What is Distinctive of Human Thought?

There is a tendency today to see

philosophy as a technical subject in the

sense that it requires specific

technical knowledge or a specific

technique or method like engineering or

chemistry.

It's true that philosophy is sometimes

intricate and it sometimes needs its own

special vocabulary and possibly its own

special machinery, technical machinery.

And always it must be disciplined.

But it remains the case that many of the

questions which we are concerned with

arise out of tensions and puzzles and

mysteries and paradoxes in our thinking

which were simple to understand as they

seem impossible to solve.

So it is I think with the question which

is my concern tonight.

What is the difference between human

thought and the thoughts of other

animals?

The puzzle or mystery here is not hard

to grasp. On the one hand, we believe

that animals do have some kind of inner

life or mental life.

There's something it's like to be a dog

or a chimp or a bat.

But when we reflect on what this might

be like, we draw a blank.

It seems utterly mysterious to us.

What it must be like from the inside.

It's not that we have no idea what

animals are doing when they seem to be

doing things purposefully and it's not

that we have no idea why they're doing

what they're doing. It's just that we

can't envisage or describe to ourselves

or otherwise imagine what it is like for

them.

So it might be thought that my question,

what is distinctive of human thought, is

one that can only be solved by a

scientific inquiry.

In what I'm going to say in a moment, I

will certainly appeal to something that

counts as scientific evidence, but it's

worth pausing to consider for the moment

that we can only consider science here.

How exactly should we proceed if we were

scientists?

Do we scan the brains of apes and humans

and see how they differ? Do we stare at

the few percent of DNA which we do not

share with chimps?

The problem is we have no idea what

we're looking for.

This is one reason I think why we need

the relatively abstract level of

speculation which is characteristic of

um philosophy.

Philosophy, I think, is not a science,

although it is, among other things, a

search for truth about its various

subject matters.

And one thing that distinguishes

philosophy from science is that the

views of the philosophers of the past

can still be relevant to us.

This can be for many reasons, either

because we should take care to avoid

their errors or because we need to get a

sufficient distance from our own

assumptions and realize the contingency

of our own assumptions

or because we want to avoid reinventing

the wheel.

And in this connection, I'd like to

endorse a remark made by, I think, one

of the more underrated Knightbridge

Professors,

C. D. Broad.

Broad said, "It appears to me that the

best preparation for original work on

philosophic problem

is to study the solutions which have

been proposed for it by men of genius

whose views differ from each other as

much as possible. The clash of their

opinions may strike a light which will

enable us to avoid the mistakes into

which they have fallen, and by noticing

the strong and weak points of each

theory, we may discover the direction in

which further progress can be made."

So, let's proceed by taking Broad's

advice and asking what some of the

philosophers of genius have said that's

relevant to our question.

Aristotle begins his Metaphysics with

the famous sentence,

"All men by nature desire to know."

He goes on to say that an indication of

this is the delight we take in our

senses, for even apart from their

usefulness, they are loved for

themselves.

He then contrasts the way other animals

live by appearances and memories, but

the human race lives by art and

reasoning.

Knowledge and understanding belong to

art rather than to experience because

art, not experience, teaches you the why

of things.

I agree with Jonathan Lear when he says

in in his book on Aristotle that when

Aristotle says

that by nature we desire to know, he was

referring to the desire to know for its

own sake.

Lear argues that the urge to

philosophize arises out of such a

desire.

For Aristotle, philosophy begins with

questions and puzzles.

We are led to the pursuit of

explanations for their own sake, both by

our natural makeup, the desire to know,

and because it is part of our nature to

find the world puzzling.

So, this then will be the aim of my

lecture.

To defend Aristotle's view in a certain

interpretation that it's in our nature

to seek knowledge for its own sake.

What do I mean by knowledge for its own

sake?

We can draw a distinction between a

piece of knowledge being valuable

because of some further purpose or good

it might serve, and a piece of knowledge

being something which is an end in

itself.

This is just as we draw a distinction

between something's having value because

it's a means to a further end, and

something which is valuable because it's

an end in itself. Some things must be

ends in themselves if anything is to be

of value at all.

And what applies to value here also

applies to knowledge.

Consider someone interested in learning

about the stars.

We could distinguish someone's having a

purely instrumental interest in the

stars, for example, to aid navigation at

sea, from someone who has an interest in

the stars just for its own sake.

Um, it may be that that

the role of the stars in aiding

navigation was where our interest in the

stars arose from. It may be.

But on the face of it, this kind of

interest in the stars is different from

the interest of someone who simply wants

to know about the constellation of

Orion, or who wants to know how far away

the stars are, or which stars are

brighter than others.

This kind of knowledge is not put at the

service of any practical project, but

it's simply something that's pursued for

its own sake.

There is a way of trivializing the

distinction between what I'm going to

call instrumental knowledge and

knowledge for its own sake.

This would be to say that even in the

case where someone simply wants to look

at the stars, their knowledge is

instrumental because its role is to

satisfy the desires of the agent.

Any agent who wants to know something

has some desires, notably the desire to

know these things, and these desires

would be satisfied by the achievement of

knowledge.

Since the search for knowledge is always

driven by some desire, perhaps all

searches are

if Aristotle is right that thought by

itself moves nothing,

then

this knowledge would be instrumental,

too, in the sense that its role is

simply to satisfy the desire for

knowledge.

I think we can gradually agree that all

knowledge is instrumental in this

anodyne sense,

but if we insist that this is the only

sense in which all knowledge is

instrumental, then we will miss the

distinction which I claim is crucial for

understanding human thought.

The distinction we need, I say, is

between knowledge which is pursued

because of the desire for knowledge on

that subject matter as such, and

knowledge which is pursued because it

will help some aim or purpose distinct

from the desire to know.

Some philosophical accounts of thought

treat all thoughts as instrumental, um

not just philosophical accounts, some

psychological accounts, too.

Thinking about the world must be

explained purely in terms of the

satisfaction of needs, urges, and

desires as distinct from the desire for

knowledge. An extreme example is

evolutionary psychology, which looks for

explanations of human cognitive

capacities as adaptations, that is, as

developments across generations of those

traits which have enhanced the fitness

of a kind of organism.

For the moment, I'd like to look more

closely at one philosophical attempt to

ground all thought on the satisfaction

of desire.

In a famous paper, F.P. Ramsey described

a view he called pragmatism, that

beliefs could be characterized by their

effects in action. Many views have been

called pragmatism, but that's what he

calls it there.

The idea, which later came to be called

functionalism, is that because what we

do is fixed in part by what we believe

and what we want, we should attempt to

understand believing and wanting as

dispositions to act in certain ways.

Ramsey went further and attempt to

define what it is to believe one thing

rather than another in terms of the

actions that they would give rise to in

certain circumstances. And he

illustrated this with the simple example

of a chicken.

He says, "We can say that a chicken

believes a certain sort of caterpillar

to be poisonous and mean by that

merely that it abstains from eating such

caterpillars on account of unpleasant

experiences associated with them,

connected with them, sorry."

And generalizing from this, he defines

the belief in terms of the actions it

would cause, and the content of the

belief, that is what's believed, marked

here by the letter P, in terms of its

utility. He says, "Any set of actions

for whose utility P is a necessary and

sufficient condition might be called a

belief that P, and so would be true if

P, i.e., if they were useful."

Um and that's a very condensed statement

of a view which received further

development in um

in later years.

But I think of it as a um

as a version of the view that

um all thought is instrumental.

Now, Jamie White labeled this view

success semantics, and it's been

defended by a number of philosophers,

including Hugh Mellor here in Cambridge.

Beliefs are often said to be

distinguished by their truth conditions,

the conditions under which they are

true.

So, for example, my belief that the sun

is shining is the belief it is because

the belief is true in just those

conditions in which the sun is shining.

Success semantics says that the truth

conditions of a belief are its success

conditions or the success conditions of

the actions

are based on it.

Where success is understood as the

fulfillment of wants or desires.

So if what I want is to walk to

Grantchester, say, but I only want to do

it if the sun is shining, then my desire

and my belief will cause me to attempt

to achieve that.

The conditions under which the belief is

true are the conditions under which

actions based on it succeed.

It follows that belief, and therefore

thought in my sense, must be defined

instrumentally in terms of possible

success of actions.

Now, I don't want to deny that this kind

of relationship between belief and

desire and action may be the right way

to think of many actions and mental

states, not just the kind that we credit

to chickens, but those to human beings,

too. The relation between the success of

our endeavors, the achievement of our

objectives or goals, and the truth of

our beliefs must be an essential part of

the whole story.

But since it characterizes the truth

conditions of a belief in terms of the

success conditions of a desire

or a want, it owes us an account of the

satisfaction conditions of a desire.

The satisfaction of a desire cannot

simply be the cessation of a desire, as

Russell once said,

uh for a desire can cease even if it's

not satisfied.

Rather, the satisfaction of a desire

must be what is known as its

fulfillment, bringing about a certain

condition.

But if bringing about this condition

cannot be understood except in terms of

the truth of a proposition, then this is

what we were originally trying to

explain.

The problem, I think, is especially

acute when the desires concern desires

to find out something for its own sake.

For in this case, the satisfaction of a

desire just is the acquisition of a true

belief. We're moving around in a very

small circle.

I think success semantics has a lot to

be said for it, but I I whether it's the

whole story, since I doubt whether it

can have anything informative to say

about the pursuit of knowledge for its

own sake.

So, I'll put it to one side here without

having pretended to have refuted it.

So, at this stage it might be objected

that the line of thought I've been

pursuing has ignored the obvious

difference between human and animal

thought, the fact that our thought,

unlike theirs, is expressed in language.

Of course, this is an obvious

difference. Um

I think here we should um Sorry. We

should ignore

um the the evidence

uh from so-called linguistic apes.

Um

For for the for the purposes of this

lecture, I want to ignore this what

according to one recent authority is

mostly anecdotal, lacking in systematic

detail, and often involves

over-interpretation.

In any case, what's uncontroversial is

that we are the only species who develop

language in the course of normal

ontogenetic development.

But, what's the significance of this

difference for our understanding of

thought?

Does language simply make possible a

more complex kind of thought, or is

there some difference of kind that

language provides?

Descartes is famous for having denied

thought to animals, partly on the

grounds that they could not speak.

Descartes' Cambridge contemporary, Henry

More, called this an internecine and

murderous view.

In the 20th century, Donald Davidson,

himself hardly a natural Cartesian,

agreed with Descartes.

Davidson's idea was that to be a thinker

is to be the interpreter of the thought

and speech of another, which essentially

involves employing a language.

So, non-linguistic animals cannot think.

So, why did he think this?

So, Davidson's argument focuses on what

it is to have a belief.

It's based on two assumptions.

First, that in order to have a belief,

one must have the concept of belief.

And second, that to have the concept of

belief, one must have language.

It's very simple argument, but just a

lot of assumptions packed into the

premises.

It's an obvious consequence of this that

any creature which has beliefs must have

a language.

The more detailed line of thought is

that to have the concept of belief

requires mastering the distinction

between how things are and how things

seem.

Davidson argues that language would

suffice for making this distinction and

conjectures that nothing else would make

it. He doesn't claim to have proved that

nothing else would make it, but

conjectures that nothing else would.

So, Davidson's argument is controversial

and it's persuaded few people.

In particular, the premise that one can

only have beliefs if one has the concept

of belief is crucially unsupported. And

without that, there is no reason to

accept his conclusion and no reason to

deny thought to non-linguistic animals.

In the relevant sense, a belief can be a

simple representational state.

A state that just registers a condition

of the environment.

And that's a state which Ramsey's

chicken can certainly have.

We could call the chicken's belief the

belief that caterpillars are poisonous

if we like, but this does not require

that we attribute to the chicken the

concept of poison.

Calling this a belief is just a way of

indicating that the chicken represents

the world in a way that guides its

actions and in a way that can be correct

or incorrect.

In order to have this belief, the

chicken need have no beliefs about its

beliefs.

For example, it need not be surprised if

it eats a caterpillar and does not have

an unpleasant experience.

It need not discover that it was wrong.

It just moves on, updating its

representations accordingly.

Davidson argued that being surprised

requires that one distinguish between

how one previously thought the world was

and how one now discovers it is.

I think Davidson is right about this.

But he's wrong to think that being a

believer requires that one is capable of

surprise.

However,

although I think Davidson's argument

fails, it contains something which gives

us a clue as to how to answer our

question, what does language add to

thought? Or

what kind of thought does language make

possible?

Davidson argued that having the concept

of belief involved making the

distinction between how things seem and

how they are.

This amounts to having the concept of

error.

And it turns out that there is evidence

that although apes can form beliefs

about mental states,

there is no evidence that they have

anything like the concept of error.

In a series of striking experiments,

Brian Hare, Joseph Call, and Michael

Tomasello provided evidence that

chimpanzees can know what other

chimpanzees can see.

Um, now this is this complex series of

experiments, but let me summarize the

basic idea.

Um, the essence of the experiment

involved a dominant and a subservient

chimp and in in two different

situations.

In the first situation, food was placed

excessively in front of the subservient

chimp

um, and in in full view of the dominant

chimp.

The subservient chimp did not move

towards the food.

In the second situation,

an opaque barrier was placed between the

dominant chimp and and the food

um, so that the food could not be seen

by the dominant.

In this case, the subservient chimp took

the food.

The irresistible explanation is that in

the second situation, the subservient

chimp knew that the dominant ape could

not see the food.

Um,

this is one of many many many kinds of

experiments which is particularly

brilliant, I think. Um,

in 1978, David Premack and Guy Woodruff

asked the question, "Does the chimpanzee

have a theory of mind?"

It seems to me that these kinds of

experiments, among others, indicate that

we should give an affirmative answer to

the question. So long as we do not build

too much into the term theory. Having a

theory of mind in this sense is just

having a

a conception or representation of the

mental states of other creatures.

But these experiments also suggest

something about what kind of theory of

mind the chimps have.

The chimps have beliefs about what other

chimps can know or see.

But, and this is the point I'd like to

stress, there's no evidence that they

have any beliefs about what other chimps

believe.

What's the difference?

So the classic test for for testing

what's known as theory of mind in

psychology is known as the false belief

test.

Um, let me give a very simple version of

this this test too, which I'm sure will

be familiar to many people here.

So children are told a story. So this is

testing whether children have the idea

of a mental state in up

up to about age four or five.

Children are told a story illustrated by

dolls or by human experimenters, in

which let's say you've got character A

in the story

put something, say a marble, into a box

in the view of the other character, B.

Character B then leaves the room

and while while character B is out of

the room

A removes the marble and hides it

somewhere else.

When B returns

the child is asked, the child who's been

watching this whole thing is asked

"Where does B think the marble is?"

Above a certain age, about four or

thereabouts, children give the right

answer. That is to say

B thinks the marble is in the box.

B left the room before the marble was

moved. Younger children often answer

that B thinks the marble is where A hid

it.

In short, they have no understanding

that B is in error or has a false belief

about what's going on. That's why it's

called the false belief test.

And And this is This is a This is now a

standard test for whether

often often said whether whether

children have a theory of mind. Uh what

it seems to me to be a test of is

whether children have a conception of

belief.

Um theory of mind can mean other things

that are irrelevant to this particular

um issue.

Now, the interesting thing is that

there's no evidence, as far as I know,

that apes can pass the false belief

test. And there's a lot of evidence that

they can't.

Um

Chimps seem to have beliefs about the

mental states of other chimps, if the if

the Tomasello and Hare experiments are

right.

But they don't pass the false belief

test. So, how should this be explained?

I think that the distinction we need

here is the distinction between

ignorance and error.

The subordinate chimp

in Hare's experiment knew that the

dominant chimp could not see the food.

It was ignorant of this fact.

There's no evidence that they show any

awareness of the mental state of being

correct or incorrect.

The mental states that this experimental

paradigm reveals are what we might call

relational mental states,

knowing, seeing, wanting,

that relate the the um the thinker uh to

things in their environment, and in a

certain sense then cannot be wrong.

Beliefs, on the other hand, are the kind

of things that can be wrong.

But there's no evidence that chimps can

show any awareness of these kind of

states in their um fellow chimps.

So, unlike the chimp's conception, the

child's maturing conception of mind

introduces a representation of error.

What is it to represent someone as being

in error?

At the very least, it involves the

recognition by one creature that the

world is not the way the other creature

represents it as being.

The ability to hold these two

representations in your mind, how the

other represents something and how it

really is, is one of the things I say

that distinguishes human infants from

adult chimps, our nearest relatives.

It's clear that the way mature humans

normally represent others as being

correct or incorrect is in showing

agreement or ascent or by using the

words for these things, correct,

incorrect,

or the words true and false.

But sometimes I think actually only

philosophers use these words, and

philosophers are the sort of people who

will say, "That's false." in a normal

conversation, and people outside

philosophy think this is a This is an

insult because falsity implies some kind

of

uh, you know, some kind of attempt to

deceive or lie, but all the philosophers

mean when they say, "That's false." is

they mean it's not true or I don't

agree. So,

if you ever need to interpret a

philosopher, bear that in mind. Um,

>> [clears throat]

>> But this suggests to me that Davidson

was on the right track to think that

there is a link between having the

concept of belief and having a language.

But the link is this.

It's when a creature that has a language

that it can easily and systematically

represent the beliefs of others as being

correct or incorrect.

Children can do it at the age of four or

five.

Without language, it's very hard to see

how they could do this.

Very hard, I say. I don't say

impossible, but like Davidson, I don't

see any other way at the moment how it

can be done.

The significance of language on this

view of things is not simply that it

allows us to communicate or even that it

allows a more sophisticated kind of

communication, although both these

things are true.

The other extra thing that language

gives us is that it facilitates and

gives us a mechanism to to

the correctness and incorrectness of the

thoughts of others.

So far I've claimed that um

one of the things that distinguishes us

from apes is the fact that we have the

concept of belief and therefore the

concepts of truth and error

and they do not. Um although they do

represent the mental states of others.

I've also claimed that language

facilitates our representation of the

correctness of thoughts of others. I'd

now like to connect this with my earlier

theme of the desire for knowledge for

its own sake.

To want to know something for its own

sake is not to want it because it's true

if because it's true those words

is supposed to be an intelligible answer

to the question why do you want to know

that?

Um my colleague Jane Heal

has put this point very well um when

discussing the idea that the

disinterested search for truth might be

a value in itself.

When someone claims that information on

a certain topic would be a good thing,

one can always ask why do you want to

know that? An intelligible answer will

have to say something about the

particular subject matter. It cannot

simply point back to the fact that the

item in question would be a specimen of

true belief.

But Heal goes on just because being true

can never be an intelligible answer to

the question of why you want to know

something

this does not mean that an intelligible

answer must always be to specify some

practical end or project.

Heal says

to say that an answer to the question

must be forthcoming, the answer to the

question why do you want to know about

that

is not to say that the form of the

answer must involve reference to some

practical project in immediate or

distant contemplation.

Heal here points out the false contrast

between the illusory idea that one might

simply search for truth as such as if

wanting to know something that was true

could be an intelligible justification.

Just because it's true.

And the perfectly correct, but I would

argue essentially limited idea that our

beliefs and desires serve our practical

needs.

There is, as she indicates, a third

option.

One might be interested in the truth

about a certain subject matter for its

own sake.

When one's investigating a subject

matter for its own sake, one is not

pursuing the truth just because it's

true,

but nonetheless, one must think of

oneself as governed by the norm or

standard of getting it right.

The amateur stargazer who plots the

changing positions of the stars over the

year is doing it because of an interest

in the stars, but if asked to reflect on

what he's aiming to do, he should answer

that he wants to find out how things are

up there.

And for a rational animal like our

stargazer, the way to do it is to try

and avoid error.

And if you're going to try and avoid

error, you'd better have the concept of

error in the first place.

We want to avoid error even in the

simplest instrumental cases, of course,

when we wonder whether we are right

about where we left the food or whether

we're right about where the predators

are.

We'd be unable to wonder about these

things if we did not have the concept of

error.

But once we have this concept, it can

govern our thinking about

non-instrumental subject matters, too,

such as our interest in the stars.

If we consciously wonder whether we're

getting it right, then we must be

capable of consciously employing the

concept of error.

My conjecture, then, is that what is

distinctive about human thought is the

ability to pursue what I'll call

epistemic goals, goals in knowledge,

independently of practical ends or the

satisfaction of any desire except the

desire to know.

Human thinkers sometimes pursue

knowledge for its own sake.

If this were true, then it would give a

clear account of the striking difference

I've marked between the thoughts of apes

and the thoughts of humans.

How might one go about testing such a

conjecture?

Of course, conceptual or a priori

arguments and connections are important,

but ultimately one will look for

empirical evidence and actual studies of

animal and human thought and try and

understand them.

Between 2005 and 2008, I was involved in

an interdisciplinary research group on

the origins of what is known as

referential communication. That is,

communication with other animals about

objects in the environment.

Uh this group was actually funded by

those masters of linguistic

communication,

uh the European Union,

as part of their obscurely titled

framework program seven, subheading new

and emerging science and technology,

acronym NEST. And it was a pathfinder

initiative under that uh heading. So,

it's English, Jim, not as we know it.

Um

The other members of this group were

animal psychologists working on dogs,

parrots, dolphins, and our closest

relatives, chimps, bonobos, and

gorillas.

My role in the project was um to clarify

and articulate the central concepts

assumed by many of the psychological

projects, in particular, reference,

communication, intention, and

intentionality.

A classic paradigm of referential

communication in animals is the alarm

calls of vervet monkeys, as revealed in

the pioneering studies of Cheney and

Seyfarth.

Um vervet monkeys in the wild employed

number of distinct calls to indicate to

other monkeys the presence of a

different kind of predator.

The hypothesis that this is referential

communication is the hypothesis that

these animals are communicating not

about their inner states, fear, anger,

or something like that, or trying to

command

other monkeys to do things,

flee, run for it, whatever.

Rather, the monkeys are aiming to inform

other monkeys of something in their

environment, which predator is coming,

so that they will be able to take the

appropriate evasive action. Run up a

tree if it's a leopard, hide under a

bush if it's an eagle, etc.

The evidence for referential

communication among animals is mixed.

One team in the group that I was

involved with went to watch gorillas

in a nature reserve in Africa to study

their gestures.

Uh, they came back after they discovered

after months there that gorillas make

almost no gestures in the wild.

Um,

the attempts to establish that parrots

referentially communicate got similarly

got nowhere. Um,

the extent to which dogs follow the gaze

of humans is still disputed.

But where there was evidence for

referential communication, it generally

conformed to the vervet monkey model.

Communication is geared to specific

immediate goals and very domain-specific

tasks, getting food, avoiding predators,

mating, and so on.

One topic though, which is the

phenomenon of pointing, is of particular

interest to me here.

In the study of non-linguistic

communicative devices, the study of

pointing has unsurprisingly been the

focus of lot of research. Um, they

haven't got a lot to go on. Pointing is

very important.

Among human infants, there are two kinds

of pointing.

Um, infants point when they want

something

or want an adult to give them something,

uh, juice. This is known as imperative

pointing.

But they also point when they want to

share attention with an adult, to draw

their attention to something in their

environment. This is called declarative

pointing. The kind of pointing we might

think of as a child saying, you know,

look at that.

What about animals?

Dogs have a limited understanding of

pointing as we shall see. Uh,

and despite the name of this famous

breed, there's little reason to think

that they really point themselves.

But attempts to discern pointing in apes

has met with mixed success.

There seems to be almost no evidence of

pointing in the wild, although some apes

who have lived with humans occasionally

point imperatively.

But, and this is the interesting fact

for me, um

there's no evidence of declarative

pointing in apes anywhere at any time.

As Michael Tomasello has put it, "No

apes in any kind of environment produce,

either for other apes or for humans,

acts of pointing that serve functions

other than the imperative functions.

Apes never do any anything which can be

understood as, you know, look at this."

What should we conclude from this?

Um well,

as a philosopher I'm going to conclude

things that are much more rational than

psychologists might conclude, but it

seems to me that declarative pointing

>> [snorts]

>> is what one would expect if there were

something like a psychological mechanism

of pure curiosity.

Unlike instrumental pointing,

declarative pointing can manifest a

sheer interest in something with no

especial need for practical upshot.

As Aristotle said, "Not only with a view

to action, but even when we are not

going to do anything, we prefer seeing

to everything else."

I don't know if he's right about that,

but he's right about the fact that even

if we're not going to do anything, we

enjoy seeing.

My tentative conclusion then is that

there's no evidence that non-human

animals ever pursue a purely

intellectual epistemic goal.

Their investigation of the environments

are always for the sake of satisfying

some other immediate goal, for food,

shelter, sex, play, or to engage other

animals in a collaborative pursuit of

some of these goals.

If pursuing a purely intellectual

epistemic goal requires that one have

the concept of error, as I've just

argued, then the absence of the concept

of error would go some way to explaining

why this is so.

What about the evidence for humans?

If my point is that humans have some

capacity which animals don't, everyone

will agree with that in some sense, but

the question is what it is.

Then what would we what we would expect

would be evidence from humans as well as

from other animals.

The evidence for animals points in the

negative direction. The evidence from

humans comes, of course, partly from our

own reflection on our own capacity.

But the further theoretical question is

this, why do we have this capacity?

How did it come about?

Both in the sense how does it develop in

the life of an organism, as well as how

did it come about in the development of

the species.

Uh the developmental psychologist

Gergely and Gergely Csibra have recently

proposed a novel theory of learning in

human infants, which they call natural

pedagogy.

Their extensive experimental work on

prelinguistic infants strongly suggests

that infants have an ability to learn

very quickly what they call generic and

cognitively opaque information.

Information is generic, obviously

enough, when it can be put to more than

one use.

Information is cognitively opaque when

the infants have no idea what the

function or purpose of what is being

communicated is.

They learn to do certain things by

imitation, even when they are learning

something that has no obvious point.

Well-known experiment, for example,

infants learn to turn on a lamp with

their heads by copying the experimenter.

It turns out that the infants copy the

experimenter whether or not the

experimenter's hands are free.

The interpretation is that the infant

does not copy the experimenter only when

the hands are occupied. It simply

copies, according to Gergely and Csibra,

because it has an innate capacity to

recognize an occasion as one in which an

adult is trying to communicate something

to them.

So, infants are naturally sensitive, on

this view, to certain situations as

communication situations, and it's

because of this that they are so fast at

learning by imitating.

It's this hypothesized innate capacity

which Gergely and Csibra also say is an

adaptation. Um

this capacity to recognize these

situations as communication situations

that they call natural pedagogy.

The natural pedagogy hypothesis has a

couple of intriguing connections with

the rather grand thesis I'm trying to

defend in this lecture.

For one thing, nothing like natural

pedagogy has been discovered or

hypothesized in apes, and it's famously

difficult to train apes to do anything

and to do and it takes a very long time

to train them and it's very hard to

train them to do anything generic.

Dogs, who have evolved alongside human

beings, do seem to be sensitive to human

attempts to communicate, as we saw,

by responding to pointing.

For example, and it's interesting that

wolves, even wolves that have been

reared by humans, do not do this.

But the dog's sensitivity to these

situations is limited in a very

interesting way. And um as Pierre Jacob

has nicely put it, in dogs, the

sensitivity to ostensive communicative

signals, that's that's the Gergely and

Csibra idea, seems to be tied to

particular individuals and primarily

hooked to a motivational system whose

goal is to satisfy human orders. It's

not a very elegant sentence, but

expresses exactly what is specific to

the dogs.

The infant's ability to recognize the

communicative intentions is much more

flexible across different contexts, and

the information they learn is often

cognitively opaque. That is, it's not

tied to any particular practical

activity or motivation.

I don't think it's too fanciful to see a

link here to the idea of the search for

knowledge for its own sake. Or maybe it

is too fanciful, but this is my

inaugural lecture, so I'll say it.

Um if Gergely and Csibra are are right,

and human infants have an innate

capacity for the acquisition of

cognitively opaque information, then

could this capacity be the ontogenetic

psychological basis for what I'm

claiming to be distinctively human, the

interest in knowledge for its own sake?

That's my question.

So, I've been attempting to argue that,

in a sense, Aristotle was right.

We do naturally desire to know, and that

we sometimes desire to know things for

their own sake.

We pursue epistemic goals, I've claimed,

independently of their practical

consequences. In itself, this claim

might be obvious enough.

The controversy comes in the claim that

this is distinctively human, and in how

the evidence is supposed to support the

claim.

I've argued that both philosophical

considerations, for example, about what

the concept of belief requires, and

empirical evidence from animals and

humans, support the thesis that the

disinterested search for truth, to use

James' phrase, might be what

distinguishes us from other animals.

Some might say that empirical evidence

can never have any impact on a

philosophical thesis,

and that the only relevant

considerations can be a priori or

conceptual.

It would be easier to evaluate the

suggestion if its defenders were able to

say a little bit more about what

distinguishes the conceptual or the a

priori.

But in any case, it's hard to believe

that what distinguishes us from animals

should be something that can only be

established conceptually.

The approach taken here contrasts also

with one inspired by Wittgenstein,

whose writings have been

taken, whether correctly or not, to

support a kind of quietism or

conservativism about the mind. Nothing

we can learn about the brain or other

animals, in the wild or captivity, can

tell us anything about the nature of our

thought.

I'm opposed both to this Wittgensteinian

view, and to the a priori view.

Since we cannot discern sharp boundaries

between different realms of knowledge,

we should take ideas and evidence from

wherever seems relevant, and it's a

matter of judgment what is relevant.

To borrow the words of a another former

Knightbridge Professor,

if we believe that philosophy might play

an important part in making people think

about what they are doing,

then philosophy should acknowledge its

connections with other ways of

understanding ourselves.

And if it if it insists on not doing so,

it may seem, in every sense, quite

peculiar.

It's in the spirit of these remarks that

I present my proposal [snorts]

to you this evening, and thank you very

much for your attention.

>> [applause]

[applause]