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Sunday, October 28, 2007
Kant Pinker Cognition Philosophy
Steven Pinker’s latest book, The Stuff of Thought, covers a great deal of information about conceptual underpinnings of language use (review by Colin McGinn in the New York Review of Books). He has quite a bit to say about the concepts of space, time, and causality that are embedded in ordinary language, with fairly detailed discussions of classes of verbs and the types of subjects and objects they can accommodate. In chapter four he offers these observations:
This chapter is about space, time, causality, and substance as they are represented in language, in the mind, and in reality. I have framed the chapter with ideas based on Kant because the conceptual scaffolding that he said organizes our experience is also conspicuous in the organization of language. . . . real languages appear to be organized by Kantian abstract categories. (pp. 158-9)
. . . even to day the experts disagree on whether he was making claims about the mind or Homo sapiens or giving specifications for a generic rational observer. I can’t see how he could not be making claims about our minds, at least implicitly, and at least one Kant scholar, Patricia Kitcher, has argued that Kant was not just a great philosopher but an ambitious and prescient cognitive psychologist. (p. 160)
It’s been so long since I read any Kant that I don’t have a serious opinion on what he was up to. Still, that’s the sort of thing I’ve thought about at bit, but in a different philosophical context. Here are some speculative remarks I’ve cobbled together from notes I’ve written up at one time or another.
Consider Plato. In his philosophy he wondered how some thing, such as a bed, could exist when it presented so many different appearances, appearing large and small or variously tilted, and so forth. Thus in the Theatetus (152d) Plato has Socrates teaching a secret doctrine of Protagoras:
It declares that nothing is one thing just by itself, no can you rightly call it by some definite name, nor even say it is of any definite sort. On the contrary, if you call it ‘large,’ it will be found to be also small, if ‘heavy,’ to be also light, and so an all through, because nothing is one thing or some thing or of any definite sort. All the things we are pleased to say ‘are,’ are really in process of becoming, as a result of movement and change and of blending one with another.
Plato inferred that there must be something behind those appearances holding them together. That something was the Ideal Form of bedness, which existed in realm of Ideals. This problem is one quite familiar to researchers in the cognitive sciences, only we do not think of it as having anything to do with the nature of beds. Rather, we think of it as having to do with the nature of perception: How can the nervous system identify objects given the multiplicity of appearances they present to the eye?
That is to say, Plato too was a proto-psychologist and his account of Ideals was, in part, about what we know today as perceptual constancy. I don’t recall whether or not there’s a technical term the fact that something can be both heavy (in comparison with one thing) and light (in comparison with another), but psychology has something to say about that as well.
But how’d Plato come to notice such things and account for them in such a peculiar way? I’m rather fond of the notion that he got it from geometry, in which he placed great stock. One of the first things you learn in geometry is that the real triangle, the mathematical object, is perfect, unlike the various triangles you draw by way of illustrating and investigating the mathematical object. One learns about real triangles through mathematical reasoning, which is rather different from inspecting imperfect drawings of triangles.
So, what would happen if, intrigued by geometry, Plato decided to “project” the distinction between phenomenal triangles and mathematically ideal triangles onto the world at large? Well, you’d get the idea that actual things are imperfect copies of the ideal things. And the bed with its many appearances would be a good example. [At this point I’m moving into the territory explored by Lakoff and Johnson in Philosophy in the Flesh. Let’s just say I think they pushed cognitive metaphor theory a wee too far in that book.]
It’s all very speculative, but . . . It seems to me that the issue of Kant and his categories is in the same ball park. That is to say, if I were to work up an argument on the issue, I’d argue that he’s rationalizing categories implemented in the functional structure of our nervous system. But I’d go for a full-dress treatment of Plato before I’d tackle Kant.
And then we have the discovery of recursive functions in mathematical logic and Chomsky’s subsequent notion that recursion inheres in syntax. Were those logicians discovering yet another aspect of human cognition? And all this needs to be run though Piaget’s genetic epistemology and perhaps even his obscure observations in Biology and Knowledge.
Comments
Bill,
It’s been at least 15 years since I’ve dealt with Kant, so I’ll let others comment on him. With Plato, though, I think you are essentially correct.
There is the tradition that study at the Academy involved years of mathematics (geometry). There is also Pythagoras who heavily influenced Greek thought with his notion that numbers constituted the only thing real and that everything in the world related to them. A traditional view is that Plato combined Pythagoras with Heraclitus to account for the eternity of the ideal with the observable flux of the world.
Another common view is that Plato took Socrates’ attempt to fix definitions of things to its logical end. If something could be defined, such as friendship or justice, then it must exist, even if we only see imperfect versions in the world.
Is this psychology? I suppose in the sense you mean. But that claim may have some validity even by Plato’s/Socrates’ terms. What fueled both Socrates and Plato was a desire to understand the soul (or psyche). To perceive these Forms (for Plato, Socrates apparently did not take things so far) involved a philosophical ascent, which means the psyche through a series of stages (which are in poetic or mythologizing terms laid out in the Phaedrus) came close and closer to percieving ultimate reality. So, yes, it’s very much true that that perception and reality in Plato are intimately inter-related.
As for the notion that this ability to perceive is somehow inherent in the structure of the brain. I think you can make a case that Plato thought that. Key to Plato’s (if not Socrates’) notion of dialectic is that the immortal soul already knows Reality, but the process of being incarnated in flesh causes it to forget. Learning is thus remembering, and the goal is through each successive incarnation to remember a bit more until finally you can escape the bonds of flesh altogether.
One difficulty in discussing what Plato believed is that we tend to force the observations made by characters in Plato’s philosophical dramas into a whole, coherent system. But Plato didn’t write treatises, and he didn’t even write the kind of dialogues that Aristotle apparently did—in which the chief interlocutor represents unproblmatically the views of Aristotle. In Plato’s dialogues, we see emphasized the process of philosophy, but not the establishment of a firm system. That is how I see it, anyway. Many of the dialogues end in aporia (a state of befuddlement) and the interlocutors agree to take up whatever the particular issue is another day. Virtually every claim of knowledge made by the chief interlocutor (usually Socrates, but not always) of a dialogue is tentative, qualified. To my knowledge, the only claim Socrates makes definitively is that he knows the nature of Love (in the Symposium). I think Plato is often mistaught because a common practice is to strip all the particularities of the drama out and to treat the components that remain as elements of Plato’s philosophic system. That is to ignore the effort Plato made to set everything in context (setting, character, etc.) and ignore the tentative nature of the investigations found in the dialogues. (The Tubingen school takes that a step further and argues for the existence of a secret doctrine not revealed in the dialogues but which can be inferred from them.) What mattered to Plato and Socrates, imo, was pursuit of the philosophy and the philosophic life, rather than the establisment of some eternally fixed system. Indeed, if such a system could have been achieved, the the process of philosophy would be involve learning an established system rather than engaging in philosophic inquiry itself.
The last couple of decades or so has seen a recurrence in emphasis placed on the dramatic or literary nature of the dialogues.
Bill,
The relationship between geometry and Plato’s theory of forms is drawn out in The Meno, where it is packaged as a theory about recollection. Which is to say that your insight is not so speculative, but rather well grounded—and, I believe, commonly accepted.
As for Kant, while it may be the case that his insights into the forms of intuition may shed light on, or be subsumed under, contemporary cognitive theories, it is probably a mistake to treat him as a cognitive theorist himself. Attempts to gentrify his philosophy and make it contemporary tend to denude the First Critique of all the things that make it, so to speak, _Kantian_.
The notion of the noumenal realm, for instance, drops quite out of the picture if you start treating Kant on terms other than his very own. In modern science, if one were to attempt the translation, we know what noumena is. It is the mirror of nature that we draw up using concepts about space, time, particles, physical formulas, etc.
For Kant, however, all this is part of the phenomenal realm. Intriguingly even time is something we merely perceive—or more precisely, part of the way the world is packaged and ordered in transcendental apperception--, and is not a part of reality.
Or so it seems to me.
-Z.
Bill,
Both Plato and Kant (and Pinker) are trying to explain how we experience the world. This isn’t exactly unusual in philosophy. Adding Pinker or Chomsky doesn’t necessarily make it more interesting.
Also I would agree with the above posts that it is generally accepted by philosophers that Plato was strongly influenced by the Greek fascination with geometry, and maybe also by the Pythagoreans.
In the Cratylus seems to argue that without the Forms, we could no know anything, so that since we do know something, the forms must exist, but what we know is the Forms themselves, which are perfections and not merely imperfect instances, so that if we know the Forms, our knowledge is perfect since it’s the knowledge of perfections, but if our knowledge is not perfect, then it’s non-knowledge of something imperfect and unreal, since if something is real, it’s knowable..... and so on.
Seems to be a lot of circularity there—an argument from need. As a pragmatist it seems to me more sensible to say that we have knowledge of reality insofar as reality is knowable, and it’s as good as it is and no better than that, but that reality obviously reality is not entirely knowable since we actually do know things as well as we do (though of course, anyone who wants to—i.e., a fallen Platonist seeking perfection—can say that we rally don’t know anything at all). A less exciting, less wishful, flatter, less ambitious theory of knowledge that seems pretty sensible but doesn’t make is feel super duper good and blessed by Truth and Goodness.
The bait motivating this theory of truth, in my ever so humble opinion, was the wish to make contentious political and ethical problems solvable by methods as exact and certain as geometry, with true answer which could be appplied administratively by the governors, judges, legislators, or whatever.
Calling it a theory of psychology or of perception seems to pick it up from the wrong end. First, it’s a theory of being, and next, it’s a theory of knowledge and truth, and finally, it’s a theory of education showing how to train people so they can perceive these truths. Most of what we think of as perception and psychology was, for Plato, just confusion blocking us from truth.
However, the forms could be, and were, developed by others to function more empirically.
And I retreat to me bridge.
WHAT I MEANT TO SAY:
In the Cratylus PLATO seems to argue that without the Forms, we could NOT know anything, so that since we do know something, the forms must exist, but what we know is the Forms themselves, which are perfections and not merely imperfect instances, so that if we know the Forms, our knowledge is perfect since it’s the knowledge of perfections, but if our knowledge is not perfect, then it’s non-knowledge of something imperfect and unreal, since if something is real, it’s knowable..... and so on.
Seems to be a lot of circularity there—an argument from need. As a pragmatist it seems to me more sensible to say that we have knowledge of reality insofar as reality is knowable and our mind is accurate, and it’s as good as it is and no better than that—obviously reality is not entirely UNknowable since we actually do know things as well as we do (though of course, anyone who wants to—i.e., a fallen Platonist seeking perfection—can say that we REALLY don’t know anything at all.)
Thanks for the comments, guys. I certainly wasn’t claiming any originality for my notion about geometry and Plato. I read a good deal of Plato years ago, certainly The Meno, and understand that the connection between geometry and his thought is well-known.
But I’m playing a slightly different game here, though it’s probably hard to tell. I’m not trying to interprete Plato so much as I am trying to figure out how, in a cognitive sense, he built his conceptual world. From this POV whether or not his philosophy is correct or even sensible is irrelevant. I’m trying to figure out how he was able to think it at all. It’s one thing to think about apples and oranges and robins and mountains and rivers and storms and bird song and hunger, all things that we can sense with, well, our sense organs. But how is it that one can even conceive of The Good?
I mentioned Lakoff & Johnson’s Philosophy in the Flesh, which is an attempt to explain the concepts of Western philosophy as elaborations on metaphors grounded in physical experience. In general, they argue that abstract thought is metaphorical. Well, I think metaphor is one mechanism, but only one. And it’s not adequate to get you to Plato.
[On the cognitive underpinnings of abstract thought, see: http://asweknowit.ca/evcult/CogEvol.shtml]
And when I think of geometry, I’m thinking not simply of the axioms and deductions, etc. I’m also thinking of the physical things one does in the course of learning geometry, the things one draws, and exactly how one draws them (compass and straight-edge, etc.). That’s important, that’s part of the conceptual basis. So, while one learns that the real triangle is distinct from any triangle one draws, the drawing of triangles is part of the process one goes through in order to learn how to think about the real, the perfect, triangles.
Calling it a theory of psychology or of perception seems to pick it up from the wrong end.
That’s not quite what I’m doing. What I’m doing is pointing out that some of his basic examples concern matters which we would now explain with reference to perceptual mechanisms. We don’t need to postulate the existence of an ideal bed out there in the Realm of the Forms because we know that the mind, in effect, constructs this idea for itself and uses this in perceiving beds. And so on.
Bill,
If I understand you, you are concerned with the beginnings of abstract thought? From a bed, we get beds, and then perfect (ideal) bed? Or more to the point, perhaps: just relations between friends, between citizens, between cities, and then, finally, Justice?
Do you need Plato for this? If you’d like to stick with the Greeks, we have Thales, who believed everything came from, partakes of, and returns to water. We have, later, Parmenides, who claimed there was only the One. (For that matter, the Judaic tradition was moving from a pantheon of Gods (hints of which are still existant in the Old Testament) to a conception of One God). From your point of view, is Plato doing anything fundamentally different than earlier Greek thinkers (though of course, much different in degree, development, and possibily rigor)? They had already adopted a rationalist method; they had already abstracted to First Principles, as it were.
And all of this appears to be born from religion. But why did the Greeks take a rational turn in terms of cosmology and natural phenomena? Although Plato, like other Greeks, used what we describe now as rational methodology (i.e., dialectic), it does seem clear the origins of much of this thought is religious. Plato populates his ideal realms with the Gods, and it is not always clear whether he is using them as metaphors or not. Socrates’ daimon is never explained in rational terms.
It seems to me that either you are really concerned with the human conceptual faculty in general, or in the historical development of particular conceptual frameworks. But if you are indeed concerned with how Plato developed his conceptual world, I think that involves much study of his predecessors and of the notions floating in the Athenian air.
Bill, it occurs to me now (after writing all of that above) that dialectic, eristic, etc., might be a key to what you are after. After all, that’s what Plato got from Socrates and the sophists buzzing about—as I mentioned earlier, Plato took the search for definition to the search for Definition. That’s your conceptual tool, perhaps.