Rationality: An Essay Towards an Analysis

Citation preview

RATIONALITY

STUD IES IN PHILOS OPHIC AL PSYCHOLOGY Edited by R . F . HOLLAND P. T. Geach

Mental Acts The Psychology of Perception

D.

,v. Hamlyn

Alasdair MacIntyre

The Unconscious The Concept of Motivation

R. S. Peters

The Idea of a Social Science

Peter Winch Norman Malcolm

Dreaming

A. I. Melden

Free Action Bodily Sensations

David M. Armstrong

Sensationalism and Scientific Explanation

Peter Alexander

Action, Emotion and Will

Anthony Kenny

Rationality

Jonathan Bennett

RATIONALITY An Essay Towards an Analysis

by JONATHAN BENNETT

LONDON

ROUTLEDGE & KEGAN PAUL NEW YORK: THE HUMANITIES PRESS

First published 1964 by Routledge & Kegan Paul Limited Broadway House, 68-74 Carter Lane London, E.C.4 Printed in Great Britain by Hazell Watson & Viney Limited Aylesbury, Bucks

© Jonathan Bennett 1964

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except for the quotation of brief passages in criticism

CONTENTS

I.

2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

Acknowledgment Programme for an Analysis 'Regular' versus 'Rule-guided' Behaviour The Assessment of Evidence Fake Intelligence and Frozen Intelligence Language and Intelligence Reasons Acting upon R-denials Challenging R-denials Present and Particular versus Past and General Rationality and Language The Describer Insight Index

V

page vii 1

8 21 32 42

49 59 67 79 86

93 101 121

ACKNOWLEDGMENT FoR

helpful criticisms of the matter and manner of earlier versions of this essay I am most grateful to Peter Bell, R. B. Braithwaite, Ian Hacking, M. S. Halliday, David Hirschmann, Gilbert Ryle and, especially, Michael Tanner.

J.F.B.

vii

Everyone agrees that animal behaviour can only be ex­ plained by supposing processes in the brain which stand for or symbolize the outside world and which can be re­ combined to produce solutions to novel problems. One question which immediately strikes one is, how far is human thought more than this? No answer can be given. Obviously any human being carries this procec;s much further than any animal. He has a vastly greater array of 'internal responses' at his disposal, and therefore can re­ combine them in a bewildering variety of ways. And it is conceivable that there may be in our thinking some further function which is really of a different kind from that of animals, rather than the same kind in enormously greater quantity. llut if there is such a further function, nobody has as yet succeeded in describing it in ways which can be made subject to experiment. Every attempt which has been made to state some general principle of thought which is never shown by animals has ended in failure. D. E. Broadbent, Behaviour, p. 115. The possession by man of certain distinctive attributes transcending the highest intelligence of animals as organic transcends inorganic life is a fuct beyond doubt or quali­ fication. The Times, October 7th 1862.

R A T ION A L I TY AN ESSAY TOWARDS AN ANALYSIS

1. Programme for an analysis

I

this essay I present the results of an extremely ambitious conceptual enquiry into the nature of rationality. I was led to conduct the enquiry by my desire to understand and assess Kant's so-called 'metaphysical deduction of the categories', in which a peerless philosopher offers reasons of unexampled feebleness for saying that there are twelve kinds of proposition or judgment all of which must be em­ ployed by any being who is to make any judgments, hold any opinions, believe that p for any p. Although Kant's name will seldom occur in the following pages, I think it worthwhile to mention two differences between what I shall try to do here and Kant's stated aims in the metaphysical deduction. (I) Kant sees himself as engaged not in conceptual analysis but in the establishment of synthetic truths of a certain sort. That is a mistake of his which I cannot go into now: I merely turn my back on it, and set in place of his pursuit of synthetic conclusions the search for an adequate analysis. (2) Kant's central concern, like mine, is with rationality in some strong sense of 1 N

PROGRAMME FOR AN ANALYSIS

'rationality'; but he states it as a concern with the capacity for making judgments or having beliefs. This is because he thinks that judgments can be made only by those possessed of full-scale rationality: he would deny, for example, that a dog can think that something is the case. Now, we are normally prepared to say of an animal such as a dog that it thinks that, for example, it is going to be taken for a walk. Some­ one who denies that we ought to say this kind of thing is obliged either to produce his esoteric item of information, his wonderful discovery that the rest of us are deceived about dogs; or else to show that the use of expressions like 'thinks that' in application to creatures which lack a language is philosophically wrong in some way. The former alternative can be dismissed: Kant did not claim to have any special empirical information on this subject, nor, I think, do present-day philosophers who follow him in this particular mistake. As regards the latter alternative: it is possible to swallow in such a greedy and un­ digested lump the Kant-Wittgenstein stress upon language that one sees it as just obvious that there cannot be judgments where there is no language; but this is not obvious at all, and those who say that it is are merely substituting inte1lectual fashions for arguments. More cautiously, it might be argued that it is dangerous to speak of judgments where there is no language, because our notion of judgment-making is so largely concerned with the making of judgments by humans who do have languages. 'Where there is no language', it might be said, 'there will be so many differences from the human situation that it is bound 2

PROGRAMME FOR AN ANALYSIS

to be misleading and dangerous to use the same terminology for both'. This sort of talk may have its source in the timid and reactionary anthropocen­ trj sm which can be extracted from some of the worst parts of the later Wittgenstein-a chest-pounding insistence on the uniqueness of the human species, leading to the breast-beating conclusion that nothing useful of an analytic and truly general sort can be said in answer to the central questions of the philo­ sophy of mind. Without further discussion, I cheer­ fully align myself with those who are prepared to slog on at the hard questions, against those who say a priori that the questions cannot be answered.On the other hand, the cry of 'Danger!' might arise more respectably from a conviction that, although we do generally speak of certain animals as thinking that .. ., believing that ..., making mistakes etc., there are no satisfactory criteria marking off the cases where we do speak in this way from those where we do not, and that therefore this way of speaking is misleading be­ cause it suggests that there is a distinction where in fact there is none. If this were so, one might well conclude that talk about judgments made by creatures which lack a language was merely a reflection of a tendency to adopt sentimental attitudes to certain animals and not to others, and a concern for con­ ceptual hygiene might lead us to drop such talk altogether. I believe, however, that the premiss of this argument is false. So far as I have been able to discover, the use which intelligent and literate people make of the notion of judgment unaccompanied by linguistic capacity is governed by certain criteria 3

PROGRAMME FOR AN ANALYSIS

which are not entirely disreputable-I shall expound them in §4 below-and since this is so there is no good reason for refusing to allow people to say what they are generally prone to say about animal judgment. I therefore state my aim as that of analysing the notion of rationality, not the notion of judgment­ making capacity. To say 'I aim to analyse the concept of rationality in some strong sense of "rationality" ' is to say almost nothing. More precisely, then: It is common knowledge that there is a very large difference between the level of intellectual �bility of humans and that of all other terrestrial creatures. It is commonly believed that this difference is in some important way one of kind rather than of degree: that between a genius and a stupid man there is a smooth slide while between a stupid man and an ape there is a sharp drop, not just in the sense that there are no creatures intellectually half-way between apes and stupid men, but in the sense that there could not be such creatures. Any possible creature whose intellectual level was higher than that of normal apes and lower than that of normal men-so the common belief runs--either would or would not have that special something which puts humans importantly above other animals: possessing the 'special something', it would be essen­ tially up with us; lacking the 'special something', it would be down with the apes; it could not be half-way between the apes and us in respect of the gap between apes and ourselves which we regard as most important. There could be borderline or indeterminate cases, but not smoothly half-way cases; just as viruses are neither clearly living organisms nor clearly not living 4

PROGRAMME FOR AN ANALYSIS

organisms, but they are not smoothly intermediate between living and non-living in the way in which a fairly clever man is smoothly intermediate between a stupid man and a very clever man. It is further believed by many philosophers, and perhaps by others, that the intellectual eminence of human beings has some essential connection with their ability to handle languages. Now, I use 'rationality' to mean 'whatever it is that humans possess which marks them off, in respect of intellectual capacity, sharply and im­ portantly from all other known species'. My analy sis of rationality, then, will explore the content of the true belief that human beings are on a certain in­ tellectual eminence compared with other terrestrial creatures: it will thus include an enquiry into the truth of the belief that this eminence is surrounded by a logical precipice and not just by a gentle slope which happens to be unoccupied, and into the truth of the belief that the eminence is essentially connected with human linguistic ability. It follows from my definition of 'rational' that humans are the only rational creatures we know of, though it does not fo1low from the definition that it is useful or interesting to describe human� as 'rational'. Furthermore, the philosophers' hunch that linguistic ability is crucial to rationality looks plausible enough to entitle us to say at the outset that the rationality of humans is expressed primarily in their use of language. This initial assumption makes for a methodologically useful restriction in the scope of the enquiry , but it is not a premiss of the en­ quiry: in later sections of the essay I shall support 5

PROGRAMME FOR AN ANALYSIS

the 'philosophers' hunch' by extended arguments. What I wish to discover, then, is what the features are of the human use of natural languages, or 'human talk' for short, by virtue of which we regard it as a manifestation of rationality: what is it about human talk which marks it off so sharply and deeply in our minds from any behaviour of other terrestrial creatures? One might set about answering this by supposing human talk to be other than it is in various ways, in order to see which suppositions did and which did not rob it of its right to be accounted rational. The course I shall adopt, however, is the reverse of this. I shall start with a kind of behaviour which is not rational, and shall suppose it to be different in various ways in order to see which suppositions do and which do not confer on it a right to be accounted rational. Reference to human talk will be constantly needed, for the question 'Does this kind of behaviour manifest rationality?' can always usefully be put in the form 'Does this kind of behaviour share with human talk those features of the latter which create the important difference in intellectual level between humans and non-humans?' But by moving towards rationality in­ stead of away from it, we shall be able to keep human talk at a focal distance, as it were, treating it as the distant shore rather than as the sea through which we are swimming. Three solid advantages accrue: Firstly, we shall have greater control over our material. It just is easier, confronted with indubitably non-rational behaviour, to know where to start adding, than it is, when confronted with indubitably rational behaviour, to know where to start subtracting. 6

PROGRAMME FOR AN ANA LYSIS

Secondly, with the procedure I am adopting we shall not risk being distracted by features of human talk which are irrelevant to its rationa]ity but which are socially or emotionally important to us. For example, it seems likely that there could be rational behaviour which never involved the asking of questions and which was not associated with any variations of facial expression or of intonation. But if we set out to explore this matter by means of the procedure I have rejected, and tried to cope imaginatively with the supposition of a non-interrogating, expressionless, monotone human race, we should find ourselves wanting to ask 'What on earth could have gone wrong with them?' This question-just because it refers to 'them' , to the actual people now sharing the earth' s surface with us-threatens to cloud the possibility that these features of human talk might be completely irrelevant to its stature as expressive of rationality, however ]arge they may loom in our general picture of our fellow humans. The third advantage of declining to take human talk as a starting-point for the enquiry is that by starting with some non-human phenomenon we shall avoid the temptation to take the question 'What is it for a being to be rational?' in the form 'In what does my rationality consist?' and to try to answer it on the basis of introspective thought-experi­ ments. These three advantages confer an antiseptic virtue on the modus operandi which begins at the non-human, non-rational end of the scale. As my point of departure, then, I select a certain kind of behaviour of honey7

'RE GULAR' V. 'RULE-GUIDED' BE HAVIOUR

bees. I choose this because it is agreeable to grow one's heuristic fictions from a seed of fact, and it so happens that honey-bees do have a pattern of behaviour which, though not rational, is sufficiently like human talk in certain respects to be a useful starting-point for my investigation. I shall eventually move on from real to fabulous honey-bees, whose behaviour will become more and more like the linguistic manifesta­ tion of rationality. But I shall continue to refer to my subjects as 'honey-bees', so that we may think of them as small and strange and distant, so that we may have no feeling of community with them, so that we may look at their behaviour coldly and clinically in order to assess it in one respect and one only.

2. 'Regular' versus 'rule-guided' behaviour A honey-bee finds a source of sugar, imbibes some of it, and then returns to the hive where it performs a dance. Other bees observe this dance and then fly straight to the food, unaccompanied by its original discoverer. If we know where a given bee has discovered some sugar solution, and what the latter's concentration is, we can predict certain features of the bee's subsequent dance; and from watching a dance we can predict where the bees which observe it will subsequently fly. These pre­ dictions are possible because apiologists have found rules which correlate certain aspects of each dance with (a) the distance between the hive and the dis8

' R E G U L A R ' V. ' R U L E - G U I D E D ' B E H A V I O U R

covered food, (b) the direction from the hive of the discovered food (for distances over I 00 metres), and ( c) the concentration of sugar in the food. Further­ more, the features of any dance which correlate with (a) and (b) correlate in the same way with the distance and direction of the subsequent flight of any bee which has observed the dance. Other agreeable details can be learned from Karl von Frisch's Bees: their Vision , Chemical Senses , and Language. Apian dances share several important features with human talk, and it would be puritanical to frown upon the bold use, in an informal experimental report, of the natural and inviting metaphor which says that the bees have a 'language', and that they 'understand' one another's 'reports' of discoveries of food. It remains to be seen, however, whether any of this is j ustifiable as more than metaphor, and we certainly cannot accept as literally true the presupposition behind von Frisch's remark (p. 78) : 'It is remarkable that the heading toward the sun is the direction of flight selected to correspond with an upward move­ ment during the straight component of the wagging dance. One cannot believe that the bees decided all at once to arrange matters thus . . . ' . Now, I do not think that anyone, even von Frisch in a reflective moment, would wish to say that the bees 'decided to arrange matters thus', whether all at once or gradually. But then few of the linguistic conventions governing human talk are 'decided' , in any plain sense of the word, either. It thus remains possible to deny that honey-bees go through explicit procedures of adopting and promulgating conventions which lay down the R.-2

9

'REG U LAR ' V . ' R U LE - G UIDED ' BEHAVIOUR

significance which is to be attached to the various features of their dances, and yet to claim that apian dances constitute a genuine language in which honey­ bees 'express their thoughts' etc. as we do in human talk. I shall try, however, to show that this claim would be mistaken: I shall argue that honey-bees are not rational creatures, and also that their dances do not constitute a language. My reasons for treating these as distinct statements will emerge in due course. In denying that honey-bees are rational, I am neither making a metaphysical leap in the dark nor refusing to allow von Frisch to make one. When I speak of behaviour as manifesting rationality, or as showing that the behaver is capable of reasoning processes, I am not-pace Descartes-saying that the behaviour in question is an outward manifestation of a secret something called 'thought' or 'reasoning'. �� 'This behaviour manifests rationality' and cognate sep.tences to ex ress a non-relatTonalclrum a behaviour itself, and not a relational claim about what causes t 1e er 1es 1 , or 1s pr�­ jected from the secret soul into the public wor y it. te ment� states, - I do \ and pTiIIosonliTcal nrobleins-about, them. �rely restrict my attention to the criteria which underlie our everyday belief that human beings indulge in reasoning processes while honey-bees and earthworms do not, or-what may be the same belief-that humans are r.ational while honey-bees and earth­ worms are not.Thcsc_giteria arc pla-ural in nat!-).re, and inv�e no Cartesian specula�ins ab�ut priva�c mental states: Even where the notion of 10

n

' RE G U LA R ' V . ' R U L E - G U I D E D ' B E HA V I O U R

privacy seems least problematical, namely in the case of oneself, one' s claim to be rational or to have thought-processes is in the last resort answ erable to behavioural criteria. My concern is w ith the criteria w hich underlie every­ day beliefs; the beliefs themselves do not solve my problem, they create it. It is therefore useless to say 'Of course honey-bees are not rational [ or: do not have a genuine lan guage] ; for that w ould require their being able to reason, and they cannot reason because they are onl y bees. ' G ranted that ordinary hon ey- bees do not reason, my problem is to discover w hat it means to say this. Similarly, it begs the question to say that it is merely ' sentimental' or ' anthropomorphic' to credit bees w ith rationality. If 'It is anthropomorphic to credit bees w ith rational ity ' means 'To credit bees w ith rationality is to lik en them to humans', then this is true but unhelpful; on the other hand, if it means 'To credit bees with rationality is w rongly to lik en them to humans', then it begs the question. My assumption here and throughout the present w ork is that there could be rational bees, or little buzz ing animals w hose use of a basically apian repertoire of phy sical movements compel led us to regard them as rational; and I w ish to k now w hat w e are saying w hen w e deny that actual honey-bees are of this k ind. First, w e must see w hat the prima facie case is for saying that bees are rational, or at least for saying that they have a language. There is a certain easy naturalness about describing the apian dances in terms borrow ed from human talk : w hat mak es this 11

' RE G U L A R ' V . ' R U L E - G U I D E D ' B E HAVI O U R

such a good metaphor? The answer to this lies in certain features which the dancing phenomena share with human talk and which, it seems reasonable to think, would have to be possessed by any behaviour which was to constitute the use of a language. ( I ) Any language must fall under rl!les relating wh_at is said in it to the facts about its subject-matter. The only kmd of subject-maffcr with which we can be concerned is the empirical world, and so the rules in question must relate what is uttered in the language to the empirical circumstances of the utterer. I do not say that such rules must be formulated, or even that they must be capable of precise formulation, in the language. All I am �9n�crnGd t9 _�a_y is that a language must_CO!!i5j�tqfex-press_i_ns which arc about something, and that 'aboutness' involves some sort of relation­ sµip�- wl�ich �ay be extremely complex but which is in principle capable of expression in rules, between lvhat is said in the language and what is true of that which the expressions in the language are about. Apian dances are language-like to this extent, for they fall under rules or generalisations which enable us to tell, from how a bee dances, where it has found food. (2) If a number of creatures arc said to have a cowroau Jooguagc, then there must be a behavioural basis for say��g that they understan� (!_��- -�nother's utter�Q-���� ji:i- tlie Jang_u�ge. For there to be such a basis, there must be a patt�� {) f rel�tio�s�ips­ pcrhaps a complex one, but still a pa-ttern and thus in principle expressible in rules or generalisations­ re�g utterances io � J_a__Eguage to the subsequent behaviour of observers of those utterances. - Such

-------- - -- ---r2___ -

' R E G U L A R ' V.

' RULE - G U I DED ' BEHAVI O U R

a patte rn e xists for hone y-bee s, for the ir be haviour obe ys rule s w hic h e nable us to pre dic t whe re a bee will fl y if we know what sort of dance it has j ust obse rve d. (8) T he third lan guage- like fe ature of the danc ing phe nome na is a ce rtain kind of c omple xity and ric h­ ne ss. T he bee s have many kinds of ' sen te nce ' with whic h the y c an 're port' many kinds of situation; but the me re size of the be es' stoc k of distinguishable 'se nte nce s' is le ss important th an what give s rise to it. E ac h apian 'se nte nce' falls unde r three rule s at once ( distance, direc tion, c once ntration), and e ac h rule c orre late s some variable quantity in the dance with some variable q uantity in the world.T he re are thus ve ry many ways in whic h the three rule s c an inte rsec t in a single 'se nte nce', and this provide s the bee s not only with a large stoc k of kind s of 'se nte nce' but also with a 'language ' in whic h the re is a ge nuine c apac ity for 'say ing' what may ne ve r have bee n 'said' be fore . Suc h a c apac ity is nece ssary if we are to have a language and not just sc raps of lin guistic be haviour; and it the refore see ms to be c lose ly c onnec te d with the ide a of rational ity. It is sometime s said that a fully -fle dge d lan guage must c ontain utte rance s analo­ gous to se nte nce s, with parts analogous to words; but the only re ason I c an thin k of for be lie ving this to be true is that a full y-fle dge d language must c ontain utte rance s with the kind of c omple xity I have re ­ ferre d to. T his c ondition is satisfie d if the utte rance s have se ve ral feature s e ac h of whic h has an inde pe n­ de nt linguis tic signific ance. T he re is no ne ed to insist that suc h fe ature s must c onsist in the utte rance s' 18

'REGULAR ' V.

' RU LE - G U I DE D '

BEHAVIOUR

containing parts or episodes each of which has an independent linguistic significance. There is a further language-like feature which apian dances might be thought to have. Roughly, it is that the dances seem to be symbolic in character: without wishing to say that a dancing bee 'means' anything by its dance, one feels justified in saying that the relationship between a dance and the dancer's dis­ covery of food is more like the symbolising relation­ ship between a human statement and the fact stated by it than it is like the symptomatising relationship be­ tween a bout of shivering and the frightening experi­ ence which caused it. In either case, one can derive some information about the way the world is from observation of a bit of behaviour, but there are differences between the two which might be expressed by saying that in the symbolising case there is a conventional association between the behaviour and the fact while in the symptomatising case the associ­ ation is not conventional but natural. The trouble is that the idea of a conventional association essentially involves the idea of intentions and reasons : to describe as 'conventional' the correlations between food­ discoveries and subsequent dances is to say that the bees have certain reasons, rather than certain others, for dancing as they do. From this it follows that we cannot properly describe any kind of behaviour as 'symbolic in character', while remaining agnostic as to the behaver's intentions or reasons ; and thus there was a mistake involved in my remark: 'Without wishing to say that a dancing bee "means" anything by its dance, one feels justified in saying . . . '. There 14.

' RE G U LA R ' V .

' R ULE - G U I D E D ' B E HA V I O U R

i s a puzzl e here, as t here al way s is when a pl ausible b elief t urns out t o be fal se; but t he sol ut ion of th e puzzl e is not hard t o find. C onsid er a parall el case: ant s of some species, when on t he march in t heir t ens of t housand s, w ill cope wit h a fire which l ies in t heir pat h by marching st raight int o it , t he bod ies of t he first few t housand smot hering t he fire and t he rest marching st raight on over. The behaviour of t hose in t he front l ooks l ike bravery in prett y much t he same way as apian d ances l ook l ike sy mbolism; yet no one t hinks t hat ant s are eit her brave or cowardl y. It is not t oo d iffi cult t o work out what one is saying when one say s t hat ant s are not brave but behave in a way which 'l ooks brave' , and t hen t o t ransfer t his t o th e apian behaviour which 'l ooks symbol ic' even t o some­ one who d oes not cred it bees wit h having reasons for anyt hing t hey d o, and who t herefo re d oes not conced e t hat apian d ances are symbol ic. N ow, I shal l argue t hat bees do not in fact have reasons for t heir behaviour, and t hus t hat t he ir dances are not l it erall y symbol ic, and t hus t hat t he dances do not const it ut e a l anguage. I propose, how ­ ever, t o post pone d eal ing wit h t hat matt er d irect l y unt il § 5 bel ow. I wish t o approach it t hrough a d ifferent t hough rel at ed consid erat ion: It d oes l ook on t he fa ce of it as t hough we can say of honey- bees t hat t heir d ancing behaviour is covered by rul es, but not t hat honey- bees have rul es accordi ng t o which t hey dance. Or in ot her word s alt hough t he d ancing beh�viour_ of hees is reg ula r, 1t 1 s not rule-�id ed. For t he moment I say not hing about ju st what hangs upon t his dist inct ion: it is suffi cient t hat t here d oes seem t o 15

' R E G U L A R ' V. ' R U L E - G U I D E D ' B E H AV I O U R

be a difference between apian dances and human talk which can fairly be registered in the word! 'Apian dances are regular; human talk is rule-guided'. Before investigating what the 1mportance--01-th1s difference is for my present investigation, however, we must seek a more precise understanding of what difference it is. One blind-alley should be signposted immediately : we must not deny that apian behaviour is rule-guided just on the grounds that it is entirely explicable in terms of physiological laws and the physical structure of the bees. It has sometimes been said that no behaviour can count as rational or thought-backed or rule-guided if it could be fully explained in terms of physical laws : Descartes gave as his reason for attributing mentality to men but not to dogs his belief that physical explanations could be found for canine but not for human behaviour. This invites us to treat 'Other people have thoughts' as a hypothesis which is accepted because it helps to explain physical happenings which are otherwise inexplicable. If this were correct, then one's ordinary, confident attribution of intellectual capacity to one's fellow-humans would be based upon pessimism about the chances of finding physicalistic explanations for their behaviour; and if such explanations were found one would have to relinquish the belief that humans other than oneself have thoughts, or are rational, or have rules. Perhaps in such a case we should indeed relinquish the belief, or at least cease to use the concepts which are in­ volved in it; but to concede this is not to concede that the belief in question is, or entails, the belief that physicalistic explanations of human behaviour 16

' RE GU L A R ' V . ' RULE - GUID E D ' B E H A V I O U R

will not be found. It seems to me entirely implausible to say that when we apply menta] predicates to others we are committing ourselves to any view at a11 about the possibility of explaining their behaviour in terms of physical science. While a denial that the dancing phenomena are rule­ guided is not supported by the fact that they could be physicalistically explained, such a denial would be justified if the rules governing the dances had the stat_us af causal laws which held for every fairly normal bee. For it would then be c�usally_im._possible for any such bee to break one of _:tb_e._rules, and rules which no normal bee can break are not rules which can guide the behaviour of any normal bee. ;For a creature to be correctly said ta have a _ rule, _ If}s necessary that it should be ab)e-1.Q_b!eak the rule; but although this is necessary_,, jt__is no_t su_fficient . Normal, weU-constructed honey-bees do in fact occasionally break the rules by peforming the 'wrong' dance or flying in the 'wrong' direction after observing a dance ; yet this further detail about their behaviour still leaves one unwilling to say that they are guided by rules. It does remove the impression that the bees are in the grip of the ru]es, but not by showing that the rules are in the grip of the bees; all that has happened is that rules which formerly looked like 'Whenever a sighted adult human with his eyes open is confronted by a sudden flash of bright light, he blinks' can now be seen to resemble 'Far more often than not, if a sighted adult human . . . etc.' . The latter of these no more reports rule-guided behaviour than does the former. We must therefore look further if we are to find what 17

' RE G U LA R ' V. ' R ULE - G U I D E D ' B E HA V I O U R

disqualifies apian behaviour from counting as rule­ guided. We cannot say that bees have J:'!l�S _!].nl�_ ss_ __ tl!ey somehow manifest an awareness-- of their rules as rul�s. It is not easy to see what could count ai their doing this, but we can at least begin to see how they might manifest an awareness of breaches of the rules as breaches of the rules. A necessary condition for this is that there should be a recognisable kind of per­ formance which a bee goes through if and only if it has just observed a dance, or a post-dance foraging flight, which it knows to be in breach of the rules. Let us adopt the fiction that honey-bees do have a kind of behaviour which conforms to this condition, and let us call any performance of the kind in question a denial ; in this use of it, 'denial' is a purely technical term which must not be assumed-though it may be discovered-to be synonymous with 'denial' in the ordinary sense of the word. It may seem question-begging to speak of the bees as 'knowing' that something is in breach of the rules, but I attach to 'know' here only a limited and legitimate sense, namely : a bee knows that a performance, whether a dance or a post-dance flight, breaks a rule if and only if (a) the performance breaks a rule, and (b) the bee in question has been sensorily confronted with those facts in virtue of which the performance is a rule-breaking one. It would be agreeable to dispense with this complication, and to speak of denials as occurring when and only when a rule-breaking per­ formance occurs, full-stop. But if we did thus suppose the bees to perform denials without having any sensory 18

' R E G U L A R ' V. ' R U L E - G U I D E D ' B E H A V I O U R

commerce with the rule-breaking performance and the bit of the world which shows the performance to be rule-breaking, we should be supposing a radical kind of miracle which would make it impossible to say what was going on at all. I shall return to this point later. Before enquiring in detail into what sort of apian behaviour might count as a denial, I wish to bring out as clearly as I can just what I hope to achieve by inventing such behaviour for the bees. I have con­ nected it in a loose and hopeful way with the aim of enabling the bees to manifest awareness of the rules as rules; but a better account than this can be given of the strategy behind the introduction of denials into the apian story. We can describe the behaviour of real honey-bees­ which do not perform denials-by means of certain generalisations or rule-like statements. These descrip­ tions do not say anything about rules, and so neither 'rule' nor any of its cognates occurs in them ; but we have a use for the word 'rule' in talking about the descriptions, for the descriptions are rules. I am pro­ posing to replace real bees by fictional ones which perform in a special sort of way when and only when they have been confronted by a rule-breach and by such facts about the wor]d as make it a rule-breach. With this new subject-matter we shall need to use 'rule' or one of its cognates in our description of the bees ' behaviour: our bees will now have a kind of behaviour whose performance-conditions can be stated generally only by means of some cognate of the phrase 'sensorily confronted by a rule-breach and 19

' R E G U L A R ' V. ' R U L E - G U I D E D ' B E H A V I O U R

by such facts about the world as make it a rule­ breach'. Tli� thesis _:which I here advance is that the move fro_:rp _ a rule-like description to a description in which 'rule' occurs is an important part of-even if it is not idei1ti��l_ with-the move from regular behaviour to rule-guided _behaviour. This is a special case of some­ thing more general which I do not know how to formulate precisely but which can be illustrated by a different special case of it which does not involve 'rule'. Suppose that we study a small child in order to find out whether it has the concept of a pair, or of twofoldness. We establish some true generalisations about the child's behaviour, and we use the word 'two' in talking about these generalisations. For example, we have generalisations relating behaviour to audio­ visual stimuli, tactual-visual stimuli, audio-olfactory stimuli, etc., but none relating behaviour to auditory, visual, etc. stimuli simply; and we sum this up by saying that each of our findings relates the child's behaviour to its intake by two of its senses. Here we are using 'two' not in describing the child's behaviour, but in describing descriptions of the child's behaviour, and such a use of 'two' is obviously irrelevant to whether the child has the concept of a pair. Suppose now that we discover that the child behaves in a certain way whenever it is confronted by two milk­ bottlcs, but not when it is confronted by only one or by more than two. This enables us to use 'two' in the description of the child's behaviour, and such a use of 'two' clearly is relevant-even if not conclusively so-to whether the child has the concept of a pair. It 20

THE ASSESSMENT OF E V I D E N CE

does at least fit 'two' into the child's story : it presents the child as behaving in a pair-discriminating manner, as though it had the concept of a pair. Similarly, the fictional bees which perform denials do at least behave in a breach-discriminating manner, as though they had rules for, or were guided by rules in, their dancing behaviour. Thus the move from generalisations which manifest pairhood to generalisations about pairs has an effect analogous to that of the move from descrip­ tions which are rules to descriptions which refer to rules.

3 . The assessment of evidence I have described a strategy for endowing the bees with rule-guided behaviour, but I have not executed it : we have still to see what a pattern of apian behavi­ our would have to be like to be describable only with the use of 'rule' . For simplicity's sake I sha11 consider only denials of rule-breaking dances, and shall thus ignore denials of rule-breaking post-dance flights ; but the whole discussion will also apply mutatis mutandis to the latter as well. The first idea which comes to mind is along the following lines. A bee performs a dance which is rule-correlated with a certain place and a certain kind of food ; observers of the dance fly to the dance-indicated place and find there no food of the dance-indicated kind; they then go through the characteristic kind of physical per21

THE AS SES SMENT OF EVIDENCE

formance which we are calling a 'denial' . A denial may be thought of as a specially intense kind of buzzing, a peculiarly random sort of flight, or what you will: all that matters is that it should be a recognisable performance which is specially associated with arrival at a dance-indicated place which lacks the dance-indicated kind of food. I offer this as an initial attempt to describe a kind of behaviour which is specially associated with known breaches of the rules; whether the attempt is successful remains to be discussed, but for convenience I shall in any case label the performances in question as 'denials'. It should be noted, incidentally, that denials themselves are governed by a rule, and that they too are to be thought of as occasionally performed in a rule­ breaking way. Every rule which I shall suppose to be applicable to apian behaviour in my further fables is to be thought of as applicable with a few exceptions: I shall not spatter my text with riders of the form ' . . . or almost always', but each rule which I enunciate is to be understood as thus qualified. I think it would be generally agreed, at the pre­ analytic or Sprachgefuhl level of 'what we should find it satisfactory to say', that endowing the bees with the pattern of denials which I have just described is not sufficient to entitle us to say that their behaviour is rule-guided. This is shown by the fact that most people could fairly easily be convinced that real bees do perform in a special kind of way on all and only the occasions when they reach a dance-indicated place and find there no food of the dance-indicated kind, while it would be extremely difficult to persuade any 22

THE ASSESSMENT O F E VIDENCE

sensible person that real bees behave in a rule-guided way. It follows that either I have misexecuted my strategy for endowing the bees with rule-guided behaviour by putting 'rule' into the description of their behaviour, or the strategy itself is a wrong one. As a preliminary to choosing between these options, I want to call attention to a certain disturbing feature of the apian behaviour which we are now considering. If we treat apian dances as sentences which express judgments, we must decide what judgment is expressed by any given dance ; and there are two possible bases for such decisions. (I) We can pay attention to the circum­ stances under which dances of any given kind are per­ formed. The performance-conditions for any kind of dance are embodied in a rule of the form: a bee dances in such and such a way if and only if it has recently been in place P and found there food of kind K. On this basis, each dance will be translated by a sentence of the form 'There was recently food of kind K in place P' . (2) We can attend instead to the circum­ stances under which dances of any given kind are denied. Denial-conditions are embodied in rules of the form: a dance of such and such a kind is denied if and only if some bee observes it and shortly thereafter flies to place P and finds there no food of kind K. This gives to each dance the force of a sentence of the form 'There will soon be food of kind K in place P' . The upshot of this seems to be that if we credit the bee_�ith having --�J�hg!_l�ge· . canli:ot makea-con sistent assignlnent of tensesto--the sentences in · .it. Although this IS -notable-- aifrerence between the

a:

we·.

28

THE A S SES SMENT OF EVIDEN CE

bees' behaviour and human talk, it is not clear that it is fatal to any important claim we might wish to make about the similarity between apian dances and human talk. For it is prima facie open to us to say that the bees have a genuine language which manifests their rationality, but that they have made the stupid mistake of overlooking the possibility that the food in a dance-indicated place might be removed, destroy­ ed or consumed between the time of the dancer's departure and that of the dance-observers' arrival, and that they have therefore adopted linguistic rules according to which it is sometimes correct to affirm a statement and also correct to deny it. This would be a defect in their language; but it might well be of little practical importance, if the overlooked possibility were seldom realised. In any case, humans too are capable of this sort of oversight, so that we cannot just on this account deny that the bees have a language in which they do the same sort of thing as humans do in human talk. I have called attention to the tense-discrepancy in the apian 'language' not because of its intrinsic importance-for I have argued that it has none-but because of the importance of a feature of the bees' behaviour which underlies the tense-discrepancy: namely, that there is a straightforward one-one correlation between dances and situations justifying them, and between denials and situations justifying them . The tense-discrepancy arises because the situa­ tion correlated with a dance is not quite the same as that correlated with its denial; but a far more radical trouble arises just from the simplicity of the correlations. 24

T HE ASSESSMENT O F E V I DEN CE

In likening the apian behaviour I have invented to human talk, we liken a dance-followed-by-a-denial to what happens when, for examp]e, you say to me 'There is some cheese in the 1arder' and I return from the larder a minute later and say 'No there isn't'. But consider the ways in which the disagreement about the cheese can develop : you say 'Well, there was cheese there a few minutes ago, and you must admit that there is still a smell of cheese there'; I reply 'I can't account for the smell, but you can't account for the disappearance of the cheese-we haven't heard anyone enter or leave the larder and you know how the floor creaks'; you reply 'You must have eaten it yourself'; I say 'Why should I lie to you? And anyway, smell my breath'; and so on. Apian 'disagreements' have no analogy to any of this: they should not be likened to human affirmations and denials, but rather to a situation in which you emerge from the larder making that purring noise which, let us suppose, we all make when we have just seen some cheese, and I then go to the larder and whine with disappointment when I find it empty, and nothing else happens at all. Admittedly, each dance is correlated not mere]y with food's having been imbibed but with the distance, direction and concentration of the food; but these complications do not radically alter the picture. For the 'correct' performance of a dance can be explained in terms of the digestive state resulting from the con­ centration of the imbibed sugar solution, the degree of muscular fatigue resulting from the distance flown since feeding, and the optical state produced by the direction of flight from the food. Real bees do dance R.-8 25

THE ASSESSMENT OF E V I DEN CE

'correctly', and their doing so is explicable in these terms. The apian behaviour which manifests 'under­ standing' of observed dances can be explained along similar Jines : observation of a dance causes the observer to move in such a way as to attain a certain optical state, and thus to point in a certain direction; and it creates a bodily disturbance which causes flight and fades away after a certain length of flight, as when adrenaline flows into the human blood-stream and has to be worked off before comfort is restored. Again, something along these lines is the explanation of the behaviour of actual bees. The one fictional item in my apian story-namely the denials which were supposed to bring apian dances so much closer to human talk­ fits neatly into this same explanatory pattern. Since apian denials do not in fact occur, one cannot say that something is the explanation of them, but we can at least see what sort of explanation it would be sensible to expect to find for the pattern of denials I have described if it were observed to occur. The appropriate kind of explanation would be as follows: just as the imbibing of sugar solution of concentration N leads, via the digestive system, to a dance of type n, so observation of a dance of type n leads to the discharge of digestive juices in quantities appropriate to the imbibing of sugar solution of concentration N ; if at the end of the flight there is no food, or food of the wrong concentration, the bee's digestive system is in a state which is chemically inappropriate to its intake of food, and a characteristic kind of disturbed per­ formance, technically called a 'denial', takes place. The bees' behaviour is not j�g­ notjust as unexplained hiifas-downright.Jn_y_st.eri_ous­ until it has been shown to corr�!M�_�if!:l.J?l_y _'Yi�}]. the sensory states of the bees and thus not to depend upon � c:Ontrot any sort of intellectuaforganisation y One important corollar -or the -- arguin.ent of this section is the Kantian conclusion that there is a logical connection between 'intuition' and 'under­ standing', that is, between sensory and intellectual capacity. This is just what we should expect if Kant is right in his view that intellectual capacity is the capacity for handling given raw materials in certain ways ; for it is only to be expected that we cannot know what handling talents a creature has until we know what raw material it is handling.

or

5. Language and intelligence Of the bees which perform denials in conformity with the past-tense rule for denials, and which keep to 42

LA N G UAGE A N D I N TELLIGE N C E

this rule through changes in the evidential value of various kinds of empirical state of affairs, I claim: (a) they are intelligent, (b) they can sometimes be said to think that such-and-such is the case, (c) their dances may be really symbolic in character, (d) if their dances are symbolic then they constitute a genuine language, and ( e) they are not rational. I take (a) and (b) to be roughly equivalent ; and I assert them of the bees now under consideration because it seems to me that, in so far as there is any clarity at all in the ordinary man's use of 'intelligent' outside the human sphere, his notion of intelligence is . that of the possession of patterns of behaviour which involve complex relationships between behavi­ our and sensory intake, and which the behaver can modify if modification should become desirable in the light of the behaver's wants and needs. There is a further point about intelligence which needs to be brought out in order to c1arify the relation­ ship between (a) and (b) on the one hand, and (c) and (d) on the other. In any case in which the relations between behaviour and sensory intake show the behaver to have some measure of intelligence, it is possible to talk about why the creature in question acts in a certain way on a certain occasion, the 'why' having something of the force of a giving of reasons rather than merely the assigning of a cause. There is no temptation at all to say that 'The amoeba moves this way because the acid is over there' gives anything like the amoeba's reason for moving. But when we say 'The dog stayed close to its owner because he was carrying a piece of meat', this looks much more like 43

LANGUAGE A N D I NTELLIGENCE

the giving of a reason. What makes the idea of a reason seem more appropriate in the latter case is the fact that there are many other circumstances which would also lead the dog to stay close to its owner, and the further fact that if it became radically inappropri­ ate for the dog to stay close to its owner under some such circumstance the dog could learn that this was so and could modify its pattern of behaviour accord­ ingly. In short: the idea of 'reasons' far action is in­ appropriate when we have to do with simple or ri id patterns o u us an res onse; ut where �he patterns are both complex and mo 1 a Jle it_ is possible, while admitting that the patterns are O!),ly patterns of stimulus and response, to speak of them also in terms of actions and reasons for actions. Fro_lll this it follows that real honey-bees ------ .......__ do not __h_ave reason�J:���Y!hi.D1L!�y _5lo; and it also follows that the fiees described at the end of §3 do in a certain minimal sense have reasons for some things which they do. I think it would be generally conceded that a kind of behaviour is not properly described as 'linguistic' un­ less it is symbolic in character; and to describe behav­ iour as symbolic is to say something about the behavers' reasons for behaving as they do. Specifically, it is to say that most bits of behaviour of the kind in question are enacted because such behaviour informs other creatures about the location of food, the direction of danger, or whatever the subject-matter of the language may be; and the 'because' here must have something of the force of the giving of a reason. The force of the claim that the dances of real honey-bees 'look sym44

� - ---------

LANGUAGE AND IN TELLIGEN CE

bolic' is just that it looks as though the only reason that bees could have for dancing as they do is to in­ form one another of the whereabouts of food ; and this can be sensibly asserted by someone who does not know whether bees have any reasons for any of their behaviour, or who knows that they do not have reasons for any of their behaviour. Similarly, even if we are confident that ants ought not to be said to have reasons for anything they do, we are entitled to say that if the concept of 'reason' or 'motive' could be brought to bear upon the behaviour of the ants which march straight into the fire, they would have to be applied in such a way as to justify describing that behaviour as brave, self-sacrificing, etc. The fictional bees which perform denials in accord­ ance with the past-tense rule are intelligent, and therefore do in a minimal sense 'have reasons' for some things which they do ; and this is why I have said (c) that their dances may be symbolic. To show that their dances are symbolic, however, we must do more than just show that the dances 'look symbolic' and that the dancers have reasons for some things which they do. We must further be entitled to say that the dancers do have certain reasons for dancing ; if the dances are symbolic then of most dances it must be true that the bee performs the dance because it is in the presence of other bees which wi1 1 be informed by the dance as to the whereabouts of food. That is, for the dances to be symbolic, it is necessary that the dancers should be not merely intelligent about some­ thing but intelligent about the relationship between one bee's dancing and another's finding food. 45

L A N G U AGE A N D I N T E L LIGE N C E

To show intelligence in this kind of way, they would have to satisfy at least some of the following con­ ditions . When a bee has found food and returned to the hive, it does not dance if there are no other bees there, or if the only bees there are ones which have themselves just returned from the same source of food. If a bee performs a dance once and then falls exhausted, another bee which has observed the dance now performs the dance itself until it has been ob­ served by many others. If a certain bee repeatedly performs 'false' dances, then in time the other bees come to disregard the dances of that particular bee. A few things of this sort would certainly entitle us to credit apian dances with a genuinely symbolic signifi­ cance. The 'things of this sort' would manifest intelli­ gence of about the same order as that which is in­ volved in keeping to the past-tense rule for denials, and they would fit the analysis of intelligence which I have offered in §4. But now the intelligence would be brought to bear upon the status of the dances as a system of communication, and would thus suffice to justify attaching a symbolic significance to the dances . It would also justify treating them as cons­ tituting a language. My ground for assertion (d), that if the dances arc symbolic then they constitute a language, is simply that they have the right kind of complexity and capacity for novelty to count as a genuine language, and not just as what I have in §2 called 'scraps of linguistic behaviour' . My thesis, then , is that intelligence is a necessary conaiUon- lor i- 1-a�:i�i_ - a _Ian_gu_age ; t:hat possessi6n of a 'sy:nilioliclooking' and suitably complex pattern of - - --� 46

LANGUAGE A N D INTELLIGENCE

behaviour is al so necessary fo r having a language; � ut t4_ at to est� bl ish th_�i_�_ G!:�-�t!-Q'� h�s a_ l�Ilgµ age. we must show _P-9t _ _Q_!} l y that it satisfies these two con­ d itions but_aj� o that its int�Bi ge nce_ is ex ercised in the particul ar way which I hav e been d iscussing. There is no th1�g- im poss ibl e in the supposition that there shoul d be a creature which was intell igent and which had a pattern of behav iour which 'l ooked sy mbol ic' etc., but which d id not show intell ig ence with rega rd to the status of its ' sy mbol ic-l ooking ' behaviour as a sy stem of comm unication. Suppose that a highly intell igent sheep- d og showed itsel f abl e to und erstand a really compl ex sy stem of whistl es by the shepherd, and al so showed itsel f to be master of a compl ex sy stem of barking noises fr om which the shepherd coul d infer m uch useful info rm ation about the position of the sheep, the natur e of the terrain and so on. This begins to sound l ike a story about a genuine, if primitive, l anguage. But suppose it transpired that the d og woul d bark ' informatively ' even when the shepherd was obviousl y out of earshot; suppose it never passed on the info rmative ba rks of another simil arl y end owed d og; suppose it nev er l earned that ( say) when the shepherd remov ed his hat his whistl es were al way s l ies. . . . If in these ways the d og showed itsel f to be entirely unad aptabl e and thus uninte1l i­ gent, even though it was cl early intell igent about many other things, I think we shoul d be d isincl ined to say that it had a genuine l anguage.This d isincl ination woul d be justified by the fact that, ev en in the cases of successful com munication, we coul d not say in a 'reason-givi ng' tone of voice that 'The d og barks thus 47

LA N G UA GE A N D I N T E L L I G E N C E

because the shepherd is within earshot and . . . ' or 'The dog runs in that direction because the shepherd has whistled in such and such a way', and so on. What I have said so far in this section implies that several things have been happening at once in §§2-3 ; and it is now necessary to disentangle them. The n�t�ol?-_ �L!:��guid�!!�es� w�ch } b-��� _ PE-t _ at · t'he centre of the stage in tl:iose t�o se.ctions is, -as . I shall try fo show, ' cruci�y relevant_ to rationality ; and we are yet t1ie end -of tnat question. But in the progress towards a solution of it I have developed the apian fable in such a way as to endow the bees with intelligence and-if we consider the story to be extended along the lines indicated in the present section-in such a way as to endow them also with a language. It would have been possible to raise the question of intelligence, and of the linguistic status of the dances, without discussing rule-guided­ ness at all. For example : it would have been possible to leave the bees with a 'language' which lacked denials and which was uniformly 'past-tense', and which thus involved only rather simple correlations between dances and states of affairs 'justifying' them or 'reported by' them. If in addition the story was told in such a way as to show the bees to be intelligent about the circumstances under which they refrained from dancing, or relayed one anothers' dances, or refrained from acting on the dances of certain bees, etc., then it would have been a story about a genuine language. In this story, though, the intelligence would have come into play only in connection with whether or not to dance, or whether or not to act upon a dance, 48

-not

al

REASONS

in a given situation; it w ould not have been involved in the qu estion of what to dance in various sorts of circumstances. Thus, I am not saying that any language must con­ tain denials, or that any language must contain statements based upon the assessment of evidence.I do say that linguistic behavi our must be behaviour of intelligent cre atures, and I have chosen to develop apian intell igence as a by -product of apian d enials, since it happens that apian denials of the sort I have discussed provi de a good springboard to apian ration­ ality. As regards 'Any language must contain denial s' : not onl y do I not affi rm this, but I doubt if th ere is any thing useful to be said of th e fo rm 'Any l anguage must contain. . . '. C ertainly, a language must obey certain sorts of rules, and must contain statements w hich fall un der more than one rule a t once; but I doubt if there is anything true to be said along the lines of 'Any language must contain something anal ogous to statements of su ch an d such a logical form' .

6. Reasons I have _said-� og_:rp atic_::iJI,y t_b. a_t the. bees wh ich p erfo rm derifa ls i�c..Qnformity: with .th e .p ast-tense ru le m anifest in!��}_!g_�!l c�_lJ ut_ not r ationality. L et us take it that they also show the sorts of intelligence mentioned in §5 49

REASONS

as justifying us in saying that they really do have a language. Then, to say that they are not rational is to make the vague claim that their language lacks some of the features of human talk which lead us to regard the latter as setting us on some special sort of intellec­ tual eminence as compared with other known terres­ trial species. In this section and the next two I shall try to show that this is so, and to show what the relevant features are. The reader will note a certain tenuousness in the argument of these three sections : I do not think that the arguments I shall use are invalid, but I concede that it is far from obvious that they do all that I claim for them. However, the con­ clusions which I shall reach in §§6-8 will be further discussed and re-argued in a quite different way in §9 and following sections ; and so the arguments of §§6-8 are in a way dispensible. I include them partly because they are embodied in further developments of my apian fable, and I believe that there are method­ ological lessons to be learned by allowing the fable to run its full course through §§2-3, 6-8, even if the later developments of the fable lack the kind of inevitability one might hope for. I do claim merits other than methodological ones in §§6-8, however ; whether or not they prove anything, they undoubtedly illustrate conclusions which are proved in later sections. As a preliminary to showing that our fictional bees are still not rational, I am going to modify the apian story in three ways which will bring the behaviour of the bees still closer to human talk ; and I shall show of this modified version that even it does not count as a story about rational behaviour. The modifications in 50

REA S O N S

question will have, prima facie, the effect of endowing the bees with ( I ) statements with two distinct tenses, ( 2 ) two distinct subjects of discourse, and (3) means for stating their reasons for any particular affirma­ tion or denial. The details are as follows. ( I ) The bees have two physically distinguishable genera of dances, all dances of one genus having a past­ tense status which is supported by the performance­ rules and denial-rules for dances of that genus, and all dances of the other genus having a similarly un­ challenged future-tense status. ( 2 ) The bees can talk about danger as well as about food . That is, there is a rule of the form: 'If dance 1 is the same as dance 2 except that the former has physical feature F while the latter does not, then the English sentence which gives the force of dance1 is the same as that which gives the force of dance 2 except that where the former has "food which is sugary in degree N" the latter has "danger which is great in degree N".' I ignore the frivolous problem of how to calibrate the scale on which N appears . (3) There is a set of physical features F1 , • • . , Fn such that (a) each dance and each denial has at least one of the features F1 , • • • , Fn, and (b) there is for each of F1 , • . . , Fn a rule of the form 'Any dance or denial has the feature Fi only if the bee performing it has recently been in an empirical situation of the kind Si', and (c) a given dance or denial has a feature F1 only if the associated empirical situation S1 does in fact constitute evidence for the truth of what is affirmed by the dance, or for the falsity of what is denied by the denial. Thus, one of the set F1 , • • • , Fn may be associa51

REASONS

ted with men carrying smoke-pots, another with the bodies of dead bees, another with the early stages of forest fires, another with forest-fires on the wane, another with nectar-laden flowers opening fast, another with flower-stalks and ruminating cows, and so on. These three proposals complicate the apian picture by introducing three further independent ways in which apian dances can be classified. The idea is that there is a physical feature which is common to all the dances which has the force of 'There will be soon . . . ' and to none which have the force of 'There was recently . . . '; a feature common to all which have the force of '. . . food . . . ' and to none which have the force of '. . . danger . . . ' ; a feature common to all and only those which have the force of ' . . . in compass­ direction D from the hive . . . ' for each compass­ direction; a feature common to all and only those which have the force of '. . . at distance L from the hive . . . ' for each distance within the apian range; and a feature common to all and only the dances and denials which have the force of '. . . evidence of kind E . . . ' for each kind of evidence of which the bees take cognisance. The 'force' of each dance depends upon the conditions under which dances of its kind are performed and denied. What I am supposing is that the classification of dances in terms of their perform­ ance-conditions and denial-conditions corresponds to a classification based upon physical features of the dances themselves. By giving the bees dances with two distinct tenses, we make the assessment of evidence relevant to their affirmations as well as their denials. Previously they 52

REASONS

pre se nte d us with a case of comm unication ( dance and subseq ue nt foraging flight) and of e vi de nce -asse ss­ me nt ( de nial pat te rn) ; but t he se two sorts of pe rhaps­ rat ional be haviour we re rat he r thoroughl y se parate from one anot he r, t he e vide nce -asse ssme nt occurring onl y afte r t he commun icat ion was al l fi nishe d. Now we have t hem fi rm l y inte rl ocke d: the asse ssme nt of e vide nce l ie s be hind what is affi rme d as we l l as be hind what is de nie d. B y int roducing rule s which corre l ate fe at ure s of dance s and de nial s wit h t he e vide nce which is avail able to t he bee s m aking them, we i nve nt bee s which m ight be said not me re l y t o base state me nts upon e vide nce but al so t o make st ateme nts about e vide nce. This incre ase s t he pl ausibil ity of say ing that the e vide nce t o which we refe r whe n de scribing the bee s' be haviour is e vide nce of which t he y are aware as e vide nce ; or of saying t hat t he y have a conce pt of '. . . e vide nce for . . . '. The re is a furt he r im portant conseq ue nce of t his de ve l opme nt in t he apian st ory. I have argue d t hat t he prirJyf_facie . case fo r cal lin g�anyc re at ure inte llige nt m ust i ncl ude somet hing of the followi ng form :_ -�'J:h. i� _ cf_��f ure goe s t hrough a pe rformance of kind P whe ne ve r it is in a sit uat ion of any of t he kind s S1 , -S2 , • • • §.n• The se k1nd s-of situation are supe rfi cial ly di ssimila:t from one anot he r, but the y are unite d by the fact t hat, in a sit uation of any of the se kind s, P is an appropriate pe rform ance for a cre ature with the want s and nee d s of t his cre at ure.' I- showe d that ------------appare nt inte lligence_maY- _tur_n _out_ __t_o l>e fa ke inte l ligence if it t� _ _tq_u,ncLth atthe __c.r.eJL_tiu:e.in _que st ion doe s nof-apprehe n� - �iJu�tions _of _ kind s. S1, S2 , • • • Sn as 53

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superficially dissimiJar but appropriate for perform­ ance P, but merely as superficially similar. But in the late.st version of the apian story no such discovery is even theoretically on the cards, for now the bees' dances and denials are themselves complex to the same degree, and in the same way, as is the set of situations in which they are performed. It is not now possible to say : 'Perhaps to the bees these are not cases of flower-stalks and cows, of ploughed fields and the scent of poppies, and so on, but merely cases of some one simple sensible feature which the bees can detect but which we cannot. Perhaps these different situations are not different to the bees at all.' We now know that the situations in question are different to the bees, for the differences amongst the situations are mirrored by d.ifferences amongst the dances and denials which are associated with them : we are not now conjecturing that a complex operation is going on, we are watching a complex operation. Further­ more, it is still a complexity-within-a-unity : two dances which are based on different evidence will differ from one another in their evidence-giving aspects, but they will resemble one another in those respects which make them dances-about-food-or­ danger; and similarly with denials. There is thus as much reason as ever to regard dances and denials as manifesting intelligence-as involving the intellectual organisation or bringing together of complex and disparate data-and one threat to their being so regarded, namely the threat of discovering the com­ plexity or disparateness to be spurious, is decisively removed. 54

REASONS

By giving the bees two distinct subjects of dis­ course, food and danger, I have endowed them with a usefully dyadic concept of evidentia] relevance. Our ordinary concept of evidentia] relevance is usefully dyadic because we cannot describe a state of affairs as merely 'evidential', we have to say what it con­ stitutes evidence for. But if the only thing for which we ever wanted evidence was the existence of food in various places at various times, we should not need the dyadic phrase '. . . counts as evidence for . . . ' at all, since the second blank would always be fil1ed in the same way. It would suffice to have the monadic phrase '. . . is important': states of affairs would be picked out as important with respect to particular places at particular times, but there would be no need to say what their importance was, for there would be only one sort of importance, namely importance as evidence for the presence of food. By al1owing the bees to discourse about danger as well as about food, we give to the relation of evidential relevance a job which could not be done just as well by a monadic predicate like 'important'. With all these similarities between human talk and the language of the fictional bees, why do I still deny that the bees are rational? The answer to this concerns the notion of evidence or of reasons. I tried to increase the plausibility of saying that the bees' behaviour manifests rationality by saying that in the latest version of their story they can not only base their statements upon evidence but can also make state­ ments about evidence: the suggestion was that when a bee performs a dance which is rule-correlated with 55

REASONS

food of kind K in place P, and which is rule-correlated with empirical situation S which is in fact evidential for the presence of K food at P, we can interpret the dance as saying 'There was recently [ or will be soon] food of kind K at P ; I affirm this because situation S was recently observed'. But what right have we to put a 'because' into this? Granted that the dance is a statement, why should it not be a statement saying 'There was [ or will be] food of kind K in place P ; and situation S was recently observed'? What right have we to say that the evidence-correlated features of the bees' dances are reason-giving features? It might be said : 'Well, it cannot be a coincidence that each dance is accompanied by a feature which is rule­ correlated with a situation which does in fact consti­ tute evidence for the truth of what is asserted by the dance. Why is there this correlation if not because the bees are giving their reasons for what they say?' The answer to this is that the correlation between dance­ features and evidence is certainly not coincidental, since there is a causal explanation for it : the bee is so built that when it is under the influence of any one of a genus of situations, which have in common that they all precede the presence of K food in place P, it performs a dance with certain general features; but what more specific features a dance of this general kind has depends upon the species of K-food-at-P-promising situation it has recently observed. Whether there arc reasons for, as well as causes of, the holding of the correlation between dance-features and evidence is precisely the point at issue. It will be recalled that earlier in the development of 56

RE ASONS

the apian story I tried to endow the bees with behav­ iour which was rule- guided and not m erely regular. My fir st attem pt to achieve this end was the i nven­ tion of denials conform ing to the 'simple rule' for denials, but this fa iled because the sim ple rule could be expressed in terms of 'absence of anticipated food' instead of in terms of 'breach of a rule'. Since then, I have introduced several further com plications into the patterns of dancing and denials, but-although I have not explicitly raised this q uestion-none of these developm ents has entitled us to say that the bees have rules. Our present diffi culty-that the bees do not have reasons-is a lineally descended variant of the earlier diffi culty about their possession of rules. I shall not try to show that the two diffi culties are variants of one another: it suffi ces for my purposes that they are obviously analogous diffi culties, and that they pose anal ogous problems. J ust as the diffi culty about rules posed the problem of how to give 'rule' an unassailable place in the description of the bees' behaviour, so the diffi culty about reasons poses the problem of how to endow the bees with some pattern of behaviour which cannot satisfactorily be described without the use of 'reasons' or one of its cognates. Because the bees are intelligent, we can in the m anner of §5 describe them as having reasons, without thereby com mitting the sort of absurdity which would be involved in crediting, say, an am oeba with having reasons for what it does. But we can alsor esist the claim that the bees have reasons; and my present concern i s to see how we can so develop the apian story as to force 'reason' or one of its cognates into the story. R.-5

57

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Let us try to do this through the invention of a 11e,v kind of denial. What we need is a kind of denial which is performed when and only when some bee 'knows' that a bad reason has been given for some claim. We already have the bees performing dances which we should like to interpret as having the force of 'Such and such is the case ; the reason for saying this is that such and such was recently observed', but which we can equally well interpret as having the force of 'Such and such is the case ; and such and such was recently observed' . To separate these from one another, and to associate the dances firmly with the former kind of interpretation, we must endow the bees with a kind of denia] which they perform not if they know that a