Immanuel Kant & Mental Time Travel

In my previous post I pointed out that new evidence coming from the chimpanzee Santino's behavior may be crucial for discussions whether 'episodic' planning and prospective Mental Time Travel exist in non-human animals.

This relates to the proposal by Suddendorf & Corballis (1997, 2007) that Mental Time Travel is unique to humans and that from an evolutionary perspective:

"that the crucial selective advantage mental time travel provides is flexibility in novel situations and the versatility to develop and adopt strategic longterm plans to suit individual selected goals."

Mental Time Tavel thene evolved so we are able to plan future behavior based on the recall of past episodes. But our "episodic memory" only provides the "raw material" for future planning, it isn't useful in itself. From an evolutionary perspective, being able to relive past memories may only be a byproduct, and in itself may not very useful. It's only use might be that it provides us with "raw" material.
Acording to this argument, the crux then is is that our ability to recall past episodes is only a necessary design feature of being able to plan flexibly for the future.
The philosophical implications of such a view may be rather bleak, given that it reduces another of our most cherished features of what makes us human - namely our memories and life histories, which give us a sense of having a, a continous, purpose- and meaningful existence - to an accidental spandrel. But what is also interesting from a philosophical point of view is that Suddendorf & Corballis weren't the first to come up with this idea.

Interestingly, I just found a quote from Immanuel Kant in a paper of a friend of mine:
Recalling the past (remembering) occurs only with the intention of making foresight of the future possible […] we look about us from the standpoint of the present in order to decide something or to be prepared for something. Empirical foresight is the anticipation of similar cases […] and requires no rational knowledge of causes and effects, but only tahe remembering of observed events as they commonly follow one another, and repeated experiences produce n aptitude for it" (Kant, Immanuel. Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View. Trans. Robert B. Louden. Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006, 79)

Bibliography:

Kant, Immanuel (2006) Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View. Trans. Robert B. Louden. Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Suddendorf, T. and M.C. Corballis (1997), Mental time travel and the evolution of the human mind, Genetic Social and General Psychology Monographs 123, pp. 133–167.

Suddendorf. T. and M.C. Corballis (2007), The evolution of foresight: What is mental time travel and is it unique to humans?, Behavioral and Brain Sciences 30, pp. 299–351

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Thomas Henry Huxley: Why Evolution Matters

This semester I'm attending two very interesting seminars: one one the Reception of Darwinism in America in the 19th and 20th Century and one one its philosophical and theological implications from todays perspective.

In my reading pack I just found a very nice quote by "Darwin's Bulldog", Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-1895):

"The question of questions for mankind --the problem which underlies all others, and is more deeply interesting than any other--is the ascertainment of the place which Man occupies in nature and of his relations to the universe of things. Whence our race has come; what are the limits of our power over nature, and of nature's power over us; to what goal we are tending; are the problems which present themselves anew and with undiminished interest to every man born into the world."
(T.H. Huxley, Evidence as to Man's Place in Nature, 1864, p. 58)

Thomas Hobbes on the Evolution of Language

During my research for my term paper on Friedrich Nietzsche’s theory of the evolution of language and consciousness I came across a very interesting German book on the debate about the origin of language in the 18^th century by Cordula Neis (2003), who has also written an article on the topic in the 14 Volume Elsevier Encyclopaedia of Language and Linguistics (Neis 2006). In 1769 the Berlin Academy of Science issued a prize contest regarding the origin of language:

"After a long internal discussion, the Academy invited scholars from across Europe to submit their essays on the origin of language. As language was considered an essential component of the natural constitution of man, it was required to reveal how man might have invented it and whether he might have been able to create it on his own." (Neis 2006: 100)

[...]

"By announcing the prize topic as being the origin of language in 1769, the Berlin Academy endeavored to find a persuasive solution that defended the possibility of human invention. Scholars considered the question as highly important, 31 essays were submitted to the Academy, an unusually high number of entries." (Neis 2006: 101)

The German philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder won the contest, and as a result, was the only contributor whose name was made public so that most of the authors of the manuscripts are still unknown. Of the 31 anonymous contributions, only 24 still exist, but all reviews of the judges are still there. Still, posthumous identification is made extremely hard by the fact that contributions were sent in in three different languages (German, French, and Latin. Two contributions were even written in what Neis calls “Fantasy-French:” Due to the fact that French was maybe the most prestigious language at that time, the authors apparently felt obliged to sent in papers in French even if they couldn’t really speak the language…). Apart from that, sloppy 18^th century handwriting is extremely hard to read (for me: absolutely impossible to read).:

Nevertheless, there are a lot of topics common to all the manuscripts, for example explicit or implicit references to the influential philosophers Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) (to whom I’ll maybe come back in a later post) and Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679). Hobbes is especially well known for his view of man as being “homo homini lupus” (man is the wolf of man) and his book “Leviathan” in which he argues that only if everybody adheres to a social contract and submits most of his freedom to the state can the natural “bellum omnium contra omnes” (the war of all against all) be stopped. Anyway, even though Hobbes was a man of his time and thus was a creationist who believed that “the first author of speech was God himself, that instructed Adam how to name such creatures as He presented to his sight,” some of his thoughts on the topic of language evolution/origin/function are really interesting. Hobbes speculates that Adam couldn’t possibly have invented all words, especially as all speech was confounded after the Tower of Babel incident.

For Hobbes, language is adaptive in that it is shaped by what speakers and hearers need to communicate about:

“And being hereby forced to disperse themselves into several parts of the world, it must needs be that the diversity of tongues that now is, proceeded by degrees from them in such manner as need, the mother of all inventions, taught them, and in tract of time grew everywhere more copious. “

But what I find most interesting is Hobbes’ view of the function of language:

“The general use of speech is to transfer our mental discourse into verbal, or the train of our thoughts into a train of words, and that for two commodities; whereof one is the registering of the consequences of our thoughts, which being apt to slip out of our memory and put us to a new labour, may again be recalled by such words as they were marked by. So that the first use of names is to serve for marks or notes of remembrance. Another is when many use the same words to signify, by their connexion and order one to another, what they conceive or think of each matter; and also what they desire, fear, or have any other passion for. And for this use they are called signs”

References:
Neis, Cordula (2003) Anthropologie im Sprachdenken des 18. Jahrhunderts ‑ Die Berliner Preisfrage nach dem Ursprung der Sprache (1771). New York: de Gruyter.

Neis, Cordula (2006): Origin of Language Debate. in: Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics (ELL). Ed. By Keith Brown (Editor-in-Chief). Second edition. Oxford. Elsevier.

Friedrich Nietzsche on the Origin of Language and Consciousness

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) is mostly known for his famous sentence “God is dead” and his concept of the “Übermensch”/”Superman” which later was horrendously misinterpreted and misused by the Nazis. In fact, some of the widespread misinterpretation of Nietzsche’s works are really his own fault, because he often expressed himself in very dark and obscure ways open to several readings. There is a joke in the Nietzsche scholarship community that everybody who is quoting a single excerpt of Nietzsche’s writing to make his case has to be lying, because you just as easily could find a section in which he says the exact opposite.

This ambiguity and uncertainty can also be found when it comes to Nietzsche’s assessment of Darwinism. Although he seemed to be convinced of the theory of evolution through common descent, he seemed to have differing views on the mechanisms of evolution. There are several aphorisms in his unpublished works and notes titled “Anti-Darwin,” but at least from the view of modern evolutionary Theory his criticisms are mostly due to a misunderstanding of evolutionary theory and terms like “fitness.”

I do not know in which way Nietzsche’s criticisms applied to 19^th century Darwinism. You should probably ask John Wilkins for that. Nietzsche took the side of biologists like Wilhelm Roux who argued that there had to be internal, systemic selection prior to external selection, something readily acknowledged in modern evolutionary theory, especially the systems theory of evolution.
Nietzsche also thought that life wasn’t only about self-preservation and mere survival (a position he took Darwinists to be arguing for) but that life was intrinsically aiming toward multiplication and extension, that it was governed by fundamental “a will to power” (here we have another very problematic concept of Nietzsche which no one really seems to understand).

Be that as it may, there is quite a bit of evolutionary theorizing in Nietzsche’s work and sometimes he even invokes notion akin to fitness and survival in order to explain how a certain cognitive property came about.

In Nietzsche’s 1882 “The Gay Science” (Part V, Aphorism No. 354) there are even some speculations about the function and evolution of language and consciousness and their interrelated nature.

For Nietzsche, thinking, feeling, wanting, recollecting and acting need not be conscious in order to be performed, but can come about sub-consciously. Nietzsche then asks:

“What then is the purpose of consciousness generally, when it is in the main superfluous?”

Nietzsche proposes that consciousness is always in proportion with an animal’s capacity for communication. This capacity again is seen as being related to an animal’s need for communication:

“where necessity and need have long compelled men to communicate with their fellows and understand one another rapidly and subtly, a surplus of the power and art of communication is at last acquired, as if it were a fortune which had gradually accumulated, and now waited for an heir to squander it prodigally.“

Language then, is seen as an adaptation that evolved gradually and provided a selective advantage in a hostile environment in which quick and efficient group coordination and cohesion were of utmost important. This is eerily familiar with the perspective of Evolutionary Psychology, especially Steven Pinker’s view of language as a gradual adaptation that evolved for the communication of complex propositions. Interestingly, Pinker also has written about our intrinsic “urge to communicate" (Pinker 1994).

Nietzsche sums up his hypothesis thus:

“consciousness generally has only been developed under the pressure of the necessity for communication “

Furthermore, consciousness is mainly necessary in social settings:

“consciousness is properly only a connecting net between man an man, - it is only as such that it has had to develop, the recluse and wild-beast species of men would not have needed it.”

Humans are seen as the “most endangered animal” in need of help and protection. This is also eched in famous German philosophical anthropologist Arnold Gehlen's concept of humans as "Mängelwesen" (deficient creatures), i.e. organisms with deficient instincitve capacities which leave them ill-prepared to respond to challenges from their environment. I think formulated in the way Gehlen does it the notion is crap, but it is certainly true that human are adapted for the "cognitive niche" and do not rely on predatory skills such as lions, etc, and are much more fragile and helpless to such attacks.

In order to express and coordinate this need, they needed to make themselves understood, and they needed to have a capacity for conscious introspection in order to know and communicate what they needed and wanted. In modern terminology, this would probably be called metacognition. To be more precise, given modern terminology, Nietzsche would probably hold that animals may display metacognitive regulation, e.g. higher-order sub-conscious uncertainty monitoring, as it has been shown in macaques and dolphins (Smith et al. 2003). This sort of higher-order subconscious thought would probably be what Nietzsche would refer to as unconscious thinking. However, together with other modern philosophers, he would probably hold that only humans display metacognitive knowledge (a distinction introduced by Flavell 1979, see also Hurford 2007: 23ff.).

Again, this neatly fits with the perspective of evolutionary psychology and Steven Pinker who see language and consciousness as “adaptation to the cognitive niche”, which then led the ‘environmental’ niche humans constructed for themselves: culture.

Nietzsche’s view on the evolution of language and consciousness even links to concepts such as Ernst Cassirer’s “homo symbolicus” or Terrence Deacon’s “Symbolic Species” as well as to the Social Intelligence Hypothesis, which holds that the driving motor of primate brain evolution as well as of human conscious cognition were large social groups:

“The sign-inventing man is at the same time the man who is always more acutely self-conscious, it is only as a social animal that man as learned to become conscious of himself“”

The term social animal of course can be traced back to Aristotle’s notion of man as a zoon politikon, which basically means “social aninmal.”

Now here’s the catch: according to Nietzsche:

“consciousness does not properly belong to the individual existence of man, but rather to the social and gregarious nature in him; […] as follows therefrom, it is only in relation to communcal and gregarious utility that it is finely developed; and that consequently each of us, in spite of the best intention of understanding himself as individually as possible, and of “knowing himself”, will always just call into consciousness the non-individual in him, namely, his “averageness.”"

This sounds similar to neuroscientists who see the conscious self as an illusion, a fiction that just came into existence as a regulatory social mechanism. They see that consciousness in essence as a socially and culturally imposed and imprinted idealized role model we link and ascribe our actions and states to. (see e.g. Metzinger 2000)

But Nietzsche goes even further: given that conscious is essentially something that develops in group interactions, if we translate our actions into conscious decisions, they all have to adhere to the same conscious group format, and thus lose their personality, uniqueness, and individuality:

“The nature of animal consciousness involves the notion that the world of which we can become conscious is only a superficial and symbolic world, a generalised and vulgarized world; […] everything which becomes conscious becomes just thereby shallow, meagre, relatively stupid, a generalisation, a symbol, a characteristic of the herd; […] with becoming conscious of something there is always combined a great, radical perversion, falsification, superficialisation, and generalisation.”

Nietzsche’s closes with a sceptically remark that is very similar to the viewpoint of modern, evolutionary epistemology, and which is also close to the following fear espressed by Charles Darwin:

"But then with me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man’s mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy.”

Nietzsche also shares this scepticism. If consciousness is merely a group function and not responsible for higher-order thought, then

“we have not any organ at all for knowing, or for “truth”: we “know” (or believe, or fancy) just as much as may be of use in the interest of the human herd, the species; and even what is here called “usefulness,” is ultimately only a belief, a fancy, and perhaps precisely the most fatal stupidity by which we shall one day be ruined”

P.S.

The translation I took these quotes from is pretty shitty. I have also looked at the original text and asked myself how I could translate it better, but Nietzsche’s idiosyncratic style is sometimes hard to follow if you’re a native speaker of German, and my English skills are wholly deficient for the task I’m afraid.

References:

Flavell, John. (1979). Metacognition and cognitive monitoring: A new area of cognitive-developmental inquiry. American Psychologist 34, 906–911.

Hurford, James M. (2007): The Origins of Meaning: Language in the Light of Evolution. Oxford: OUP.

Metzinger, Thomas (2000): The Subjectivity of Subjective Experience: A Representationalist Analysis of the First-Person Perspective. In: Thomas Metzinger (ed.): Neural Correlates of Consciousness – Empirical and Conceptual Questions. Cambridge, AM: MIT Press

Pinker, Steven 1994. The Language Instinct: The New Science of Language and Mind. London: Lane Penguin Press.

Smith, J. D., W. E. Shields, and D. A. Washburn (2003a). The comparative psychology of uncertainty monitoring and metacognition. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 26, 317–339.

A Digression on the History of Some Philosophical Ideas about Cognition and Evolution

Over at Evolving Thoughts, John Wilkins has drawn attention to a new article about Austrian physicist and philosopher Ernst Mach (1838-1916) in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Mach was an important figure for the philosophical theory of positivism, philosophy of science in general, gestalt theory, and even influenced Skinner’s behaviorism. Mach was also very interested in psychology, and focused on the question how sense data and sensory elements, constitute our perception, and especially our conscious experience and sense of selfhood, given that the starting point for our conscious experience and reasoning is actually made of elements like this :

source:
wikiepdia commons

According to Mach, we then shorten, bundle and anchor these “elements” into a unified body-image self concept. There is thus only a

“complex of memories, moods, and feelings, joined to a particular body (the human body), which is denominated the "I" or "Ego" (Mach, 1897. p. 3, cited in Pleh 1999) But: "The primary fact is not the I, the Ego, but the elements (sensations). The elements constitute the I. ... when I die... only an ideal mental-economical unity, not a real unity, has ceased to exist (Mach, 1897, p. 19-20, cited in Pléh 1999)"

To explain how these sensations are bundled and form concepts he draws on Darwin’s theory of evolution, which, as Wilkins notes, makes him one on of the first evolutionary epistemologists:

Here’s what Paul Rojman writes in his article:

"Mach is part of the empiricist tradition, but he also believed in an a priori. But it is a biologized a priori: what is a priori to an individual organism was a posteriori to its ancestors; not only does the a priori pre-form experience, but the a priori is itself formed from experience. It was simultaneously the contradiction and confirmation of Kantian epistemology. In as much as Kant used the a priori to explain how knowledge is possible, Mach uses the knowledge of the new sciences to explain how an a priori is possible. One more patch of philosophy, it was thought, yielded to science.”

Interestingly, Mach even made some interesting comment on what today we would call Theory of Mind Research:

"We predict in thought the acts and behavior of men by assuming sensations, feelings, and wills similar to our own connected with their bodies" (Mach, 1910, p. 207, cited in Pleh 1999). He even speculates on how early and in what way these capacities emerge: "every child unconsciously accomplished it" (Mach, 1910: 208, cited in Pleh 1999).

This would thus make Mach a Simulationist in the current debate.

In his Article “Ernst Mach and Daniel Dennett: Two Evolutionary Models of Cognition” Csaba Pléh shows that there is are interesting historical developments that “create a continuity from Mach to Dennett“ starting from Ernst Mach and other Viennese Scholars. Pléh argues that Mach influenced psychologist Karl Bühler, taught and influenced both philosopher Karl Popper, who focused on the logical aspect of evolutionary transmission and ethologist Konrad Lorenz, who focused on evolutionary explanations for biological traits. Both then influenced the work of Dan Dennett either directly or indirectly.

Thus, the two philosophical traditions which had their origin in Vienna, Logical Positivism and evolutionary-minded behaviorally studies/evolutionary epistemology, finally unite in modern cognitive science-oriented philosophy:

“What we have today in the work of Dennett and others is a meeting of the Frege-Russell-Vienna traditions with the Darwinian traditions so clearly exposed by Mach.” (Pléh 1999)

Interestingly, speaking of historical forebears of modern ideas about cognition, I looked at the wikipedia articles on gestalt theorists, in the German wikipedia entry for famous gestalt theorist Wolfgang Köhler I found a reference to a paper in the journal Gestalt Theory, in which Morris Eagle and Jerome Wakefield claim that Köhler anticipated the discovery and function of mirror neurons with his theory of psychophysical isomorphism. Here are the abstracts:

"Recent work in cognitive neuroscience reveals that, when one observes another person performing some action, neurons fire in one’s own motor cortex that are the very same neurons that would fire if one were also performing the observed action; these have been dubbed “mirror neurons”. The principle of external or interpersonal isomorphism, formulated by the Gestalt psychologists, Köhler and Koffka, during the 1920’s through to the 1940’s, anticipated important aspects of the mirror neuron discovery. Moreover, both the Gestaltists’ theory, based on the principle of interpersonal isomorphism, and Gallese’s (2003) contemporary theory of “embodied simulation”, inspired by the mirror neuron discovery, converge on the central claim that our general ability to understand another’s actions, emotions, and intentions, is implicit, automatic, and non-inferential. (Eagle and Morris 2007)"

"This paper aims to give a constructive contribution to Eagle & Wakefield’s contention (in their article in Gestalt Theory 29, 59-64) that the Gestaltists’ hypotheses regarding isomorphism and phenomenological direct access to other’s mind anticipate recent accounts of mind-reading ability. I attempt to specify the extent to which Gestalt psychology might be seen to be consistent under certain respects with mirror neurons system theory and embodied simulation theory, claimed to be founding the aforementioned ability. Therefore, empirical and theoretical issues such as the neurobiological features of the mirror neuron system, the psychological explanation of its functions, and the features of the embodied simulation theory are briefly addressed. Further, some points about the consistence of this explanatory view with some key Gestaltist notions are made. It is argued that talk of off-line action planning as internal pretending states might not be consonant with Koffka’s attempt to explaining other’s mental states as a special class of phenomenal qualities." (Cali 2007)

"Recent work in cognitive neuroscience reveals that, when one observes another person performing some action, neurons fire in one’s own motor cortex that are the very same neurons that would fire if one were also performing the observed action; these have been dubbed “mirror neurons”. The principle of external or interpersonal isomorphism, formulated by the Gestalt psychologists, Köhler and Koffka, during the 1920’s through to the 1940’s, anticipated important aspects of the mirror neuron discovery. Moreover, both the Gestaltists’ theory, based on the principle of interpersonal isomorphism, and Gallese’s (2003) contemporary theory of “embodied simulation”, inspired by the mirror neuron discovery, converge on the central claim that our general ability to understand another’s actions, emotions, and intentions, is implicit, automatic, and non-inferential." (Morris and Wakefield 2007)

Perspectives on "Perspective" – Part II

This post continues my fragmentary list of disciplines in which the phenomenon of “perspective” plays a crucial role. So far, I’ve discussed the importance of perspective from a developmental/ ontogenetic point of view, an evolutionary/ comparative point of view and, more generally, from a cognitive point of view.

In this post I’ll write a bit about some aspects of perspective from a philosophical point of view as well as from the perspective of cognitive linguistics.

4. Perspective from a philosophical point of view

Perspective also plays an important role in all conscious processes, as

“consciousnesses can be defined as being conscious of perspectivally selected aspects of some phenomenon.” (Allwood 2006).

This perspectival nature of consciousness can largely be attributed to our embodiment, as discussed in the previous post.

On the other hand, we have to be careful in equating all the interesting properties of consciousness with embodiment. There are quite radical theories out there that pose that consciousness is only a function of our embodied and situated interaction with the world. Consciousness in this way is not only an essential part of, but is in fact constituted by the interaction of mind, body, and world.

The “cognition is for action”-hypothesis seems to be more plausible in this respect. It poses that consciousness is a precondition for being in and navigating our everyday world. (Prinz in press). A central function of consciousness is that it is part of a system that “decouples” representations from their direct linkage to action chains, processes and analyzes these representations, generalizes them to schemas, and makes these newly formed multifaceted representations available to various action systems.

A conscious intentional system able to pre-select among various options by analyzing decoupled representations thereby extends the response breadth of an organism. (Sterelny 2003). Consciousness is thus fundamentally linked to our bodies and the world, but not necessarily constituted by it (Prinz in press).

What this tells us is that is useful to look at the phenomenon of perspective from a functional point of view, i.e. what it means for cognition and mental processes to be perspectival, body based and action-oriented. One application of this form of inquiry would be to ask what we actually need information for:

“Viewpoint-specific information is needed to determine how your goal can best be realized: it’s information that provides a means to the end.” (Prinz in press).

We should of course also consider that all information we acquire is perspectivally mediated, either through our embodiment, or through the perspectival nature of the medium itself. This holds for the many potential perspectives intrinsic to language (Köller 2004) as well as for “the media” in a broader sense, which make accessible to us information that we otherwise never would’ve known about.

The structure and organization of our knowledge is thus always deeply rooted in and influenced by the perspectival nature of the information transmitters. Metaphorically we could almost go as far as saying that we form an integrated circuitry, an interface with our environment, including electronic devices (Jean Baudrillard 1988). Tools and artifacts, including information transmission devices such as book, the internet, TV, etc. can in general be seen as “the extensions of man” (McLuhan 1964), with which we interface with basically from birth, thus creating some kind of feedback loop

“where we shape our tools and therefore our tools shape us” (McLuhan 1964)

making us “natural-born cyborgs” (Clark 2003). This creates

“the problem of understanding how human thought and reason is born out of looping interactions between material brains, material bodies, and complex cultural and technological environments. We create these supportive environments, but they create us too. We exist, as the thinking things we are, only thanks to a baffling dance of brains, bodies, and cultural and technological scaffolding. Understanding this evolutionarily novel arrangement is crucial for our science, our morals, and our self-image both as persons and as a species.” (Clark 2003)

Although this all may sound a bit esoteric and we should definitely remember Jesse Prinz’s caveat, what seems clear is that perspective is a phenomenon born out of

1.the development of perspectival mental representations during childhood which arose from the interaction with others and through the integration of perspectival concepts and perspectives mediated by language (Tomasello 1999, Clark 1997)

2. The perspectival sense of selfhood that came out of shared attention and intentions, cooperative interactions, and the unification and evaluation of conflicting perspectives on self and others, enabling the child to integrate various perspectives and life episodes into a single, unified concept of self (Moll 2007)

3. The fact that not only our own view of the world is linked to a certain point of view, but that the same holds true for the information we get from all kinds of sources, which thus creates a kind of dialogue between our own perspective and the various perspectives embodied in the information coming from the outside world.

5. Perspective from a linguistic perspective

There are a lot of linguists, especially cognitive linguists who treat the phenomenon of perspective as central to language. On this view, language can be seen as inherently embodying the manifold perspectives of all language users of the past who used it to allocate attention, and ‘perspectivize’ certain salient and relevant features of a situation or event (for such a view, see e.g. Köller 2004, Tomasello 1999).

Cognitive linguists assume that language reflects “at least partially, the nature and organisation of the conceptual system” (Evans & Wood 2006: 170), thus giving us important insights into how the mind works. If linguistic organization is partially illustrative of the way we conceptualize things, it follows that if perspective is an important aspect of linguistic structure, it is also a fundamental property of cognition:

“The perspectival nature of linguistic meaning implies that the world is not objectively reflected in the language: the categorization function of the language imposes a structure on the world rather than just mirroring objective reality (Geeraerts and Cuyckens 2007: 5).”

To make this clearer, consider the following examples (taken from Evans & Wood 2006: 41ff.):

a. The boy kicks over the vase.

b. The vase is kicked over.

c. The vase smashes into bits.

d. The vase is in bits.

In each of this sentences another aspect of the scene is made salient.

(a) can be seen as the unmarked case in which the event as a whole is represented, and is thus the main focus of the description.

In (b) the main focus lies on the action itself and its PATIENT (i.e. the receiving end of the action), whereas the AGENT, is only weakly represented, i.e. in the background.

In (c) the action chain of the object, its internal change and the resulting state (b = in bits) are ‘profiled’, i.e. made the center of attention.

(d), on the other hand focuses on the end state of the object.

We can thus say that each sentence embodies a different perspective on the state of events.

This observation is a major hallmark of cognitive linguistics and the notion of “perspective” or something related to it can thus be found in the terminology of many cognitive linguists. This holds, for example, for the domain of metaphor, where “a recurrent characteristic determining the nature of metaphor has been that it presents its target from a particular point of view.” (Dirven et al. 2007: 1226). Max Black (1993) explicitly calls this phenomenon “perspective”, whereas Lakoff & Johnson (1980) call it ”highlighting and hiding” (see Dirven et al. 2007: 1226).

Ronald Langacker (e.g. 2007) also describes perspective, i.e. “the linguistic manifestations of the position from which a situation is viewed” (see Verhagen 2007: 53) as a central dimension of the construal operations that we employ when using and comprehending language. This phenomenon is also deeply intertwined with the phenomenon of “profiling”, where one aspect of a scene appears salient and constitutes the figure which is positioned against a background. In Rubin’s famous face/vase-figure, for example, you can see either the face as figure and the vase as ground, or vice versa:

Leonard Talmy (2000) also proposes that the “Perspectival System” is one of the four schematic systems that structure scenes expressed by language. In his view this system:

“includes schematic categories that relate to the spatial or temporal perspective point from which a scene is viewed, the distance of the perspective point from the entity viewed, the change of perspective point over time and so on” (Evans & Wood 2006: 194).

Consider the following two examples where the main difference between the sentences is the ‘perspective point’:

(Talmy 2000: 69, see also Evans & Wood 2006: 197):

The door slowly opened and two men walked in. (Interior perspective point)

Exterior perspective point (Two men slowly opened the door and walked in.)

A perspective point seems to be exactly the same as what Karl Bühler (1934) called an origo point located on a ‘coordinate system of subjective orientation’, and I prefer Bühler’s terminology over that of Talmy. Still Talmy’s work seems to very insightful and fundamental and I will try to write a bit more about it in a subsequent post.

Similary, and as I described in an earlier post, Brian MacWhinney argues that perspective taking is a fundamental cognitive process that enables language to bind together the five imagery subsystems of direct experience, space/time deixis, plans, social roles, and mental acts (MacWhinney 2005). MacWhinney also makes the observation that the expression and recognition of the deictic center of an utterance and/or a mental representation is an important linguistic and cognitive operation, and, just as Talmy, doesn’t refer to Bühler. Following Duchan et al. (1995) MacWhinney differentiates between three deictic frameworks: egocentric, allocentric and geocentric.:

“Egocentric deixis directly encodes the perspective of the speaker. The spatial position of the speaker becomes the deictic center or “here.”” (MacWhinney 2005: 203). This would be what following Bühler is called the Here-Now-I-Origo.

The allocentric frame projects

“the deictic center onto an external object”, and makes us assume “the perspective of another object and then [judge] locations from the viewpoint of that object”(MacWhinney 2005: 203).

One example would be “the pool in front of the house,” where the pool’s position is defined relative to the location of the house. Other, more mundane examples of the allocentric frame are “under the table”, “behind the desk”, “next to the zombie” etc.

The geocentric frame

"enforces a perspective based on fixed external landmarks, such as the position of a mountain range, the sun, the North Star, the North Pole, or a river.” (MacWhinney 2005: 203).

According to MacWhinney there are languages that make excessive use of this kind of perspective taking:

In Guugu Yimithirr, an Australian Aboriginal language, for example, “rather than asking someone to “move back from the table,” one might say, “move a bit to the mountain.” (MacWhinney 2005: 203)

MacWhinney argues that linguistic perspective taking is based on the construction of a “full-blown Cartesian coordinate system” and that it involves the construction of “a temporary Cartesian grid” based on the conceptual construal of a given linguistic event and the dominant integrated propositional objects therein (MacWhinney 2005: 203f.)

This proposal seems perfectly congruent with Karl Bühler’s description and of mental representations involving a “coordinate system of subjective orientation”. It also squares well with my own clumsy extrapolation of this system following Wilhlem Köller’s (2004) notion of a ‘systemic space’/’coordinate system’ into which propositional objects and concepts can be transferred, imported, which then can be blended and manipulated.

I really find it exciting that MacWhinney’s approach is so similar to that taken by Karl Bühler, and more generally, that a lot of approaches to perspective and cognition converge on the metaphor of a coordinate system. This metaphor may prove to have great integrative power in the cognitive sciences and I’m looking forward what will come of it.

That’s it for now. In the future I will try to address some of the proposals outlined here in more detail. For the time being, I hope to have shown that studying the various forms of perspective can be a rewarding and cool enterprise.

Somewhere in the distant future, the phenomenon of perspective may prove an important aspect of many inquiries into all cognitive phenomena, and studying the perspectivity intrinsic to cognitive systems and their various emanations and expressions may be a useful overarching paradigm able to combine and integrate various areas of research.

References:

Allwood, Jens (2006): 'Consciousness, Thought and Language' In K. Brown (ed.) Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, 2nd edition. Oxford: Elsevier, 44-53.

Bühler, Karl. 1934. Sprachtheorie. Die Darstellungsfunktion der Sprache. Jena: Gustav Fischer.

Clark, Andy (2003): Natural-Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies, and. the Future of Human Intelligence, Oxford: Oxoford University Press-

Clark, Eve V. (1997): Conceptual Perspective and Lexical Choice in Acquisition. In: Cognition 64:1–37.

Dirven, René, Frank Polzenhagen, and Hans-Georg Wolf Cognitive Linguistics, Ideology, and Critical Discourse Analysis. In: Dirk Geeraerts and Herbert Cuyckens (eds.) The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Duchan, J. F., Bruder, G. A., & Hewitt, L. E. (1995). Deixis in Narrative: A Cognitive Science Perspective. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Evans, Vyvyan and Rachel Wood (2006): Cognitive Linguistics: An Introduction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Geeraerts, Dirk and Herbert Cuyckens (2007): Introducing Cognitive Linguistics. In: Dirk Geeraerts and Herbert Cuyckens (eds.) The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Langacker, Ronald W. (2007): Cognitive Grammar. In: Dirk Geeraerts and Herbert Cuyckens (eds.) The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson (1980): Metaphors we live by. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Kannetzky, Frank (2007): Weder Bewußtseinsimmanenz noch Schnittpunktexistenz. Überlegungen zum Begriff der Person. In: F. Kannetzky/H. Tegtmeyer (Hrsg.): Personalität. Leipzig: Universitätsverlag

Köller, Wilhelm (2004): Perspektivität und Sprache. Zur Struktur von Objektivierungsformen in Bildern, im Denken und in der Sprache. Berlin/ New York: de Gruyter.

MacWhinney, Brian (2005): The Emergence of Grammar from Perspective. In: Diane Pecher und Rolf A. Zwaan (Eds.), The Grounding of Cognition: The Role of Perception and Action in Memory, Language, and Thinking. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 199-223.

McLuhan, Herbert Marshall (1964): Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Moll, Henrike (2007). Person und Perspektivität – Kooperation und soziale Kognition beim Menschen. In F. Kannetzky & H. Tegtmeyer (Eds.), Leipziger Schriften zur Philosophie. Personalität – Studien zu einem Schlüsselbegriff der Philosophie, 37-56. Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag.

Sterelny, Kim (2003): Thought in a Hostile World: The Evolution of Human Cognition. Malden: Blackwell.

Talmy, Leonard (2000) Toward a Cognitive Semantics (2 vols). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Tomasello, Michael (1999): The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition. Cambridge, Massachusetts; London, England: Harvard University Press

Verhagen, Arie (2007): Construal and Perspectivization. In: Dirk Geeraerts and Herbert Cuyckens (eds.) The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

The Cognitive Foundations of Perspective

In my last three post I have highlighted convergences between the arguments made by German linguist Wilhelm Köller in his 2004 book “Perspektivität und Sprache” (Perspectivity and Language”) and findings in the general area of cognitive science.

In this post, I want to dig a little deeper, and ask what happens when we engage in discourse in regard to the cognitive representations that are established. Köller argues that through the use of language we create a shared ‘systemic space’ (a term he takes over from the German art historian Erwin Panofsky) a virtual, conceptual model of what we are talking about. We can then create and direct attention to certain proposition in this shared systemic space, thereby advertising a certain perspective on the world, and highlighting relevant information. Köller bases this view of language on German psychologist and linguist Karl Bühler’s (1934) notion of the “Deictic/Symbolic field” which we construct, and wherein we place and transport referential semantic messages, and which basically can be illustrated like this:

Bühler calls this the ‘coordinate system of subjective orientation’. The O represents the ‘Origopoint’, the point of origin for all referential messages, and is also called the “I-here-now-Origo”, because from this point of view/perspective the sender refers to thing in the world, and introduces new referents into the discourse. Köller adopts this view of language, but adds to it the perspectival and attention-piloting nature of discourse.

In sum, in Köller’s view Language is:

1. a means to create a shared, ‘virtual’ systemic space
   
2. a means to transfer relevant propositions in to the systemic space and
   
3. a means to focus and pilot attentions and thus to
   
4. create perspective
   

This view of mental representations as virtual, internal models of some state of affairs in the world is echoed in a variety of other proposals in cognitive science.

First, and most importantly, Michael Tomasello and his colleagues from our beloved Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology argue for the importance of Shared Intentionality, in human cognition, that is

“the ability to participate with others in collaborative activities with shared goals and intentions” (Tomasello et al. 2005: 675).

In order to both communicate or collaborate, it is necessary that:

“each participant cognitively represent both roles of the collaboration in a single representational format – holistically, from a “bird’s-eye view,” (Tomasello et al. 2005: 681).

Thus, we need to have the knowledge of that there exists a “shared space of common psychological ground” (Tomasello & Carpenter 2007: 121).
This means that the most fundamental aspect of human cognition that enables joint attention and shared intentional actions is the ability to cognitively represent a “shared space of meaning” (Moll & Tomasello 2006: )/ a ‘systemic space’ from a central perspective (Köller 2004).

Dan Dennett (1996) also holds that one of the major feats of human cognition is the ability to build virtual models of reality, especially the ability to build rich intentional models of yourself and others. In this virtual model, you can take the physical stance, the design stance, or the intentional stance toward the systems created and basically see what happens.

In addition, Bickerton (1990) argues that the most special trait of human cognition is the ability to entertain counterfactual propositions. To give you an example in the vein of Köller (2004): If I say something like:

“There aren’t any Zombies in this room,”

not only do I introduce the concept of ‘Zombies’ into the systemic space, but negated Zombies:

Such counterfactual propositions needn’t necessarily be linguistic. In his 2006 Jean Nicod Prize lecture, Michael Tomasello gave the example of a child always wearing a belt when it goes for a walk. When the child and her mother go out of the house, and the mother then sees that the child doesn’t have his belt on, but only points to the child’s waistband, the child goes ‘Ooops’ , goes back inside and fetches the belt. Mother and child thus communicate nonverbally about a counterfactual proposition based on mutual knowledge/common ground about a conventionalized set of actions. Bickerton proposes that this ability is syntactically structured and enables us to manipulate, physical and virtual events, objects, and processes in general.

Don Ross (2007), reviewing Dennett’s and Bickerton’s proposals, argues that on this view language is a means to stabilize ‘referential fixed points’ in these virtual spaces. So on the one hand language can be seen as cognitive aid or artifact which enhances cognitive representations via conceptual labeling, and on the other hand it can be seen as a means of introducing fixed points into the virtual shared systemic space of joint attentional discourse.
Ross then draws our attention to the fact that we also introduced ourselves into these virtual spaces, thus ‘narrating’, and thus creating our selfhood and our identity both in private mental representation and shared intentional discourse.

Suddendorf & Corballis (2007) have similar ideas about the importance of self- and other-projection into virtual spaces as a method of ‘Mental Time Travel’, which enables us to plan and adapt to possible future stages of the world as well as future need by learning from and re-experiencing the past and projecting ourselves into future situations where we can practice various plans of action. They liken this process to a theater production, as the necessary precondition for virtual planning and decoupled thinking processes is a virtual systemic space, or, if you go with their theater-metaphor, a stage. According to Suddendorf & Corballis (2007), further necessary components of Mental Time Travel are:

• a declarative database or script from which you can infer how to act in a given situations (i.e. the playwright),
  
• the ability to represent yourself and others realistically, ergo a Theory of Mind (i.e. the actors),
  
• the ability to create an adequate physical context in which the mental representation can operate (the set),
  
• the motivation and ability to practice and rehearse future actions in the virtual space.(the director)
  
• the ability to voluntarily control and execute the ‘best plan’ to achieve the future goal, which is relatively ‘rational’, and decoupled from present stimuli and neeeds. (The executive producer)
• and additionaly, many MTTs are expressed publicly via language: "More generally, humans use language to exchange and complement their mental travels into the past and their ideas about future events, as well as to cooperatively coordinate plans and strategies" (Suddendorf & Corballis 2007: 310) (The broadcaster)
  
  

Virtual internal modeling can of course also seen as a solution to the exploration-exploitation trade-off as well as to the unstable environment homo is said to have emerged from.

Interestingly, there is additional support for this internal modeling hypothesis namely, from robotics.

As you may recall, In my first post I briefly described an experiment done by Floreano and Nolfi (1996) in which a robot evolved to internally represent the area surrounding him, thus enabling him to act in relation to the virtual internal body-related map he had created.

Even more intriguing, Bongard et al. (2006) describe a robot which adapts to an unstable environment as well as injuries (such as losing a leg) by continuous internal self-modelling.

Of course, the notions of internal systemic representation is practically all-pervasive throughout the field of cognitive science, as echoed for example in the controversy between Theory-Theory and Simulation Theory proponents in Theory of Mind research, as well as the ongoing controversies regarding the relation between mirror neurons and mental imagery, and practically every aspect of cognition, but I find the combination of internal representational spaces, shared intentionality and perspective incredibly, and I write a bit more about their cognitive and linguistic foundations in my next post. I’ll also try to stay more down to earth in my next post.

References:

Bickerton, Derek .1990. Language and Species. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,

Bongard, J. V. Zykov, & Lipson, H. 2006. “Resilient Machines Through Continuous Self-Modeling” Science 314: 1118-1121.

Bühler, Karl. 1934. Sprachtheorie. Die Darstellungsfunktion der Sprache. Jena: Gustav Fischer.

Dennett, Daniel C. 1996. Kinds of Minds. New York: Basic Books.

Floreano, Dario, and Francesco Mondada. 1996. “Evolution of homing navigation in a real mobile robot”, IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics – Part B: Cybernetics 26:396–407.

Köller, Wilhelm. 2004. Perspektivität und Sprache. Zur Struktur von Objektivierungsformen in Bildern, im Denken und in der Sprache. Berlin/ New York: de Gruyter.

Moll, Henrike, & Michael Tomasello. 2007. Co-operation and human cognition: The Vygotskian intelligence hypothesis. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society 362: 639-648.

Ross, Don. 2007. H. sapiens as ecologically special: what does language contribute? Language Sciences 29.5: 7 10-731.

Tomasello, Michael.1999.: The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition. Cambridge, Massachusetts; London, England: Harvard University Press

Tomasello, Michael and Malinda Carpenter. 2007. Shared Intentionality. Developmental Science 10:1:121-125.

Tomasello, Michael, Malinda Carpenter, Josep Call, Tanya Behne, and Henrike Moll. 2005. “Understanding and Sharing Intentions: The Origins of Cultural Cognition.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 28.4: 675-735.

Suddendorf, Thomas & Michael C. Corballis. 2007. The Evolution of Foresight: What is mental time travel, and is it unique to humans? Behavioral and Brain Sciences 30.3: 219-313.

The Intentional Stance

According to Dan Dennett (1987) there are different strategies for predicting the future behavior of systems. A successful strategy to predict the behavior of a physical system is the ‘physical stance’, which works like this:

“determine its physical constitution (perhaps all the way down to the microphysical level) and the physical nature of the impingements upon it, and use your knowledge of the laws of physics to predict the outcome to any input.” (Dennett 1987: 16).

For example, to predict that if I lose grip of a stone I hold in my hand it will fall down, we use the physical stance (Dennett 1999).

Another strategy is the ‘design stance’ from which you assume that a certain design enables you to predict that the system will “behave as it is designed to behave” (Dennett 1987: 17). Examples are alarm clocks, computers, or thermostats, where you can gain insight about their function by analyzing the mechanics behind it, or observe the way they work. The 'design stance' is riskier than the physical stance, because first I only suppose that the artifact I encounter works like I think it does, and second, the artifact can be misdesigned or be victim to a malfunction, whereas the laws of physics do not simply do that. (Dennett 1999).

The riskiest stance is the ‘intentional stance’, and

“Here is how it works: first you decide to treat the object whose behavior is to be predicted as a rational agent; then you figure out what beliefs that agent ought to have, given its place in the world and its purpose. Then you figure out what desires it ought to have, on the same considerations, and finally you predict that this rational agent will act to further its goals in the light of its beliefs. A little practical reasoning from the chosen set of beliefs and desires will in most instances yield a decision about what the agent ought to do; that is what you predict the agent will do” (Dennett 1987: 17).

In animate agents, the intentional stance comes very close what we call “Theory of Mind”. Although risky, the ‘intentional stance’ is also incredibly powerful. To illustrate this, Dennett engages in a pretty interesting Gedankenexperiment: If there were Martians – to modify the idea a little, let’s say, zombies – able to predict every future state of the universe, and therefore every action of human beings through a complete knowledge of physics, without treating humans as ‘intentional systems’, they would still miss something.
If one zombie, call him Pierre, would engage in a predicting contest with a human, he would need much more information to predict what would happen if someone went to get cigarettes than a human treating the cigarette-getter as an intentional system and taking into account the patterns in human behavior.
So why does this strategy work, and how? First, in the course of evolution, humans evolved to use these predictive strategies because they worked, or as Quine puts it

“creatures inveterately wrong in their inductions have a pathetic but praiseworthy tendency to die out before reproducing their kind.” (Quine 1953).

According to evolutionary epistemology, natural selection ensures a “fit” between our cognitive mechanisms and the world, at least asymptotically, because the closest approximation of epistemological mechanisms and reality has the greatest survival value. (Some aspects of these thoughts are also important in the “Social Brain Hypothesis”, which I will write about some time in the future.) This probably also holds true for the evolution of the intentional stance/theory of mind. But how does “the machinery which nature has provided us” (Dennett 1987: 33) work? Dennett himself (albeit cautionary) proposes that there may be a connection between the exploding complex combinatorics of mind-reading/the prediction of complex behaviors and the generative, combinatorial properties of language/the language of thought.
Poirier et al. (2005) have an updated idea concerning how these predictive strategies might work, and present their speculations with considerations from an embodied evolutionary-developmental computational cognitive neuroscience (there, I said it again) viewpoint, which I will, finally, discuss in my next post.

References:

Dennett, Daniel C. 1987. The Intentional Stance. Cambridge, MA: Bradford Books.

Dennet, Daniel C. 1999. "The Intentional Stance." The MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences. Eds.Robert A. Wilson and Frank C. Keil. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Poirier, Pierre, Benoit Hardy-Vallée and Jean-Frédéric Depasquale. 2005. “Embodied
Categorization.” Handbook of Categorization in Cognitive Science. Eds. Henri Cohen and Claire Lefebvre. Amsterdam: Elsevier.

Quine, Willard van Orman. 1953. From a Logical Point of View. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.