Cognition: Human vs Non-human Animal

Jordan,

One philosophical mistake that Marsh and MacDonald made was to refer to a concept as an internal representation. This makes concepts that which we understand or know, rather than that by which we understand or know. It makes concepts what that we know, rather than how we know.

Though with differing conclusions as them, you seem to be making the same mistake. In order to clarify this, please answer this multiple choice question. Concepts are:

a) objective
b) subjective
c) intrinsic
d) none of the above

Ed

Post 21

Thursday, October 2, 2008 - 1:23pm

Hi Ed,

So you disagree with both me and the researchers.

Heh. Yep. :-) I think the researchers designed an experiment that would answer a question that's different from the one they intended, so it was no surprise that their interpretation of the results was off.

I disagreed with you that anti-conceptuality in humans resembles animal concept-formation. If I had to pick, I'd say animal concept-formation more closely resembles concept-formation found in human children. More fundamentally, I think we disagree that mental file folders can be created through mere association, but let's be sure: do you think categories can be formed via association? While I'm at it, do you disagree that concepts are mental categories with members that share some specific trait?

Next, while I prefer to view concepts as relational and intentional, if I were to select from your multiple choices, I'd say concept are (derived) objectively and subjectively. Lemme splain! The process we use to form concepts is set and ruled and is not open to whim or preference. Either we isolate into a set some items apart from all else based on those items' shared trait, keeping in the set all items that belong and out all that don't, hence forming a concept -- or we don't, and no concept comes about. To that end, concepts are objective.

Concepts are subjective in the sense that each person is stuck forming her or his own set of concepts, and each person's concept set differs from everybody else's because concept sets are formed via the individual's unique experience and are based on epistemic essences which change per individual as he or she grows. Indeeed, it's not like there's a set number of concepts or instrinsic kinds out there just waiting to be nabbed -- that would implicate some sort of fishy metaphysical categories or essences ala Platonism. Where do we disagree?

Cheers,
Jordan

Post 22

Thursday, October 2, 2008 - 2:19pm

Ed T. wrote:

One philosophical mistake that Marsh and MacDonald made was to refer to a concept as an internal representation. This makes concepts that which we understand or know, rather than that by which we understand or know. It makes concepts what that we know, rather than how we know.

Concepts are internal representations. Properly grounded they have external referents. In that way they are that by which we know. The alternative to concepts not being internal representations is that they somehow exist outside the mind, e.g. they are intrinsic or Platonic.

Your second claim doesn't necessarily follow from the first, and I don't understand how you get the second from the little bit I see written by Marsh and MacDonald.

I think this dialogue has a better chance of some progress if what the parties, especially Ed, mean by "crude association" were clearer. Consider Pavlov's dog. The bell rings, it thinks food. Is that simply a crude association (bell-food) or something else? Consider several occurrences of the sequence. The dog has witnessed similar events. Is that the formation of a primitive concept? If not, why not?

Jordan wrote:

If I had to pick, I'd say animal concept-formation more closely resembles concept-formation found in human children.

Replace "animal concept-formation" with "animal thought" and I agree.

(Edited by Merlin Jetton on 10/02, 2:37pm)

Post 23

Thursday, October 2, 2008 - 2:45pm

Attempting to compare the mechanisms of association and the mental processes between animals and humans is fraught with difficulties. We take our personal units of percept and concept born of a lifetime of introspective experience into these attempts - none of knows HOW to think like a dog.

We talk about Pavlov's dog making an association between food and the bell - right away we are totally in error unless we are careful to make disclaimers. "Food" is a concept subsuming a wide range of existent units - even with the simple palate and limited dietary experience of a dog. But the dog doesn't have a concept anything like what a human concept is.

The dog has a hunger integrally connected to, and part of, a built-in drive to satisfy that hunger. The dog automatically acts to satisfy that hunger along those paths that are most strongly associated with past satisfactions. The dog can make association chains - where multiple stimuli have to occur in the same time frame to connect - like the sound of the can opener, but only if the person who feed him is in the kitchen. Think of these as the high-end of logic-gates that get created and modified as the dog goes through life.

One could modify the frequency or duration or volume of the bell sound and one would find a range that still activated the Pavlovian response and it might be possible to measure a kind of cognitive dissonance that increased in proportion to the amount of modification, and a decrease in the energy of the response. But that isn't saying there are units of bell-rings being subsumed under a concept of bell.

Post 24

Thursday, October 2, 2008 - 3:04pm

Steve Wolfer wrote:

Attempting to compare the mechanisms of association and the mental processes between animals and humans is fraught with difficulties. We take our personal units of percept and concept born of a lifetime of introspective experience into these attempts - none of knows HOW to think like a dog.

True. We don't know how to think like human infants, either.

The dog has a hunger integrally connected to, and part of, a built-in drive to satisfy that hunger. The dog automatically acts to satisfy that hunger along those paths that are most strongly associated with past satisfactions.

Human infants, too?

One could modify the frequency or duration or volume of the bell sound and one would find a range that still activated the Pavlovian response and it might be possible to measure a kind of cognitive dissonance that increased in proportion to the amount of modification, and a decrease in the energy of the response. But that isn't saying there are units of bell-rings being subsumed under a concept of bell.

Katherine Nelson, a cognitive development psychologist, has hypothesized that the first concepts human infants have is of events, not entities.

(Edited by Merlin Jetton on 10/02, 3:12pm)

Post 25

Thursday, October 2, 2008 - 4:08pm

Merlin,

Yes, we have the same kind of problem understanding the mental processes of an infant. But I'm not sure how similar the human infant is to other animals. One one level, we see (from the outside) an infant appearing to be at about the same level as, say, a dog. And there may be some similarities that arise from structures and processes from common ancestors, but internally, we know that the infant is laying down learnings that lie on the path to juggling complex abstractions. The infant is starting to grasp things like language. My guess is that each organism has the underlying structures of its most distant ancestors as its boot-strapping mechanism, its infancy start-up tool. But that it also has the latest and greatest equipment for its species that kicks in - running in parallel and/or as a modification to the older patterns - that takes the infant past that old stage and into the current adult stage of awareness for its species.

Post 26

Thursday, October 2, 2008 - 4:52pm

"Dumb" Animal?

Have you folks not seen Alex the grey parrot that responds to the question "what material?" (wood, plastic, metal) when presented with small objects, which he feels with his tongue, and responds also to such questions as "what color?" and "what object?" The question of what object is a second level distinction it requires that he have the concepts of various objects, and also the higher level concept of object as opposed to color or material. Further, he responds to the question "what is different?" where he answers that two keys differ in size or color or material. This is a third level abstraction. One cannot deny that this parrot has concepts.

The fact that animals such as dogs can learn to distinguish between various smells may not be conceptual per se, but it is imp;lict percetual judgment, according to Kelley's Evidence of the Senses, the link between the perceptual and the conceptual.

Ed, I fail to see the underlying point you want to make here. As you showed in the other thread on the definition of the concept man, just because you belong to the species Homo sapiens doesn't make any specific and possibly brain dead individual necessarily smerter than an animal. Why this need to show yojur agrreement with researchers and the inferiority of dumb animals? I suggest that you abandon this text based rationalism, and try an experiment - get a pet dog - and then report back after some real life experience. There is one mistake that you make that animals don't. You confuse "expert" opinion, because it is written and you have read it, with metaphysical reality.

Post 27

Thursday, October 2, 2008 - 5:38pm

Ted,

I only told one story on my parrot - made the little guy seem like a dummy when he couldn't tell the difference between a sock and a snake.

Here is another story. I was watching him standing on his perch on one foot, scratching his head with his other foot. Then he stops, and starts looking around the bottom of the cage - it is clear that he sees something he is interested in and he scurries over, slides down the bars and goes over to the corner he was looking at, and picks up a feather in his beak. He climbs back up on his perch, grabs the feather with his foot, shifts it around till the gets it the way he wants it and starts scratching his head with the sharp end of the feather.

Now, factor in to this, the fact that he was hand-raised from an egg and never even saw another bird. And I sure didn't have anything to do with teaching this "tool-using" behavior.

I agree with Ed that there are very definite difference between humans and other animals in our method of conceptualizing and the nature of our volition and in introspecting and especially working with concepts about concepts.

Post 28

Thursday, October 2, 2008 - 10:48pm

Jordan,

I'll answer you in time. Merlin hit one of my hot buttons, though -- and I am compelled to respond.

Merlin,

The sense-data theorists got in trouble postulating internal representations -- like a picture show inside your head -- as the means by which we perceive things. Who can blame them? I mean, it was just natural to think that what we see when we see -- is an internal replica of what it is that exists out in the world. It seemed like the most straightforward explanation of perception at the time. Yet we agree they were wrong.

While I have to do research to disagree with you efficiently, I disagree that concepts are internal representations. In order for clarity, I ask you this:

Are we conscious of the concepts in our heads, or do we use concepts to be conscious of the referents out in the world? And do you -- like me -- believe that it has to be one or the other?

Ed

Post 29

Thursday, October 2, 2008 - 10:55pm

Merlin,

The alternative to concepts not being internal representations is that they somehow exist outside the mind, e.g. they are intrinsic or Platonic.

But there's a third alternative. There's internal subjectivism, intrinsic externalism, and intentional (objective) conceptualism. With subjectivism and intrinsicism the concepts are what we "see" conceptually -- and we argue about whether they're inside our heads or on the outside.

Intentional conceptualism transcends this dichotomy by explaining concepts as tools for understanding -- rather than objects of understanding (or objects of focus in their own right).

Ed
[and if you click the link and read the thread, Regi Firehammer was right to accuse me of overlooking Peter Abelard -- who was a true intentional conceptualist (rather than a platonic realist, a subjective nominalist, or an "internal representation" conceptualist)]

Post 30

Thursday, October 2, 2008 - 11:49pm

Ted,

I suggest that you abandon this text based rationalism, and try an experiment - get a pet dog - and then report back after some real life experience. There is one mistake that you make that animals don't. You confuse "expert" opinion, because it is written and you have read it, with metaphysical reality.

[not text based rationalism]

Ed

Post 31

Friday, October 3, 2008 - 5:00am

Ed wrote:

While I have to do research to disagree with you efficiently, I disagree that concepts are internal representations. In order for clarity, I ask you this:
Are we conscious of the concepts in our heads, or do we use concepts to be conscious of the referents out in the world? And do you -- like me -- believe that it has to be one or the other?

Is that an exclusive "or"? How about both? Introspectively we are aware of using concepts. Properly grounded, those concepts do refer to external things. But if the reference is via memory or to an imagined future, such reference is representational (unlike current percepts). Please be very clear about one thing. You said "concepts" and my response is based on that, not percepts. For a more complete statement of my position, see my article Mind and Representation.

I wrote: "The alternative to concepts not being internal representations is that they somehow exist outside the mind, e.g. they are intrinsic or Platonic."

Ed replied:

But there's a third alternative. There's internal subjectivism, intrinsic externalism, and intentional (objective) conceptualism.

I would classify the last as internal representation, properly grounded externally. "Intentional" implies a relationship between mind and something extra-mental. The act of referring is internal.

Post 32

Friday, October 3, 2008 - 7:16am

Merlin,

"Intentional" implies a relationship between mind and something extra-mental.

But that is exactly why I used the term: intentional -- to imply a relationship between the mind and reality. This is laid out at the link in post 29.

Ed

Post 33

Friday, October 3, 2008 - 7:38am

Jordan,

do you think categories can be formed via association?

I think vague groupings (treating likes alike) can be formed via association. And when humans see animals treating likes alike, then they may mistakenly anthropomorphize the process that they infer that might be going on in the animals' heads. They say to themselves: When I group things, I use logic -- so animals must be doing that too."

While I'm at it, do you disagree that concepts are mental categories with members that share some specific trait?

No.

Where do we disagree?

I disagree with anthropomorphizing, which I believe that you are guily of, and I disagree with treating concepts subjectively. If we're at the table both staring at the same vase, we each have a subjective perception of it (which has to do with angle of view, lighting, etc) -- but we both see the same objective vase. Objective is a term that means "same for all" or "specific to no one." Subjective means the opposite "specific to someone." We can talk about the vase because it's real for both of us -- one and the same for us both. In the same manner, we can discuss the concept of justice -- because it's real for both of us (having to do with reality, rather than subjectivity).

This isn't true of a tooth-ache (a tooth-ache can't be one and the same for two people), but whenever two people talk about one and the same thing, they do it because of inherent objectivity. I see where people can make mistakes in trying to form concepts. But like you said above:

keeping in the set all items that belong and out all that don't, hence forming a concept -- or we don't, and no concept comes about.

... so we could disagree on whether what's casually talked about at coffee tables around the world are all true concepts, but those are instances of specific mistakes where folks have error in their minds (anti-concepts, vague feeling "treated" as concept, etc). Those specific instances don't detract from the objectivity of conceptual knowledge which allows things like science to grow.

Ed

(Edited by Ed Thompson on 10/03, 7:39am)

Post 34

Friday, October 3, 2008 - 7:49am

Merlin,

I'm sorry to be jumping around like a kid with ADHD. Here is an answer to your question in post 22:

Consider Pavlov's dog. The bell rings, it thinks food. Is that simply a crude association (bell-food) or something else? Consider several occurrences of the sequence. The dog has witnessed similar events. Is that the formation of a primitive concept? If not, why not?

No. Concept formation requires volitional and logical abstraction. What Pavlov's dogs did was rote learn, nothing more.

Edit:
[or what Steve said in post 23]

:-)

Ed

(Edited by Ed Thompson on 10/03, 7:52am)

Post 35

Friday, October 3, 2008 - 8:09am

Merlin and Steve, Steve said:

Merlin,

Yes, we have the same kind of problem understanding the mental processes of an infant. But I'm not sure how similar the human infant is to other animals.

I'm not sure how similar they are, either -- but I am sure that they are different. Folks who are drunk with anthropomorphization decry: "How can you be sure they are different? You are not an animal (or infant)!"

Here's how I know:

An 18-month old human stares at magic tricks much longer than animals ever do. The explanation is that toddlers are smarter than animals. Having implicit knowledge of the axioms -- such as existence exists -- toddlers realize on some level that matter is indestructible (that it cannot be created or destroyed). So, when you make things "appear" or "disappear", they stare at that and inside their heads they are saying to themselves: "What the f#$%???"

:-)

Animals don't say to themselves: "What the f%#??" They take perception as unquestioned reality. If a magician makes a ball disappear, then he really did -- the ball no longer exists for the animal (until you "bring it back"). To their credit, dogs try to sniff to verify the new "non-existence" of the ball that the magician had in his hands -- but they take their very next perception as unquestioned reality (no scent of ball? no existence of ball).

Ed

Post 36

Friday, October 3, 2008 - 8:22am

No. Concept formation requires volitional and logical abstraction. What Pavlov's dogs did was rote learn, nothing more.

It seems to me you are skirting the issue with a definitional approach. You say there can't be a concept w/o volition, but equally, if not more, fundamental to concept-formation is similarity. Also, in post 22 I wrote primitive concept. I didn't mean full blown, adult-style, human concept formation.

What is at the root of what you call rote learning? Do not humans, especially babies, rote learn, too?

Post 37

Friday, October 3, 2008 - 10:54am

Hi Ed,

I think vague groupings (treating likes alike) can be formed via association.

I don't see how. That's just not how association works. But you are welcome to persuade me otherwise by walking me through the process.

Next, I think the accusation of anthropomorphism is misplaced for at least two reasons: (1) the accusation is typically made on unempirical grounds based on the notion that there is a categorical difference between the cognitive traits of humans and animals. I try to start from empirics and see who passes the tests. (2) the accusation begs the question as to whether animals share some cognitive traits with humans. So I'd say you are engaging in anthropodenial! :-)

But anyway, I maintain that concepts are subjective to the end that essences change per an individual's personal experience. That is, people add, grow, and shrink their mental categories. For what it's worth, I'm convinced that Objectivism solidly agrees with me on this point.

Per your vase example: The (observed) vase is a percept, not a concept, but I suspect we agree that it is the same vase regardless of who is forming a percept of it and regardless of what perspective they are forming that percept from. It is objectively the vase. But the vase can fit into many different categories, and the categories into which that vase fits can be different for each person. It could fit into the categories of color, shape, texture, reflectivity, height and width, origin, age, utility, etc.

Off I go,
Jordan

Post 38

Friday, October 3, 2008 - 2:28pm

Merlin,

It seems to me you are skirting the issue with a definitional approach.

Well -- and this is an appeal to authority -- then Rand did, too. She wrote about how volition was needed.

Also, in post 22 I wrote primitive concept. I didn't mean full blown, adult-style, human concept formation.

It seems to me you are skirting the issue with a definitional approach. Please define primitive concept.

:-)

What is at the root of what you call rote learning?

From Wikipedia:
"Rote learning is a learning technique which avoids understanding of a subject and instead focuses on memorization."

A non-understanding memorization is at the root of what I call rote learning. It's how we teach dogs tricks.

Do not humans, especially babies, rote learn, too?

Yip.

Ed

Post 39

Friday, October 3, 2008 - 2:49pm