The Science of Language (18 page)

JM:
I wanted to ask you some questions about
social science, but I'm reluctant to switch the topic that much. Well, maybe we can
.

NC:
It should be a short conversation [both laugh].

 

NC:
Let's take something concrete; let's take some of the standard examples. I look out the window, I believe it's raining, I desire to stay dry, I take my umbrella. So my belief and my desire caused me to take my umbrella.

I think that that's just a description of what I did. There's no independent notion of
belief, desire, or cause that enters into this discussion. It's just a way of describing what we regard as rational action. If instead of taking my umbrella I take my clothes off, we say it's irrational. But there's no more or less notion of cause, and we don't even know that there are such entities as beliefs and desires. In fact, plenty of languages don't have those words. What you would say is, well, I think it is raining, and I want to stay dry, and so I'm going to take my umbrella. There's no [mental representation] belief, there's no [mental representation] desire; just [my saying] here's what I want, here's what I think, here's what I do. What I think and what I want are probably related in some way or another to what I do, but that's not a sufficient basis for a science.

You get the feeling that it might be a science because you nominalize. If you talk about beliefs, then ok [you think], there must be some sort of system of beliefs, and we can try to say something about it, and so on. But maybe that's just the wrong way of looking at it. English happens to be a highly nominalizing language, so we're led down that path very easily. But it doesn't tell you that this is the right thing; in most languages you just can't say that kind of thing. You might claim that it's right to say these kinds of things, as it's right to talk about tensors, molecules, and so on. But you've got to show that. You can't just tell a story using “tensor” and “molecules” and then say, ok, we did it. You have to say what they are, and what the theoretical framework is in which you embed them, and so on. In these [belief-desire] cases, it's just not done.

Well, could it be done? You could have some kind of
empirical study of what people believe and why they believe it, and so on. It might turn out – if that kind of study gets anywhere – that you could develop theories that postulate entities that they call “beliefs” and place them in some appropriate framework. Then you could talk about the belief component of the system. And the same with the
desire component, perhaps. But even if you could do that, it's not at all clear that that's the right way to go. You would still have the non-trivial problem of bringing in causality. Now we're back to
Descartes's problem. Does it cause you to do this? No; it just says that you're acting rationally, whatever that means. You can also choose to act irrationally; to take Descartes's example, you can choose to put your finger in the flame.

JM:
Davidson in his “Mental Events” (
1970
) rejects belief-desire psychology as a science, but he wants to insist that action is caused – it's just that it's caused ‘physically.’ I was reminded of another article of his while you were speaking – “Psychology as Philosophy” (
1980
) in which he reports carrying out an experiment on a class of students at Stanford, and effectively showed that there is no possible way of measuring beliefs, desires, and the like. If there's no way of measuring them, there's no possible way of putting them into a theory
.

NC:
I don't know the article; what's a sketch of the proof?

NC:
. . . and it doesn't come out consistent.

JM:
. . . it doesn't come out consistent
.

NC:
There's a lot of work on that; for example,
Tversky and Kahneman (1974) and Kahneman, Slovic, and Tversky (1982). There are a lot of
strange phenomena. Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini (
1994
) has an interesting book in which he includes many paradoxical conclusions that people come up with. But that doesn't tell us that there's no belief system, just that they won't be consistent.

NC:
It would say that a scientific psychology shows that people's belief systems are not
consistent. That doesn't surprise me; I'm sure it's true of mine. And in fact, we know it's true. We do certain things because we feel, somehow, that that's what's happening, while some other part of our mind tells us that that's not what's happening. I can't imagine anyone not having that experience.

This is interesting work because Kahneman and Tversky spell out what happens. In fact, they come up with criteria that show why certain kinds of questions will give one kind of ranking, while another kind of question will give a different ranking. You're looking at the questions in some different kind of framework.

As for
irrational beliefs: it's in front of us every moment. Take a look at the election that's coming this year [2004]. Probably large numbers of the people who are voting for Bush are doing it on the basis of irrational beliefs. These are poor working people who are getting completely shafted and have objective facts right in front of them that tell them that that's what's happening to them, and can with a trivial argument see that it's the result of these policies [of Bush]. But they nevertheless accept the view that this guy is standing up for us against the rich and powerful elitists. You couldn't have more obvious irrational beliefs.

NC:
Partly; but somehow, the end result is that many people – perhaps the majority – have the feeling that this guy is defending us against the liberal elitists . . .

NC:
But apparently that is the range of possible, testable attitudes. Maybe there are all kinds of reasons for it. But if you explore it a bit, it's clearly a system of extremely irrational beliefs. And that happens all the time.

NC:
Well, we don't know that the mind does
not
work by deterministic, law-like principles, we just know that the belief-desire type of description doesn't have those properties. You can say the same about the anomalism of the folk ‘physical.’ The ways we talk about the world – our intuitive understanding of the world in folk physical ways – is also not deterministic in the sense of Newtonian (or later) science.[C]

NC:
Well, if we are, that's a comment on our cognitive capacities. There's no external criterion that requires it.

NC:
. . . except that it's human-specific . . .

NC:
Human-specific, unless we take ourselves to be the criterion for a rational being, in which case we end up being logical. If we have some other concept of rationality, we may conclude that humans are inherently irrational.

Suppose it's true. There's a lot of work now that suggests that
religious beliefs of one kind or another – that's a broad category, belief in some supernatural force or whatever it may be – is inherent in human nature. You can imagine how that might be true. Take children; you can show experimentally that if there's something moving over here and something else moves over there in a systematic way unconnected to it, they will assume that there is some lever or something or other that's connecting them that they can't see. You look for mechanical causes; it's just in our nature. That's why it was so hard even for Newton himself to accept his law of
gravitation; it's in our nature to look for mechanical causes. Well, you take a look at the world around you; the number of things that you can account for in terms of mechanical causes is infinitesimal, and if that is the way you have to look at things, you're going to have to look for some other cause. So you go to a supernatural cause, not a
natural. So it could be that our cognitive capacities – I'm not suggesting it, but it could be – that the cognitive capacities of this creature will compel it in the actual world to conjure up supernatural forces. “There must be a mechanical causal law that explains this” happens to be an irrational belief. But it might be that we are just destined by our very nature to have that belief; that's just the way we are. I can certainly imagine a creature that worked like that, and it could well be us.

JM:
There are any number of examples of individuals – like myself – who don't accept those beliefs in supernatural causes, meaning by that ones that don't accord with science as we have developed it . . .
.

NC:
No, we don't accept it consciously; but of course consciously we don't accept the fact that motion requires contact. On the other hand, our commonsense intuitions tell us that that's nonsense. So we're kind of living with two worlds, the world of our commonsense intuition, and some other world that we've been able to construct, in which we have a
different conception of rationality. And it's a hard one to hang onto. We probably fail all the time in ordinary life.

NC:
We can make up stories in both directions. We don't know. There haven't been human societies in which there isn't some kind of authority. And among other primates it's certainly commonly the case – maybe universally the case – that there is some authority structure. It could be. You could make up a reason for that too. We all grow up in an authoritarian atmosphere by definition; we couldn't survive otherwise. Maybe there's something built-in about submission to authority. But you can make up the opposite story too. Children grow up in that framework, and they reject it. Maybe there's something about us that says that you reject authority. You can have it either way; it's one of the joys of evolutionary psychology. You can have it any way you like.

NC:
. . . the opposite; we are somehow free. But that's just a hope.

NC:
Yes. We can't say we know it.
Rousseau argued, “look at savages, animals struggling for their freedom, if we Europeans can't see that that's a
part of our nature, it's just because we're so degraded.” OK, that's a kind of an argument, but not a very convincing one.

NC:
. . . have innately an instinct for
freedom? I'd like to. I don't anticipate it.

NC:
Not scientific evidence. There's conflicting evidence from history, experience, anthropology, and so on – but conflicting. If it were to be proven that some people are simply born to be slaves, and they will never be fulfilled and satisfied unless they're slaves – if that were proven, I wouldn't like the conclusion, but I couldn't show that it's false.