover that he was thirsty through various different behavioural measures; e.g. people pointing out that his is licking his lips, that he appears to be dehydrated, that John keeps looking longingly at a glass of water on the table. Upon this being pointed out to John he agrees that unknown to himself he was thirsty and he can drink the water and to quench the thirst. Now John can be further asked if he knows that Water and H2O referred to the same thing and suppose he replies that no he believed that H20 actually referred to Oil. So based on this simple behavioural procedure we can conclude that while John unconsciously desired water he didn’t unconsciously desire H20. But in terms of the deep unconscious that can never be brought to awareness things are different. If we attribute to John the unconscious desire to drink water and since water refers to H2O we must be attributing to John the unconscious desire to drink H20. Since John is in no position to comment on what he is entirely unconscious of, his explicit claim that he doesn’t believe that H20 and Water are synonymous is not a defeater of the claim about his unconscious desire. And since explicit conscious beliefs are not defeaters of attributions of unconscious knowledge then a claim that John unconsciously desires is water doesn’t distinguish between whether this desire commits John to the unconscious desire for H20.

Readers will of course recognise this form of argument as it has been used by Donald Davidson as a way of casting doubt on attributing beliefs to non-linguistic animals. Davidson argues that when we quantify into belief contexts for linguistic creatures we can run into referential opacity. Thus (1) ‘Superman is the most powerful man in the universe’ is true and Clark Kent = Superman, then (2) ‘Clark Kent is the most powerful man in the universe’ is true as well. However assume that 3 is true: (3) ‘John believes ‘Superman is the most powerful man in the universe’’. Now again Superman = Clark Kent. But that doesn’t make 4 true: (4) ‘John believes ‘Clark Kent is the most powerful man in the universe’. The reason obviously is that John may believe x about Superman and not believe x about Clark Kent because he is unaware that they are the same person.

Davidson noticed a logical problem in the case of attributing beliefs to non-linguistic animals. Attributing beliefs to non-linguistic animals results in different logical behaviour than attributing beliefs to linguistic creatures does. Thus while referential opacity occurs in the linguistic creature case it doesn’t occur in the non-linguistic creature case. So, Davidson asks us to think of a case of a dog chasing a cat up a tree. The dog is barking at the cat. But Davidson notes are we justified in saying (1) The Dog believes ‘the cat is up the tree’, (2) The Dog believes ‘the cat is up the tallest tree in the forest’ (3) The Dog believes ‘The cat is up an Oak etc. Davidson’s point is that we have no evidence to decide what the Dog believes in this case and hence referential opacity that occurs in the case of linguistic believers doesn’t occur when we attribute beliefs to non-linguistic creatures.

Now this is a pretty strong argument for a logical point. Davidson uses this argument to cast serious doubt on whether we are justified in attributing beliefs to animals. Searle uses a similar argument in the unconscious cases with just as dramatic results; the claim that we are not justified in attributing unconscious computational states to people. Interestingly, while Searle uses an argument from referential opacity to argue against unconscious mentality; he has never accepted Davidson’s views animals. In his book ‘Intentionality’ Searle notes:

“…It seems to me obvious that infants and many animals that do not in any ordinary sense have a language or perform speech acts nonetheless have Intentional states. Only someone in the grip of a philosophical theory would deny that small babies can literally be said to want milk and that dogs want to be let out and believe that their master is at the door. There are, incidentally, two reasons to why we find it irresistible to attribute Intentionality to animals even though they do not have a language. First, we can see that the causal basis of the animal’s intentionality is very much like our own, e.g., these are the dog’s eyes, this is his skin, those are his ears, etc. Second we cannot make sense of his behaviour otherwise.” ( Searle: Intentionality p.5)

Searle’s acceptance of the referential opacity argument in the case of unconscious knowledge is at odds with his rejection of it in the case of attributing beliefs to animals. Furthermore the reasons that Searle gives in arguing for animal beliefs are good reasons when applied to the case of unconscious knowledge. So if we attribute to a person an unconscious dislike of their mother we may do so because they behave towards that person in ways consistent with this attitude (though they may consciously deny that this is the case). So this attribution involves similar causal explanations that we use when we attribute a desire/belief to the dog. Likewise unconscious mentalistic explanations are precisely appealed to in cases where otherwise the person’s behaviour is inexplicable. So Searle’s two reasons for attributing beliefs to non-linguistic animals can be used just as easily in the case of unconscious knowledge.

I find neither Searle’s aspectual argument nor the logically similar argument of Davidson very convincing. In both cases we are presented with a scenario where it is not determinate whether an animal believes x or extensionally equivalent alternatives or whether a person unconsciously believes x or extensionally equivalent alternatives. This creates an ambiguity that can affect our interpretations of the subjects understudy. The Davidson/Searle reaction to this ambiguity is to cast a doubt on the psychological reality of the subject understudy. However, a logical argument revealing more ambiguity in our interpretations than expected isn’t sufficient to decide a priori whether non-linguistic animals can have beliefs (Searle of course recognises this). Neither is it sufficient to refute an entire discipline like cognitive science, psychoanalysis and computational neuroscience. I think Searle’s principle that if we have no other theory that can explain the behaviour of a creature than attributing beliefs is an excellent principle and the principle holds in the area of unconscious beliefs.

A nice example of a person seemingly unconsciously thinking is the subject of blind-sight. Searle discussed blind-sight in his recent book ‘Seeing Things as They Are’. He argues that an appeal to blind-sight to undermine the importance of consciousness is not very convincing as blind-sight is such a peripheral aspect of perception. He notes that a person couldn’t drive a car when suffering from blind-sight So, Searle argues that given how limited the effects of blind-sight are there is no reason to think that it undermines the importance of conscious experience in daily life. Now I have no interest in undermining the importance of conscious experience but I think that Searle is here guilty of underestimating the types of blind-sight that exist. Dehaene’s also discusses blind-sight and his discussion Dehaene’s discussion of blind-sight while doing nothing to refute Searle’s claim that blind-sight patients could not drive a car, does paint a more complex picture than Searle’s story. For example Dehaene mentions a patient of psychologist Melvyn Goodale, the patient called D.F suffered from carbon monoxide poisoning and as a result of a lack of oxygen suffered from brain damage in her left and right lateral visual cortexes. As a result of the brain damage D.F. ended up blind when it came to recognising shapes, nonetheless she still maintained some motor control when it came to manipulating shapes. As Dehaene describes her surprising abilities:

“Her motor system always seemed to unconsciously “see” things better than she could consciously. She also adapted the size of her grasp to the objects she reached for- yet she was utterly unable to do so voluntarily, using the finger to thumb distance as a symbolic gesture for perceived size.

       D.F.’s unconscious ability to perform motor actions seemed to vastly exceed her capacity for consciously perceiving the same visual shapes…Although D.F. was unaware of it, information about the size and orientation of objects was still proceeding unconsciously down her occipital and parietal lobes. There, intact circuits extracted visual information about size, location, and even shape that she could not consciously see.” ( Dehaene ‘Consciousness and the Brain’ p. 55)

This ability to perform complex motor activities while not conscious is obviously not at the level of someone with blind-sight driving a car; still the capacities are more complex that Searle’s simple examples indicate. Dehaene even argues that some people with blind-sight are capable of navigating their way through busy corridors (ibid p.55), though he presents no references to verify the truth of this claim. Either way it is clear that blind-sight doesn’t just occur in the simple manner that Searle indicates. Searle just argues that it is obvious that his Dog knows when he is at the door, that his dog is indicating that he is hungry. This argument is a simple inference to the best explanation that Searle has arrived at based on the predictive accuracy of using folk psychological locutions to describe the dogs behaviour. It is pretty obvious that when neuroscientists like Dehaene are trying to explain the behaviour of patients like D.F., by saying she is unconsciously computing information to compute the shape of objects, and they way they should be turned; they are engaging in an inference to best explanation and one that can be modelled in scientifically useful ways. Searle aspectual argument does little to challenge these scientific models.

Overall Searle’s arguments against the Freudian and the Cognitive unconscious are pretty unconvincing. Searle himself doesn’t accept similar arguments when applied towards attributions of knowledge to babies or dogs. Searle uses inference to the best explanation arguments when attributing intentional states to dogs and non-linguistic babies; so there is little reason why he should ban similar inferences to the best explanations in the case of positing unconscious mental states.

So psychoanalysts like Talvite need not worry about Searle’s a-priori argument having demonstrated that the mentalistic unconscious in incoherent. Searle’s argument neither refutes the psychoanalytic unconscious, nor does it refute the Freudian Unconscious. Whether a bridge can be found between psychoanalysis and cognitive science is a different question; and is beyond the remit of this paper. What is certain is that if such projects are to be tried greater care is needed than was given by Dehaene in his caricature of Freud.

Everett, Quine and Translation in the Field

Abstract: Dan Everett’s attempts to refute Quine’s Indeterminacy of Translation argument are marred by misunderstanding the nature of Quine’s project. Everett’s examples of the Indeterminacy of Translation are of a different logical type than Quine’s examples. For this reason Everett’s arguments against Quine are aiming at the wrong target. Furthermore Everett’s attempts to overcome the Indeterminacy of Translation by appeal to innate perceptual constants is at odds with the overall thesis of his book which argues against appealing to innate apparatus unless you have an adequate evolutionary account of how these innate apparatus evolved. It will be demonstrated that Everett is guilty of inconsistency in the sceptical approach he takes postulations of things like a language instinct, a morality instinct etc and the casual manner in which he argues for innate perceptual constants.

Key words: Indeterminacy of Translation, Inscrutability of Reference, Innateness.


In his 2016 book ‘Dark Matter of the Mind: The Culturally Articulated Unconscious’[1], Dan Everett discussed and criticised Quine’s Indeterminacy of Translation Argument[2]. Quine’s IDT has spawned a large literature in both scientific circles and philosophical circles. In scientific circles the IDT has typically been used as a tool to motivate nativism about concepts. Thus cognitive scientists typically (see Pinker 1995, Markman 1989 etc), relocate the problem of radical translation into a problem of underdetermination facing the child as he learns his first language. They argue that this underdetermination is overcome because of innate constraints that limit the type of interpretation that children can make to sensory experience as they interact with others and the world. One difficulty of this approach is that (1) Assuming the existence of innate constraints is question-begging against Quine’s position (2) Even if such constraints did exist they would not necessarily rule out the IDT unless it could be guaranteed that these constraints ruled out conceptual change in adults[3] (King, 2016a). Everett’s discussion of the IDT however is different than the standard treatment in cognitive science because his discussion centres on actual linguistic practice in translating foreign languages in the field.

To some degree Everett agrees with Quine that language involves a certain amount of indeterminacy. He argues that a complete translation between two languages is never possible because of different background assumptions (sometimes ineffable), which the two languages will have. He calls these background assumptions our Dark Matter and defines them as follows:

“Dark matter of the mind is any knowledge-how or knowledge-that that is unspoken in normal circumstances, usually unarticulated even to ourselves. It may be but is not necessarily, ineffable. It emerges from acting, “languaging” and “culturing” as we learn new conventions and knowledge organization, and adopt value properties and orderings. It is shared and it is personal. It comes via emicization, apperceptions, and memory and thereby produces our sense of “self”. ( DMM p. 1)

Everett’s view of language is that it is as a cultural tool, and much of the cultural shaping of our linguistic practices is implicit, and some of it ineffable. At a cursory glance there is much that Quine and Everett have in common. Both Quine and Everett emphasise the social nature of language, both of them emphasise the importance of background beliefs in shaping our overall theory of the world (though Quine says little about ineffable knowledge), and both agree that a picture of translation involving two different languages sharing identical propositional content is wrongheaded.

Nonetheless, despite agreeing on some key issues Everett does have some difficulties with Quine’s IDT. Everett critiques Quine’s IDT based on the fact that in his many years of field work he has never come across examples that Quine mentions in his IDT. Everett notes the following:

“On the side of mistakes never made, however, Quine’s gavagai problem is one. In my field research on more than twenty languages- many of which involved monolingual situations ( D. Everett 2001; Sakel and Everett 2012), whenever I pointed at an object or asked “What’s that?” I always got an answer for an entire object. Seeing me point at a bird no one ever responded “feathers”. When asked about a manatee, no one ever answered “manatee soul. On inquiring about a child, I always got  “child”, “boy”, or “girl”, never “short hair”. (Ibid p. 267)

As a field linguist with years of experience translating other cultures languages, Everett’s views are extremely important in evaluating Quine’s radical translation thought experiment. Everett’s examples though are very different from the examples Quine gave, and the Everett’s examples crucially are not of the same logical status as Quine’s. Everett notes that every time he pointed at an object and said “what’s that?” he always got an answer that named an entire object. His first answer is that in pointing to a bird and saying “what’s that?” he never got an answer such as “feathers”. Now this is an interesting fact but it doesn’t refute Quine’s IDT. Quine acknowledges that there are many different ways a translator could go wrong in interpreting what the native he is conversing with is saying. And he discusses ways in which these mistakes could be overcome through future evidence. Thus in ‘Word and Object’ Quine discusses how even when using as precisely honed a tool as matching stimulus meanings; collateral information could result in a field linguist erroneously thinking that ‘Gavagai’ and ‘Rabbit’ were synonymous, when this is not actually the case. Quine imagines the following case:

“There may be a local rabbit-fly, unknown to the linguist, and recognizable some way off by its long wings and erratic movements; and seeing such a fly in the neighbourhood of an ill glimpsed animal could help the native to recognize the latter as a rabbit. Occular irradiations combining poor glimpses of rabbits with good ones of rabbit-flies would belong to the stimulus meaning of ‘Gavagai’ for natives generally, but not to that of ‘Rabbit’ for the linguist.” (Quine: Word and Object p. 37)

Now Quine is quick to note that even in this case the field linguist wouldn’t be fooled for too long. As the field linguist learns more and more about the language; questions more natives, interacts with them in their shared environment the linguist would overcome such mistranslations. The ‘feather’, and ‘bird’ example that Everett gives is of the same logical status as the rabbit fly example. In Everett’s exposition he speaks of himself pointing at an bird and asking “what is that?” and he notes that no native ever answered ‘feather’ instead of ‘bird’. To describe this situation in Quinean terms we need to do so in terms of how the linguist would translate what the native says when the linguist points to the bird. So suppose Everett points to a bird and the native says ‘Havagon’, based on commonsense folk-psychology Everett would surely be right to translate what the native is saying as meaning ‘bird’ and not ‘feather’. Translating what the native said as meaning ‘bird’ in this instance would presumably be verified as the field linguist interacted with more and more natives. But suppose for some strange reason the field linguist translated what the native said as meaning ‘feathers’, if this was the incorrect translation the incorrectness would be discovered pretty quickly as the word was used in various different contexts and combinations. Quine would have no difficulty with this situation which is on a par with the rabbit fly example. But of course examples like ‘rabbit fly’ and ‘feathers vs birds’ are not the cases Quine was thinking of in his IDT.

The most important aspect of Quine’s IDT is his inscrutability of reference argument[4]. Quine explicates the ISR as follows:

Does it seem that the imagined indecision between rabbits, stages of rabbits, integral parts of rabbits, the rabbit fusion, and rabbithood must be due to some general formulation of stimulus meaning, and that it should be resoluble by a little supplementary pointing and questioning? Consider, then, how. Point to a rabbit and you have pointed to a stage of a rabbit, to an integral part of a rabbit, to the rabbit fusion, and to where rabbithood manifested. Point to an integral part of a rabbit and you have pointed again to the remaining four sorts of things; and so on around.” (ibid p. 53)

Here we can see a clear difference between Everett’s example of a bird and feathers and Quine’s examples. Quine does speak of parts of a rabbit but he is speaking of integral parts. In terms of stimulus meaning of ‘birds’ and ‘feathers’, they will diverge in easily detectable ways. The native will not assent to the word ‘bird’ if the linguist is pointing to feathers on the ground or feathers in a hat. Things are different when it comes to integral parts of rabbits; given that the part is undetached, every time you point to a rabbit you are pointing to the undetached rabbit part. There is no behavioural evidence that can decide the issue. So clearly it can be seen that Quine’s examples are on a different logical level than the examples Everett uses.

When you use Quine’s actual examples and not Everett’s replacements things look very different. From a Quinean perspective the reason translators do not find the various different alternative interpretations of gavagai is because from an empirical perspective the four different interpretations of gavagai are on a par. When we are interpreting the verbal behaviour of the native our analytic hypothesis will be framed so as to assume that that they are people like us and hence we will automatically go with the assumption that gavagai means rabbit instead of undetached rabbit part, particular instance of universal rabbithood etc. But this just an assumption and it isn’t according to Quine either justified empirically or something that we can verify empirically. When Quine talks about unverifiable analytic hypotheses he is saying that there is no empirical difference between the reference of the various different translations of the term ‘gavagai’, and in order to begin to translate truth functions, observations etc the field linguist will begin by framing an analytical hypothesis and this hypothesis is not refutable by the empirical data since there is no empirical way to distinguish between the different references of the term ‘gavagai’.

When reading an early draft of Everett’s book I raised the above point with him. In his DMM he replied as follows:

“ As David King (pers. comm.) points out to me, my conclusion here regarding indeterminacy of translation could be open to criticism because it would be possible- and this seems to be what Quine had in mind- for the translator not to know that they had misunderstood, because the native speaker and translator could respond behaviourally in the same way ostensibly, but with different mental maps from experience to meaning-one person responding to rabbit parts and the other to a whole rabbit. In the field, however, this is a difference without a difference. The field researcher does not nor would not notice the problem. But of course it is entirely possible that two people can talk in translatable ways, each one of them buttressed and understanding via distinct dark matters. It is not merely possible but, if I am correct, inescapable.” (ibid p. 341)

In his reply Everett again speaks about ‘rabbits’ and ‘rabbit parts’ but of course as we have seen above Quine’s examples are of a different logical level so Everett’s reply misses to point. Everett’s comment that it is inescapable that two people could talk using different dark matters buttressing them from fully understanding each other is a very Quinian point. Quine would speak of different webs of belief buttressing understanding but this issue is tangential from the ISR. None of Everett’s arguments thus far would have overly troubled Quine.

If we abstract for a moment from Everett’s use of non-Quinian examples to criticise Quine, Everett offers a hypothesis that could conceivably be used as a way of refuting Quine. Everett offers the hypothesis:

“I believe that the absence of these Quinean answers results from the fact that when one person points towards a thing, all people (that I have worked with, at least) assume that what is being asked is the name of the entire object…Objects have a relative salience-whole objects…This is perhaps the result of evolved perception. Perhaps animals perceive wholes before parts. If we are being threatened by a wolf, we are being threatened by the entire wolf, not merely its ears its paws or teeth. And it is likely that a wolf sees a person object when looking at us. We would not last very long in the wild if we saw ears without understanding that ears are part of something else, more important than its parts, that could turn out to be a foe, friend, or food. Initial focus always seems to be on the whole. Perhaps this is to do with biological values of hunger satisfaction, self-preservation, or the like. In any case, it seems to be what happens transculturally. ( ibid p. 266)

This is a perfectly sensible suggestion by Everett, there an enormous amount of evidence that people do indeed make whole object assumptions. Scholars like Carey, Spelke, Markman have constructed many experiments which seem to demonstrate that children have innate concepts of objects and that these concepts will affect how the child will interpret what is said to them. As I discussed in detail in (King 2016a), one difficulty with this argument is that children having innate concepts doesn’t necessarily mean that those concepts cannot change as a result of cultural factors as the child develops. However a critic could argue that Everett’s experiences in transcultural translation show that the whole object assumption is a wide phenomenon. And therefore they could combine Everett’s data with the data from psychologists like Carey to demonstrate that innate constraints on concepts are maintained throughout the life time and occur in all cultures studied demonstrating that Quine’s IDT is false.

But this approach obviously won’t work for a number of reasons. The most obvious reason is because as we have already seen Everett not discovering any natives saying ‘undetached rabbit part’, instead of ‘rabbit’ is to be expected on Quine’s picture; it is no refutation of Quine. But there is another reason that combining Everett’s view with Carey et al won’t work; Everett’s entire book is dedicated to refuting appeals to innate concepts, innate language, innate morality etc. Everett even dedicates a section of his book to criticising the methodology that Carey uses when arguing for innate concepts.

On a superficial level it may seem that Everett is being inconsistent appealing to innate perceptual constants in an attempt to refute Quine while spending the majority of his book criticising appeals to innateness. But Everett is not being inconsistent at all, in fact he spells out his commitments to some form of innate apparatus throughout the book:

“To deny instincts in one domain does not entail denial of the obvious fact that our genes impose strong limitations on us. There obviously are things such as innate characteristics-eye color, adipose cell concentration, blood type, height, and so on. The question is whether there are Bastian like innate conceptual structures…in what follows I want to argue that all forms of innate conceptualism-Platonic a priori knowledge, all Bastianisms- are detriments to understanding, passé and deeply flawed” (Everett: Dark Matter of the Mind pp. 286-287)

“In fact, I believe that there is evidence that humans and other animals may be born with some instincts (candidates include grasping, breathing, making sounds-all non epistemic). Rather, my objection is that the vast majority of research on human instincts is looking in the wrong place. It is looking for knowledge instead of more basic capacities like emotions. (ibid p. 321)

Here we can see that Everett is very clear he has no problem with innate grasping instincts, innate perceptual constants etc, his difficulty is with appeals to innate conceptual abilities or innate apparatus of an epistemic nature. So whether one agrees with Everett’s views or not he cannot be automatically be accused of inconsistency in arguing for innate perceptual constants but not arguing for innate concepts. Nonetheless I will show that Everett is still being somewhat inconsistent as the sceptical arguments he uses to pour cold water on arguments for a language instinct, or a morality instinct are not applied when he argues for the existence of innate perceptual constancies.

It is worth noting that to some degree it is possible for Everett to have his cake and eat it. He could benefit from Carey’s work without being committed to the existence of innate concepts. Tyler Burge in his ‘Origins of Objectivity’ argues convincingly that Susan Carey’s data is evidence of object representations that are perceptual not conceptual. Burge argues that Carey wrongly thinks that because representations as of objects are not reducible to spatial and temporal properties and relations they are not perceptions (‘ Origins of Objectivity’ p. 249). Burge argues convincingly that Carey is incorrect in holding this view and that the fact that our perceptual apparatus attributes bodily representations when objects are out does not show that such representations are not perceptual (ibid p. 249). Whether Burge’s analysis is correct or not is beyond the remit of this paper. My only point is that a theorist who wants to rely on perceptual constants to undermine the IDT may find Burge’s work useful. Everett however is denied this obvious route because he rejects the very evidence that Carey and Burge relies on. Firstly Everett’s just dismisses Carey’s arguments for innate concepts:

“Even Carey’s theory of concepts recognizes that many concepts (e.g. “US president”) must be learned. However, once we have understood how, why, and which concepts are learned transculturally, what is left for Nativism, aside from standard poverty of stimulus arguments? And what, after all, does “poverty of stimulus” mean in practice, other than we cannot think of a stimulus responsible for a particular concept, action or other learning? As many have said in the past, when looked at carefully, the expression “poverty of stimulus” in interchangeable in practice with “poverty of imagination”.” (Everett: ‘Dark Matter of the Mind p. 274)

I have been critical of poverty of stimulus arguments in the past (see King 2016b), but not on the grounds that they amount to nothing more than a poverty of imagination but rather because the primary poverty of stimulus arguments used in linguistics have been refuted. These refutations have typically been either ignored or dismissed as unimportant by generative grammarians. The work on concept acquisition by people like Carey is much more experimentally driven than that of Chomsky,  the constant experimentation that occurs to test claims that x or y is innate, means that there is always a possibility that future experiments will refute a claim that x is innate. While Carey does make a distinction between competence and performance her distinction is not as rigid as Chomsky’s distinction. Carey won’t just dismiss performance data as irrelevant if it contradicts her theory[5]. So there is not much merit in claims that her arguments for innate concepts are mere poverty of imagination, the rigid experimental procedure she uses means that her imagination is constantly kept in check by reality.

Everett though doubts the soundness of Carey’s experimental tests. Everett argues that the Gaze monitoring paradigm favoured by most contemporary psychologists is methodologically flawed. His criticisms of the Gaze monitoring paradigm are little more than a caricature. Everett argues that the method erroneously relies on an assumption that we can perfectly interpret infant’s gazes (DMM p. 308). This claim of Everett’s  is clearly false; a close look at any of the many experiments done in the field shows many controls put in place to avoid bias and shows many experiments ruling out previous interpretations held by the theorist (See Carey 2009 for examples). Nonetheless the upshot is that by rejecting the empirical work achieved in the gaze following paradigm Everett is making it extremely difficult to prove his case that innate perceptual constants rule out the IDT.

As we saw above Everett constructed a quasi evolutionary “just-so” story to demonstrate his case that all humans are born with innate perceptual constants. This is in keeping with the general arguments of his book; a key point he makes over and over again is that if we are to postulate innate apparatus we need an evolutionary story as to how it arrived. In fact Everett offers a list of reasons as to why he is sceptical about claims that certain aspects of human knowledge are innate:

Here are some of the things that bother me about proposals that important aspects of human knowledge are innate (e.g. Morality, language): (1) The nonlinear relationship of genotype to phenotype; (2) failure to link “instincts” to environment-today’s instincts are often tomorrow’s learning, once we learn more about environmental pressures to acquire certain knowledge; (3) problematic definitions of innatess; (4) failure to rule out learning before proposing an instinct; (5) the unclear content of what is left over for instincts after acquired dark matter is accounted for; and (6) lack of an evolutionary account for the origin of an instinct.” ( DMM p. 284)

Everett’s difficulties with proposals for instincts in the case of language are seriously at odds with his casual postulation of innate perceptual constants. Everett just presented a vague story about the survival value of innate perceptual constants but justified it with no actual data. Contrast this with Chomsky who has co-authored multiple articles and a recent book (co-authored with Bob Berwick) book on the evolution of language ‘Why only Us: Evolution and Language’ going into great detail as to how the purported language instinct evolved. One doesn’t have to agree with Chomsky’s theory ( I don’t), but one wonders why Everett is so stringent in criticising the postulating of a language instinct but doesn’t hold himself to the same standards. On no reading can Everett’s casual “just-so” story be considered a serious attempt to deal with the issue of the IDT. Everett has written serious papers on the evolution of language[6] so he knows what it involves. One wonders why his evolutionary speculations on perception were not given the same seriousness. I suspect that he needed some theory to explain why he never encountered Quine type cases and the “just-so” story seemed to fit the bill. But as we have seen he shouldn’t have been surprised that he never encountered Quine type cases; this is to be expected.

If Everett wants to try and undercut Quine’s IDT using perceptual constants he needs to first present serious evidence for such constants. It is hard to see where this evidence could come from other than engaging with developmental psychology in detail. The caricatures he presents of developmental psychology don’t represent the actual work in the field. More detailed evidence is necessary before he can claim to have refuted Quine’s IDT argument.









Berwick, R., and Chomsky, N. (2016) Why Only Us: Language and Evolution. The MIT Press: Cambridge MA.

Burge, T. (2010) Origins of Objectivity. Oxford University Press: Oxford.

Carey, S. (2009) The Origin of Concepts. Oxford University Press: New York.

Carey, S. (2014) On Learning New Primitives in the Language of Thought: Reply to Rey. Mind and Language 29 (2): 133-136.

Everett, D.L. (2016a) Dark Matter of the Mind: The Culturally Articulated Unconscious. The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

Everett, D.L. (2016b) Grammar Came Later: Triality of Patterning and the Gradual Evolution of Language. Journal of Neurolinguistics Nov 10 2016.

Everett, D.L. (2017) Forthcoming How Language Began. New York: W.W. Norton/Liveright.

King, D. (2016a) Indeterminacy of Translation and Innate Concepts: A Critical Review. Linguistic and Philosophical Investigations 16: 104-141.

King, D. (2016b) Poverty of Stimulus Arguments and Behaviourism. Behaviour and Philosophy, 43 36-61.

Markman, E. (1989) Categorisation and Naming in Children: Problems of Induction. The MIT PRESS: Cambridge. MA.

Pinker, S. (1994) The Language Instinct. Penguin: Random House Uk.

Quine, W.V. (1960) Word and Object. MIT PRESS: Cambridge, MA.

[1] Dark Matter of the Mind will henceforth be referred to as DMM.

[2] The Indeterminacy of Translation Argument will henceforth be referred to as IDT.

[3] For a detailed evaluation of uses of the IDT in the cognitive science literature see my ‘The Indeterminacy of Translation and Innate Concepts:  A Critical Review’.

[4] Henceforth the Inscrutability of Reference will be referred to as ISR.

[5] Sue Carey ‘On Learning New Primitives in the Language of Thought: Reply to Rey’, where she correctly criticises Chomsky scholar George Rey of making using competence so rigidly as to rule out any possibility of being refuted.

[6] See Everett’s excellent ‘Grammar Came Later: Triality of Patterning and the Gradual Evolution of Language’, Everett also has a forthcoming book ‘How Language Began’ New York: W.W. Norton/Liverlight.