سميح القاسم
المد يــر العـام *****
التوقيع : 
عدد الرسائل : 3177
تعاليق : شخصيا أختلف مع من يدعي أن البشر على عقل واحد وقدرة واحدة ..
أعتقد أن هناك تمايز أوجدته الطبيعة ، وكرسه الفعل البشري اليومي , والا ما معنى أن يكون الواحد منا متفوقا لدرجة الخيال في حين أن الآخر يكافح لينجو ..
هناك تمايز لابد من اقراره أحببنا ذلك أم كرهنا ، وبفضل هذا التمايز وصلنا الى ما وصلنا اليه والا لكنا كباقي الحيونات لازلنا نعتمد الصيد والالتقاط ونحفر كهوف ومغارات للاختباء
تاريخ التسجيل : 05/10/2009
وســــــــــام النشــــــــــــــاط : 10
 | |  The Problem of Philosophy | |
I
The question of the scope of human knowledge has been a
longstanding preoccupation of philosophy. And that question has always had a
special intensity where philosophical knowledge itself is concerned. A certain
anxiety about the nature and possibility of such knowledge is endemic to the
subject. The suspicion is that, in trying to do philosophy, we run up against
the limits of our understanding in some deep way. Ignorance seems the natural
condition of philosophical endeavour, contributing both to the charm and the
frustration of the discipline (if that is the right word). Thus a tenacious
tradition, cutting across the usual division between empiricists and
rationalists, accepts (i) that there are nontrivial limits to our epistemic
capacities and (ii) that these limits stem, at least in part, from the internal
organisation of the knowing mind - its constitutive structure - as distinct from
limits that result from our contingent position in the world. It is not merely
that we are a tiny speck in a vast cosmos; that speck also has its own specific
cognitive orientation, its own distinctive architecture. The human mind conforms
to certain principles in forming concepts and beliefs and theories, originally
given, and these constrain the range of knowledge to which we have access. We
cannot get beyond the specific kinds of data and modes of inference that
characterise our knowledge- acquiring systems - however paltry these may be. The
question has been, not whether this is correct as a general thesis, but rather
what the operative principles are, and where their limits fall. How limited are
we, and what explains the extent and quality of our limits? Can we, indeed, come
to understand the workings of our own epistemic capacities? Hence the enquiries
of Descartes, Locke, Leibniz, Hume, Kant, Peirce, Russell, and many
others.The most recent major theorist in this tradition, and
perhaps the most explicit, is Chomsky.(1) According to him, the mind is a
biologically given system, organised into discrete (though interacting)
subsystems or modules, which function as special-purpose cognitive devices,
variously structured and scheduled, and which confer certain epistemic powers
and limits on their possessors. The language faculty is one such module:
innately based and specifically structured, it comes into operation early in
human life and permits the acquisition, or emergence, of an intricate cognitive
system in a spectacularly short time - this being made possible by the
antecedent presence of the principles of universal grammar in its initial
design. As Chomsky observes, the knowledge so generated is no simpler, by any
plausible objective standard, than knowledge of advanced mathematics or physics;
but the human mind is so adapted that it yields this knowledge with comparative
ease - somewhat as we effortlessly develop a complex physiological structure in
a pre- programmed way. (Compare the ease with which our visual system converts
two-dimensional arrays into three-dimensional percepts, but the difficulty we
have in making even simple two-dimensional drawings on the basis of our three-
dimensional visual experience.) As a corollary, however, this faculty is poorly
adapted to picking up conceivable languages distinct in grammatical structure
from that characteristic of human speech. Its strength is thus also its
weakness; in fact, it could not be strong in one way without being weak in
another.With language as his model case Chomsky develops a
general conception of human intelligence which includes the idea of endogenously
fixed cognitive limits even for conscious reason. Here, too, the price of ready
success in some domains is fumbling or failure in others. He says:'The human mind is a biologically given system with
certain powers and limits. As Charles Sanders Peirce argued, "Man's mind has a
natural adaptation to imagining correct theories of some kinds....If man had not
the gift of a mind adapted to his requirements, he could not have acquired any
knowledge". The fact that "admissible hypotheses" are available to this specific
biological system accounts for its ability to construct rich and complex
explanatory theories. But the same properties of mind that provide admissible
hypotheses may well exclude other successful theories as unintelligible to
humans. Some theories might simply not be among the admissible hypotheses
determined by the specific properties of mind that adapt us "to imagining
theories of some kinds," though these theories might be accessible to a
differently organised intelligence. Or these theories might be so remote in an
accessibility ordering of admissible hypotheses that they cannot be constructed
under actual empirical conditions, though for a differently structured mind they
might be easily accessible.'(2) Among the theories that he thinks may not be
accessible to human intelligence, in virtue of its specific slant, Chomsky
includes the correct theory of free creative action, particularly the ordinary
use of language. We seem able to develop adequate theories of linguistic
competence, i.e. grammars, but when it comes to actual performance our
theoretical insights are meagre or nonexistent. And this is a reflection of the
contingencies of our theoretical capacities, rather than an indication of
objective intransigence.Now much could be said in explication and defence of
Chomsky's general position, but that is not my purpose here. I wish to start
from something like his general perspective and explore some questions seemingly
at some distance from Chomskyan concerns: in particular, I want to ask whether
the phenomenon of philosophical perplexity might be a consequence of the kind of
constitutive cognitive inaccessibility of which he speaks. Is the hardness of
philosophy a result of cognitive bias? Might our difficulties here be a
side-effect of our adeptness in other areas? Where does the felt profundity of
philosophical questions come from? But first I shall have to make some further
general remarks about the idea of cognitive limitation; for we will not be in a
position to approach my main question unless we have properly taken the idea of
cognitive limitation to heart.(3)First, it is easy to see that comparable limitation
theses hold with respect to other aspects of our mental life. We cannot
experience every possible type of sensation, nor every emotion; neither can we
desire everything that might conceivably be desired. Differently constituted
minds from ours might well enjoy a different range of phenomenal, affective and
conative states. There are also sensory thresholds of various kinds which fix
the bounds of our perceptual acuities, and which can vary across perceivers, as
well as obvious restrictions on our memory capacities and reasoning power. These
limits are not in any way dictated by objective phenomena but stem rather from
our species- specific endowments. They give us a particular psychological
profile, not necessarily shared by other species, actual or possible. Indeed, it
is hard to know what it would be like for a psychological being not to have
limitations of these kinds, since such limitations are a direct consequence of
having any determinate psychology at all.(4)Second, we should distinguish between two potential
sources or loci of cognitive limitation: one relating to the content of our
mental representations, the other to the specific character of the operational
system within which those contents occur. That is, there is the question of what
range of concepts we can in principle deploy in our thought; and there is the
separate question of the processing principles and architecture of the system
that contains these concepts. Even with unlimited access to concepts, a system
might be confined by what it can do with them - say, because of attentional or
memory limitations. And a system might be quite impoverished conceptually but be
capable of amazing feats of processing and deployment. So when considering
whether a certain cognitive system is capable of a given task we need to ask
both whether it can acquire mastery of the relevant concepts and whether it has
the organisational resources to put these concepts to work in the necessary way.
One live possibility is that the mind is not notably lacking at the level of
individual concepts but that it lacks the capacity to combine these into
systematic explanatory theories of some given class.Third, if there are the kinds of cognitive predisposition
Chomsky suggests, then we should be on the look-out for tendencies to mislocate
the source of our epistemic triumphs and failures. Since the limits imposed by
our mental organisation are not guaranteed to present themselves as such, we may
find ourselves attributing blame to the wrong thing: we may assume that what
comes easy to us is (intrinsically) easy, and that what comes hard is somehow
objectively recalcitrant. Thus we might be forgiven for supposing, mistakenly,
that grammar is objectively simple compared to (say) relativity theory; but,
rightly considered, this is a projective fallacy, borne of our peculiar
endowments and correctible by an impartial examination of the structure of the
systems of knowledge in question. The ease of accessibility of a knowledge
system to our cognitive capacities is no measure of its internal complexity or
subtlety or profundity - still less of the ontological fibrillations proper to
the subject-matter of the system. Indeed, it is unclear, ultimately, whether
there is any (useful) notion of simplicity or complexity that is quite
unrelativised to the specific aptitudes of a selected cognitive faculty. That
reason is flummoxed by a certain class of problems is thus no proof that those
problems possess any inherent refractoriness, nor that there are no other
conceivable epistemic systems that might take these problems in
stride.It may be thought that the existence of nontrivial
epistemic limits is a peculiarity of a particular philosophical tradition and
that other viewpoints will have less restrictive consequences. Let me then
dispel this impression by surveying briefly some standard theories (or
theory-sketches) about the nature of thought; we shall see that limits are
actually the norm, at any rate by implication. In fact, one of the recurrent
faults of the usual theories is that they tend to delimit our conceptual powers
too narrowly. In any case, it is hard to see how any substantive theory of
concepts could avoid imposing some limits on concept possession, since certain
constitutive conditions will have to be laid down - and hence not necessarily be
satisfied. And the more substantive the theory is the clearer the limits are apt
to become; only vacuous theories give the impression of boundlessness - as if
concepts were entirely weightless and shapeless beings. It might help in
counteracting this subliming tendency (as Wittgenstein called it) to consider
nonhuman thinkers, like dogs and dolphins, when reviewing the theories on offer;
for deification comes harder in their case than for our own superlative species
- at least for us. Here the idea of cognitive limits seems only right and
proper.(5)Three broad types of theory can be distinguished:
sensory, behavioural, external. By sensory theories I mean those that base
concepts on the contents of perceptual experience - Locke and Hume being the
usual suspects. When concepts are construed in this way they are clearly, as
those two were keen to stress, constrained by the sensory powers of the creature
in question; they are just the traces left by the activity of the sense organs
on the memory faculty. Abstraction and association may enlarge the mind's stock
of sense-based representations, but concepts of the strictly nonsensory are
ruled out. The key tenet of empiricism, indeed, is just that thought cannot
transcend the experiential (hence the impossibility of metaphysics, according to
the positivism that sprang from these empiricist principles.) It is not, then,
just the rationalist tradition, with its emphasis on rich innate structure, that
issues in restrictions on thinkability; in fact, in its very cognitive
sparingness, empiricism imposes even more pronounced limits than rationalism.
The acuity and scope of the senses is the measure of conceptual power, and where
creatures differ in their sensory equipment they must also differ in what they
can think.Behaviour-based theories also impose limits, at least
under pretty unavoidable assumptions. The central point is simply that
behavioural theories tie concepts to the bodily repertoire of the thinker and
bodies have determinate structure and powers, varying from one kind to the next.
Behaving bodies are natural objects in the world, finite and bounded, with
limited histories and sets of dispositions. An organism's bodily characteristics
fix the nature of the inputs and outputs it can handle, but these are bound to
be restricted by the facts of anatomy and physiology. If concepts are to consist
in the motion of bodies, then the natural limits on motor capacities become the
limits of concept possession. A vivid (if controversial) illustration of the
kinds of limits that can result from behavioural theories is provided by Quine's
indeterminacy thesis.(6) If concepts come down to dispositions to assent to
sentences in specific stimulus conditions, then (i) theoretical concepts lapse
into radical indeterminacy and (ii) we cannot expect to distinguish concepts
that apply under the same conditions of stimulation - as with those rabbits and
their undetached parts. Concepts have content, for Quine, only in so far as they
are keyed to discrete dispositions to assent, but then any putative concepts not
so keyed turn out to be either cognitively inaccessible or plain impossible -
despite the reality of the properties they purport to represent. Much the same
can be said of Dummett-style 'manifestation' requirements on meaning, which
cannot make room for any concepts that call for a 'realist' interpretation.(7)
The requirement of an effective mapping from concept to behavioural capacity
confines concepts to the causal powers of the body in question. Functionalist
theories have much the same upshot, since the causal role of an internal state
clearly depends upon the contingent make-up of the organism; and if a body fails
to provide a basis for some role then the corresponding concept will not be
available to the creature whose body it is. Since, presumably, human bodies
(say) do not instantiate every logically possible causal role, there are bound
to be concepts that are not open to us (given that every such role corresponds
to a potential concept). Just as functionalist theories impose limits on the
sensations a creature may possess, so they impose limits on its conceptual
powers. And so it is with any theory that equates concepts with dispositions of
the body. Even Wittgenstein's much more relaxed emphasis on the connexion
between meaning and acting has limitative consequences, which he did not
forswear.Third, there are externalist theories that see content as
fixed by head/world relations: causal, nomic, teleological and so forth.(8)
Take, as representative, the simple idea that the concepts you have are
determined by your history of environmental elicitations. Then your concepts
will be limited both by the nature of the impinging environment and by the
capacity of your sensory transducers to respond to what is offered up to them
(what you can 'interact' with). According to some theories, you simply cannot
have concepts for things you have not had causal commerce with - for example,
natural kinds whose instances you have not encountered. At the extreme of causal
isolation, as with the brain in a vat, you cannot even have concepts of the
ordinary perceptible world.(9) Similarly, if we are now not suitably hooked up
to some part or aspect of the objective world, then we we will not be able to
form representations of that part or aspect. The danger in theories of these
kinds is actually that they impose unreasonably restrictive conditions on
concept possession, underestimating the creative resources of the mind; they
certainly do not allow untrammelled conceptual access by sheer effort of
will.It is not that I think any of these theories of concepts
is really adequate; my point is just that it is not merely an eccentricity of
the tradition in which Chomsky locates himself that thought should be subject to
significant limits. This is implicit even in theories that are not advanced with
this kind of issue in mind; and, as I remarked, it is hard to see how a theory
could be both substantive and free of limitative consequences. For what could a
concept consist in that was not in some way bound by inherently variable and
potentially absent facts? Certainly, it is scarcely plausible that every
logically possible concept should be necessarily accessible by any mind capable
of grasping some concept or other. Only a kind of mystical thinking about
concepts could occlude recognition of the virtual truism that someone might be
able to think some things without being able to think all things. (Compare the
question whether humans possess every conceivable motor skill in virtue of
possessing some.) | |
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