Alison Springle, University of Miami
Ruth’s second post echoes the key themes of one of my favorite essays: Ruth’s “Styles of Rationality” (Ch. 4 of Hurley & Nudds 2006 Rational Animals?). A key move Ruth makes in that essay is to shift our conception of practical reasoning from the Aristotelian practical syllogism– a kind of proof– to “the core of actual practical reasoning processes” which she claims “is not like a proof but like a search for a proof…you begin with something you would like to do or to have done and then attempt to construct something like a proof” where the relevant construction is “largely a matter of trial and error.” Accordingly, Ruth approaches rationality as “an ability to make trials and errors in one’s head rather than in overt behaviour” and distinguishes two different kinds of practical reasoning (trial-and-error learning) capacities in terms of the kinds of abilities or skills they involve. One of these capacities occurs “on the level of perception, prior to cognition proper,” where perception, by itself, is a thoroughly practical affair: “perception tells where in relation to the animal certain affordances are exhibited, such as relations to things to be picked up, things to hide from, places to hide, things to climb up on, things to eat, and so forth…” She speculates that not only humans but also some nonhuman animals are capable of this form of practical reasoning. In contrast, only humans appear capable of the second form, which entails “the ability to recognize contradictions among representations of facts lying beyond immediate perception and to make corrections in thought accordingly” and which allows our hypotheses to “….die in our stead.” A key difference between these two types of capacities for practical reasoning lies in the nature of the representations they involve.
Ruth’s post speaks primarily to the kind of rational capacity that appears to be unique to humans. She claims that the distinctively human form of practical reasoning depends on the capacity for genuine/pure indicative/declarative thought which, in turn, depends on the capacity for human language. Her 2006 essay helps us see why: the human animal is one that “reconstructs in thought large portions of its world that it has not yet dealt with in practice” and engaging in activities of “triangulation,” where such activities require that a “thinker be capable of recognizing evidence for the truth of its contraries, and grasp that these contraries are incompatible with it.” This, in turn, requires the capacity to form judgements with a particular logical form: such thoughts must have “subject-predicate structure” which is “sensitive to a negation transformation [internal negation], and hence subject to the law of noncontradiction.” For it is this form that allows such thought “openly to display the ways it is representing the world as coherent or incoherent prior to possible uses of those representations in helping to govern behaviour.” According to Ruth, such thought “offers a criterion of correct reidentification of objects and properties that does not depend on success or failure in practical activity.” In other words, the distinctively human form of practical rational activity depends on a propositional (predicative or attributive) form of thought, where the human capacity for such thought appears to co-evolve with the human capacity for language.
However, it’s not entirely clear what it is that makes human language distinctive. Afterall, plenty of other animals communicate; as Ruth notes in her post, “Beavers splash, vervets cry snake, many animals have stereotyped ways of communicating when and with whom they are ready to mate.” If human thought derives its distinctive feature from human language, then what is it about human language that makes the difference? Ruth’s 2006 essay suggests three potential answers, some of which are echoed in her post.
The first answer appeals to the structure of the representations involved: Ruth claims that “simple representational systems,” including nonhuman animal communicative systems, “do not contain contrary representations. Signals used to alert conspecifics to danger, for example, do not have contraries.” But this just seems to repeat the idea that human rational thought requires the kind of logical form we get with human language. It doesn’t connect that structure with the human activity of using language or how this activity differs from nonhuman animal communicative activities.
The second answer seems to move in this direction: Ruth suggests that humans are uniquely interested in “dead facts,” i.e., facts with no present or projected practical use, or facts learned “outside the context of practical activity.” However, other animals surely investigate their environments to learn how to find affordances they will only potentially need to exploit. Indeed, as Ruth notes in her post, “Placed in a new environment,” nonhuman animals “may explore, quickly locating things they might use or need given their kind of animal needs” (emphasis added). What’s more, so-called “dead facts” have a live practical use in the context of human inquiry (theoretical/intellectual practices and activities).
This brings me to the third answer, which helps fill the gaps in the other two: human language —and in particular its distinctive declarative functions and structural features— emerge alongside or co-evolve with certain forms of human social activity or practice. One such form of activity or practice is theoretical. As Ruth notes in her 2006 essay, and again in this post, humans have, whereas other animals appear to lack, a “means of developing and testing abilities to recognize objective states of affairs other than through the consequences of practical activities.” In its most refined form, we call such activities and practices scientific. Such practices are normative and performed not just instrumentally but often for their own sake. Similarly, as Herbert Terrace notes, humans don’t just communicate, but participate in informative conversational discourse, and not just as a means to some further reward. And while young humans take-up language spontaneously, they’re also taught how to use language correctly; in learning human language, we learn to hold each other and ourselves accountable for what we say. Though a student of Wilfred Sellars, Ruth is not in the habit of talking about the “space of reasons.” But I think she’s implicitly appealing to some such space insofar as she suggests that human language evolves its distinctive features as part and parcel of the cultural evolution of the distinctive forms of human practice which compose the so-called “space of reasons,” i.e., rational activities of giving and asking for explanations and justifications/asking and answering ‘why,’-questions.
The suggestion, then, is that the distinguishing features of human thought are a reflection of the distinctive features of the human capacity for language, and that these features are grounded in and emerge alongside human capacities for rational forms of activity and practice. But isn’t this in tension with the possibility Ruth raises at the end of her post, that “Perhaps it was not human language that first introduced the declarative mood but human thought.” If, as I’ve suggested, Ruth is of the view that rational cognition is fundamentally practical, such that human thought and human activity are two sides of the same coin, then we might interpret what she says here thus: perhaps the declarative mood has its home in the proto-linguistic activities and practices which composed the space of reasons in its nascency. So interpreted, the seeming tension disappears.