The Descent of Grice

By courtesy of Carruthers, on homo sapiens sapiens -- and Grice

As every schoolboy (especially in Clifton) knows, hominids evolved a wide variety of specialist processing-systems for dealing with particular domains, organised internally along connectionist lines."

"Thus they may well have evolved specialist theory-of-mind systems; co-operative exchange systems; processors for dealing in naive physics and tool-making; processors for gathering and organising information about the living world; systems for selecting mates and directing sexual strategies; and so on – just as some evolutionary psychologists and archaeologists now suppose (Barkow et al., 1992; Mithen, 1996; Pinker, 1997)."

"These systems would have operated independently of one another; and at this stage most of them would have lacked access to each other’s outputs. Although Dennett himself does not give a time-scale, this first stage could well have coincided with the period of massive brain-growth, lasting two or more million years, between the first appearance of Homo habilis and the evolution of archaic forms of Homo sapiens."

Second, hominids then evolved a capacity to produce and process natural language; which was used in the first instance exclusively for purposes of inter-personal communication.

This stage could well have coincided with the arrival of Homo sapiens sapiens in Southern Africa some 100,000 years ago. The resulting capacity for sophisticated and indefinitely complex communication would have immediately conferred on our species a decisive advantage, enabling more subtle and adaptable forms of co-operation, and more efficient accumulation and transmission of new skills and discoveries."

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And indeed, just as might be predicted, we do see Homo sapiens sapiens rapidly colonising the globe, displacing competitor hominid species; with Australia being reached for the first time by boat some 60,000 years ago."

"And the evidence is that our species was more efficient at hunting than its predecessors, and soon began to carve harpoons out of bone, beginning fishing for the first time (Mithen, 1996, pp.178-183).

Finally, a new and clever trick caught on amongst our ancestors, giving rise to what is distinctive of the conscious human mind. As Dennett (1991) tells it, we began to discover that by asking ourselves questions, we could often elicit information which we did not know we had.

Each of the specialist processing systems would have had access to the language faculty, and by generating questions through that faculty and receiving answers from it, these systems would have been able to interact quite freely and access one another’s resources for the first time. The result, thinks Dennett, is the Joycean machine – the constant stream of ‘inner speech’ which occupies so much of our waking lives, and which amounts to a new virtual processor (serial and digital) overlain on the parallel distributed processes of the human brain. This final stage might well have coincided with the explosion of culture around the globe some 40,000 years ago, including the use of beads and necklaces as ornaments; the burying of the dead with ceremonies; the working of bone and antler into complex weapons; and the production of carved statuettes and paintings (Mithen, 1996).

This is a perfectly sensible evolutionary account, which can be made to fit the available archaeological and neuro-psychological data quite nicely. But what reason does it give us for thinking that p-conscious states are those which are available to (higher-order) linguistic description (HOD), rather than to higher-order thought (HOT)? After all, Dennett himself is eulogistic about HOT theories of consciousness, except that he thinks it unnecessary to insert a thought between an experience and our dispositions to describe it linguistically (1991, ch. 10); and he also allows that quite sophisticated mind-reading capacities would probably have been in place prior to the evolution of language, and independently of it in mature humans (personal communication). The vital consideration, I think, is that Dennett denies that there exists any thought realistically construed independently of language; and so, a fortiori, there are no genuine HOTs in the absence of language, either – it is only when those higher-order contents are formulated linguistically that we get discrete, structured, individually-causally-effective states; prior to that stage, it is merely that people can usefully be interpreted as entertaining HOTs, from the standpoint of the ‘Intentional Stance’ (on this, see Dennett, 1987).

In arguing against Dennett’s HOD theory, then, I need to do two things. First, I need to argue that a mature capacity for HOTs would involve discrete, structured, states, and to argue this independently of any considerations to do with natural language. And second, I need to show that such a capacity is in fact independent of linguistic capacities – in evolution, development, and/or mature human cognition.


For the first stage of my case I borrow from Horgan and Tienson (1996), who show how the standard arguments for the view that thoughts must be carried by discrete structured states (generally thought to be sentences of an innate and universal symbolic system, or Mentalese) can be considerably strengthened. (The standard arguments are that only the Mentalese hypothesis can explain how thought can be systematic and productive; see Fodor, 1987). Horgan and Tienson ask just why propositional attitudes should be systematic. Is it merely a brute fact about (some) cognisers, that if they are capable of entertaining some thoughts, then they will also be capable of entertaining structurally related thoughts? They argue not, and develop what they call the tracking argument for Mentalese. Any organism which can gather and retain information about, and respond flexibly and intelligently to, a complex and constantly changing environment must, they claim, have representational states with compositional structure.

Consider early hominids, for example, engaged in hunting and gathering. They would have needed to keep track of the movements and properties of a great many individuals – both human and non-human – updating their representations accordingly. While on a hunt, they would have needed to be alert for signs of prey, recalling previous sightings and patterns of behaviour, and adjusting their search in accordance with the weather and the season, while also keeping tabs on the movements, and special strengths and weaknesses, of their co-hunters. Similarly while gathering, they would have needed to recall the properties of many different types of plants, berries and tubers, searching in different places according to the season, while being alert to the possibility of predation, and tracking the movements of the children and other gatherers around them. Moreover, all such hominids would have needed to track, and continually up-date, the social and mental attributes of the others in their community (see below).

Humans (and other intelligent creatures) need to collect, retain, up-date, and reason from a vast array of information, both social and non-social.

There seems no way of making sense of this capacity except by supposing that it is subserved by a system of compositionally structured representational states. These states must, for example, be formed from distinct elements representing individuals and their properties, so that the latter may be varied and up-dated while staying predicated of one and the same thing.

This very same tracking-argument applies – indeed, applies par excellence – to our capacity for higher-order thoughts (HOTs), strongly suggesting that our mind-reading faculty is so set up as to represent, process, and generate structured representations of the mental states of ourselves and other people. The central task of the mind-reading faculty is to work out and remember who perceives what, who thinks what, who wants what, who feels what, and how different people are likely to reason and respond in a wide variety of circumstances. And all these representations have to be continually adapted and updated. It is very hard indeed to see how this task could be executed, except by operating with structured representations, elements of which stand for individuals, and elements of which stand for their mental properties; so that the latter can be varied and altered while keeping track of one and the same individual. Then on the assumption that a mind-reading faculty would have been in place prior to the evolution of natural language, and/or that it can remain intact in modern humans in the absence of language, we get the conclusion that HOTs (realistically construed) are independent of language.


The demand for structured representations to do the work of the mind-reading faculty is even more powerful than the above suggests. For HOTs are characteristically relational (people have thoughts about things; they have desires for things; they have feelings about other people; and so on) and they admit of multiple embeddings. (I may attribute to John the thought that Mary does not like him, say; and this may be crucial in predicting or explaining his behaviour.) In addition, HOTs can be acquired and lost on a one-off basis, not learned gradually following multiple exposures, like a capacity to recognise a new kind of object. (Pattern-recognition is what connectionist networks do best, of course; but they normally still require extensive training regimes. One-off learning is what connectionist networks do worst, if they can do it at all.) When I see John blushing as Mary smiles at him, I may form the belief that he thinks she likes him. But then later when I see her beating him furiously with a stick, I shall think that he has probably changed his mind. How this could be done without a system of structured representations is completely mysterious; and the chance that it might be done by some sort of distributed connectionist network – in which there are no elements separately representing John, Mary and the likes-relation – looks vanishingly small.


How plausible is it that such structured higher-order representations are independent of natural language?"

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Many theories of the evolution of language – especially those falling within a broadly Gricean tradition – presuppose that, indeed 'psychological attitudes' are independent of, say, English."

On these accounts, language began with hominids using arbitrary ‘one-off’ signals to communicate with one another, requiring them to go in for elaborate higher-order reasoning concerning each other’s beliefs and intentions

vide Origgi and Sperber, on teleofunctionalism.

For example, in the course of a hunt I may move my arm in a circular motion so as to get you to move around to the other side of our prey, to drive it towards me.

Then on Grice’s (1957, 1969) analysis, I make that movement with the intention that you should come to believe that I want you to move around behind, as a result of you recognising that this is my intention.

Plainly such communicative intentions are only possible for beings with a highly developed and sophisticated mind-reading faculty, capable of representing multiple higher-order embeddings.

A number of later theorists have developed rather less elaborate accounts of communication than Grice.

For example, J. R. Searle, who studied philosophy at Oxford with Grice, (1983) argues that the basic kind of intention is that I should be recognised as imposing a particular truth-condition on my utterance.

And Sperber and Wilson (1986/1995) who Grice acknowledges ("authors like Sperber and Wilson" and 'damning' commentary thereof, WoW, cited by Chapman, _Grice_) explain communication in terms of intentions and expectations of relevance -- a descendant of Grice's category of Relation (apres Kant).

But these accounts still presuppose that communicators are capable of higher-order thought (HOT).

In the case of Searle, who contributed to PGRICE, this is because the concepts of truth and falsity – presupposed as already possessed by the first language-users – would require an understanding of true and false belief (Papineau, this volume).

In the case of Sperber and Wilson, who also contributed to PGRICE, it is because calculations of relevance involve inferences concerning others’ beliefs, goals, and expectations.

On a contrasting view, it is possible that there was only a fairly limited mind-reading capacity in existence prior to the evolution of language; and that language and a capacity for structured HOTs co-evolved (see Gómez, 1998, for an account of this sort). Even if this were so, however, it would remain an open question whether language would be implicated in the internal operations of the mature mind-reading faculty. Even if they co-evolved, it may well be that structured HOTs are possible for contemporary individuals in the absence of language.

In so far as there is evidence bearing on this issue, it supports the view that structured HOTs can be entertained independently of natural language. One sort of evidence relates to those deaf people who grow up isolated from deaf communities, and who do not learn any form of syntactically-structured Sign until quite late (Sacks, 1989; Goldin-Meadow and Mylander, 1990; Schaller, 1991).

These people nevertheless devise systems of ‘home-sign’ of their own, and often engage in elaborate pantomimes to communicate their meaning. These seem like classic cases of Gricean communication; and they seem to presuppose that a capacity for sophisticated HOTs is fully intact in the absence of natural language.

Another sort of evidence relates to the capacities of aphasics, who have lost their ability to use or comprehend language. Such people are generally quite adept socially, suggesting that their mind-reading abilities remain intact. And this has now been confirmed experimentally in a series of tests conducted with an a-grammatical aphasic man.

Varley (1998) reports conducting a series of mind-reading tests (which examine for grasp of the notions of belief and false belief) with an a-grammatic aphasic. This person has severe difficulties in both producing and comprehending anything resembling a sentence (particularly involving verbs). So it seems very unlikely that he would be capable of entertaining a natural language sentence of the form, ‘A believes that P’. Yet he passed almost all of the tests undertaken (which were outlined to him by a combination of pantomime and single-word explanation).

It seems, then, that a capacity for HOTs can be retained in the absence of language. But we also have the tracking-argument for the conclusion that a capacity for HOTs requires discrete, structured, representations. So we have the conclusion that higher-order thought, realistically construed, is independent of language, even in the case of human beings. And so there is reason to prefer a dispositionalist HOT theory over Dennett’s dispositionalist HOD theory.

Evolutionary considerations cannot help us, if our goal is to argue against mysterian views of p-consciousness, or against first-order representationalist (FOR) theories. But they do provide us with good reason to prefer a dispositionalist higher-order thought (HOT) account of p-consciousness, over either actualist HOT theory, on the one hand, or higher-order experience (HOE) theory, on the other; and they also have a role to play in demonstrating the superiority of dispositionalist HOT theory over dispositionalist higher-order description (HOD) theory.






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