Oh, good! Perhaps I’m making more sense to many others than I used to. I’ve enjoyed studying and attempting to do philosophy for a very long time now. No official academic training to speak of. Just an autodidact with an interest that very few ‘normal’ everyday people have. Over the past couple of decades sites such as this one and the previous two that morphed into this one have been some of my favorite ‘places’ to have conversations that are nigh impossible in normal everyday life.
Got it – though doesn’t “spoken language” cover all the subsets like “slang,” “pidgin,” et al.?
Ah, OK, I thought you meant “evolutionary” literally (biologically), in terms of speciation etc.
Using the mental/physical example: We have a kind of picture here. Imagine an area of space labeled “mental” and another area labeled “physical.” Now erase the labels. What’s left is two areas that we’ve decided, or posited, are to be understood as separable for purposes of discussion. So there are at least two kind of structural question that can now be asked. The first would be to accept the posit, and ask, What is the relation of the two areas? Does one ground the other? Are there causal interactions? The second would be to question the division into two areas, and ask whether this is a misleading artifact of our not knowing what grounds both of them.
These are not the only, or even necessarily the primary, structural questions we could ask. Nor does this example have to be typical, though I think it is. I’m just trying to give you the flavor of what I mean by structure in ontology. The whole issue is better captured in a formal language.
Yes, that’s another important use of the grounding concept. But that’s epistemological grounding. I was talking about ontological grounding.
Well, at the least, I’d be interested in hearing more about why animals have language-less beliefs, on your view. I think they do too, but its always good to compare notes.
Sure, as does written language, but not all language use amounts to being an accounting practice, although I would argue that even the acts that aren’t aimed at taking account of the world are based upon one. As mentioned heretofore, it’s just easier because it covers so much ground.
That said, such notions also have drawbacks regarding explanatory power. There are more specialized accounting practices/approaches that are not meant to apply to all cases. That’s both understood and okay.
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I meant it literally in the sense of emerging with creatures capable of rudimentary language less thought and belief and growing in complexity along with biological machinery and/or language creation/use/acquisition and then growing in complexity even moreso with the abstraction that comes along with taking account of imperceptible things and metacognition.
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What you’re calling a picture is what I would call an accounting practice using the mental/physical dichotomy.
I reject the entire framework when it comes to certain subject matters. Namely, anything and everything that consists of and is existentially dependent upon both mental and physical elements/parts/things. Thought, belief, and experience are all such things.
Don’t get me wrong, the dichotomy has plenty of accepted practical uses that I would not have the same objection to. However, the one drawback that all dichotomies face is the inherent inability to be able to take proper account of that which consists of both, and as such cannot be properly taken account of by either one or the other, by itself. Consciousness/experience is one such thing.
I think we’re in agreement on that, as are Davidson and Chalmers, I think. Dennett would not agree, but I reject pure physicalism for the reasons just given above.
Pertaining to the further explication of the dichotomy, I’m still not sure what you mean by “grounds” if it is not an epistemological endeavor.
Could you restate the above explanation and questions using a substitution exercise, replacing all instances/uses of “ground” and “grounds”?
The causal aspect is important, on my view, as it pertains to how(never ‘why’) much of thought and belief forms early on. The attribution/recognition of causality is something that we can be pretty sure of, along with gathering resources and avoiding danger.
That’s an interesting claim. I’d like to know; 1.) exactly what “the whole issue” is, 2.) how is that better captured by formal language, and 3.) why you believe it is?
Is there anything about the language I’m using to shed light on the issues I’ve set out that you find lacking, thus far?
I’m very sympathetic to the idea of the simplest explanation being the best, so long as there’s nothing crucial lost/missing.
“Why” is a psychological question that I could only answer with in order to survive.
“How” do all animals form, have, and/or hold thought and belief? <----That is the question I’m much more interesting in answering. The psychologists and psychiatrists have the other task. 
I’d like to note that not all animals form, have, and/or hold belief. Of those that can, some do not have just language less belief. It is well known that some/many animals quite clearly have some form of intentional deliberate communication with each other such as alarms, greetings, warnings, expressions of contentment, etc. These can be expressed via meaningful vocalizations and/or behaviors. Other animals have rather complex vocalizations such as whales, some birds, dolphins, etc.
If language use is one of the different things that a creature is drawing correlations between, then neither those thoughts and beliefs nor those creatures are rightly called “language less”.
As mentioned a while back, the “language less” and/or “prelinguistic” line becomes much less useful/accurate here, particularly when it comes to setting out belief content that includes language use. That accounting practice is found wanting/lacking in such cases.
Since we’re comparing notes, why(or how) do you think that animals have language less beliefs?
I’ll try.
For my mental/physical example, starting in mid-paragraph, it might read like this:
“So there are at least two kinds of structural question that can now be asked. The first would be to accept the posit, and ask, What is the relation of the two areas? Does one [ground] depend on the other for its existence? Are there causal interactions? The second would be to question the division into two areas, and ask whether this is a misleading artifact of our not knowing what [grounds] both of them depend upon, or are part of.”
In other words, the key difference between epistemological and ontological grounding is that the latter is about stuff – the world, to put it crudely. It’s about how things are, not how we know them to be that way. Giving reasons and justifications, in contrast, is about us – how we think and provide warrants for our beliefs. The world’s ontological grounding structures will go happily on being what they are, regardless if we’re here to think about them (though of course they won’t have labels). The reverse is not true: What we decide to say about ontological grounding will directly affect the reasons we can give for grounding our epistemology.
That said, the issues are much more complicated and interconnected than this blithe summary. But I’m trying to be concise.
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It’s more my own language that I’m critiquing. Basic ontology is hard to express in discursive language.
Oh, that’s all? Coming right up!
Seriously, I’ll work on it. For starters, there’s a section in Ted Sider’s Writing the Book of the World that has influenced my thinking, and I bet I can find a passage to quote or summarize that will be on target. Stay tuned.
By “the whole issue,” I mean the challenge of talking/writing about ontological structure. My crude “two areas” talk is probably better captured by talking in terms of what we want to quantify over, and what syntax we’ve got to work with before a semantic interpretation.
I think there is. There is a fundamental level of description where the mental and the neural meet.
Imagine we have a complete theory of your brain. We can then imagine describing your thinking of “my cup is yellow” as something like "coordinated activity of the regions devoted to ‘cup’/cups ‘yellow’/yellow, and the activation of a region which modifies other activated regions in a way corresponding to the notion of ownership.
A true description of this sort, not my hand wavey cartoon of it, would connect the features of your thought with the high level neural organizations of your brain that realize them.
Of course, as you point out the hard problem straddles these two levels of description.
What the phrase “my cup is yellow” signifies is propositional. But the thought of it, for you, is a lived experience that intends towards a proposition without being one. It is that experience, not the proposition, that can be described neurally. And so it doesn’t make sense to substitute terms of a proposition with neural descriptions.
Thanks for joining in.
Yes, we have to make allowances for the “hand-wavy-ness,” since neuroscience is just starting out on this path. But the eventual non-hand-wavy description is exactly what I have in mind.
Except here’s the problem: That description is not the neutral description as I’m construing the term. It is, simply, the physical description. Are we prepared to say that 1) with Davidson, this description is on a par with the mental description in that neither is basic, but 2) it is also “more neutral” than the mental one?
I think the “straddling” you refer to is exactly the descriptive problem I’m raising.
Yes. I called it a type of category mistake. But I don’t think it helps to replace the propositional description with the “lived experience” and say that at least this can be adequately described neurally. True, my thought of “My cup is yellow” is not a proposition. What is it, then? You want to say that what it really consists of is: what the neural description describes – which is indeed “lived,” but is it an experience? If so, that would mean that what I experience is the neurons firing. That doesn’t seem to be true, at least not in my case. I experience having a thought with propositional content. We could go full-on Dennett, I suppose, and say that what I’m experiencing is an illusion, but do you find that satisfying? It has always sounded ad hoc to me, a case of warping experience to fit a theory.
To me the physics description is also pragmatic or functional. An aesthetic description ( “this is good coffee!”) need not presuppose chemistry knowledge or intent. We can even flip things around and understand the scientific image as a tool toward a better qualitative life. To project one vocabulary as the basis of all others looks to me like a personal assertion. I’m not against such an assertion, so I’m just saying it’s not binding. I’d suggest that what is presupposed is only that the same object is being discussed, and even this doesn’t always work out. Ideally ( hopefully) we are discussing the same object, in terms of this or that pragmatic vector.
I find this highly plausible. We might call this the “articulation” of the organism’s umvelt. This basically generalizes Heidegger’s notion of care as the temporal structure of world-for-organism. An organism expects in terms of what it remembers, but this is “one vector,” not two things glued together. The animal walks toward where it has found food before.
My hand-wavey description failed. What I actually had in mind was a description that sits within a framework where mental properties were truly understood. Where qualitative features of your thought, that it was of a yellow cup, that it was yours, that it was being considered in a propositional mode, were comprehensible in terms of a well understood high level brain architecture. The description would be stated in the language that the brain architecture is understood.
And there is no reason to assume we won’t one day solve the hard problem, and understand the phenomenal features of your thought as well in terms of this architecture.
Would that suffice as a “neutral description” for you?
In your analogy, frequencies can count as “foundational” because we comprehensively understand acoustic physics, so that the entire language of notes is reducible to the language of physics, but not the other way around. My putative description would be an instance of a language that can do the same for thoughts, that neither psychological nor neural description can do today.
But the experience could be neurons without the experience being of neurons.
Ah, I understand now. The non-hand-wavy description you have in mind would be the one that solves the Hard Problem in scientific language. (Though if it really “straddles” the description problem, we can only guess whether terms like “brain architecture” will be the right ones.)
So yes, I can easily imagine such a description sufficing as the basic description analogous to my Hz description for music. Would it be neutral as well? That’s kind of a great question, because if it really did solve the Hard Problem, we’d have to ask, Neutral in respect of what?
Right. Chalmers never says we won’t or can’t solve it. I draw some heat on TPF from philosophers who otherwise are in sympathy with the centrality of the Hard Problem, because I frankly expect it will be amenable to scientific solution. But of course no one knows.
I think not. Did you follow along with my musical analogy? See @hypericin 's comment above. The reason they and I call the Hz vocabulary “more basic” is because “the entire language of notes is reducible to the language of physics, but not the other way around,” as they succinctly put it. It’s a question of what grounds what. So it’s not just a personal assertion of preference. Call them A and B – you really do need A to understand why B works, but you can understand A perfectly well without B. This asymmetry is where we get “basic” from.
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Missed this earlier. Yeah, we’re getting into verbal-dispute territory: What do we want the term “experience” to cover? Can an experience be something we don’t recognize or perceive or comprehend at all in the stated terms, so that is seems to be of something else entirely, and still be “actually what it is”? Your guess is as good as mine; there’s nowhere to look it up. I was using “experience” in a way that allows someone like Dennett to claim that conscious experience is an illusion. Your way wouldn’t allow this. But it doesn’t matter, as long as we both stipulate what the term will cover.
When I watch my cat hassle me for food, it looks like she believes that doing this will get her fed. Obviously she doesn’t form a belief the way language-using humans do, but this behavior joins a myriad of other purposive behaviors she exhibits, all of which are the sorts of things she would do if she did have beliefs.
But Robot Cat can do all this too. Yet I don’t think Robot Cat has any beliefs at all. So what’s the difference?
Here’s where the leap of faith comes in. I think only entities that are conscious can have beliefs, and only living beings can be conscious. My cat qualifies. Therefore I attribute beliefs to her, and programming to Robot Cat. I have no solid argument to justify this leap. It’s my best shot at explaining what’s going on. Someday we’ll know a lot more about all this, and be in a much better position to know about what my cat might believe, if anything, and whether Robot Cat must indeed be devoid of consciousness.
The other reason I favor the idea of beliefs for (some) language-less animals is that I think it’s a useful way to use the word “belief.” Not only don’t we know much about consciousness, we also have no clear sense of what we must mean by “a belief.” I’m not talking about the grounds for a belief – I think we know a lot about that, for humans – but what my belief actually is, phenomenally. Here I am, believing X. OK . . . is X itself a thought in my mind? Or is “the belief that X” the thought? Must the thought use language? Must I be thinking it at this very moment in order to have it? etc. Point is, there are at least two or three respectable ways to think about what a belief is, and I find the one that says “beliefs don’t require language” to be very useful, philosophically. It seems to open up more interesting ways of looking at what we humans do. And it has the added benefit of helping me connect with my cat!
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You may not have understood me. This is certainly not a verbal dispute.
There are two components of experience. The content, what the experience is like. And what the ontological foundation is. You might have a experience of a flower whose ontological foundation is certain kinds of neural activity.
I’m not sure what “neutral” means other than “basic”. To me, “basic” means explaining all interpretive windows on the phenomenon. While “non basic” is one of those windows. What else could “neutral” mean?
I’d say that “experience,” like a number of key philosophical terms, gets used in different ways by different philosophical traditions and individual philosophers. It’s a very pliable, ambiguous word.
So – your explanation above is, IMO, an explanation of how you use the word, not “what it means”. To say “There are two components of experience” is perfectly sensible, but it isn’t wrong or right. Others think about it differently.
By calling this a verbal dispute, I’m suggesting that it doesn’t much matter whether the term “experience” gets used to cover only one component, or the other, or both. I prefer thinking of an experience as “what it’s like”; you prefer to broaden the concept to cover the ontological foundation as well. Both uses have much to recommend them. But the point is: How in the world could we decide which was “right”? Rather, what we need to do is just understand what we agree to mean, in this context, by the term. That way we won’t get at cross-purposes.
I don’t know if you read through the exchanges between me and @EQV about this. They pretty well convinced me that “basic” is defensible, but that a “neutral” description may be asking too much. If you don’t mind, read through those posts (starting I think around 34, with of course lots of other posters mixed in), and if the neutral/basic distinction doesn’t seem any clearer, I can try to help.