John Searle’s “Animal Minds” (1994) suggests that language is not necessary for non-human animals to believe. He summarizes the point of contention:
“The basic idea in this argument seems to be that since ‘truth’ is a metalinguistic semantic predicate and since the possession of belief requires the ability to make the distinction between true and false beliefs, it seems to follow immediately that the possession of beliefs requires metalinguistic semantic predicates, and that obviously requires language.” (67)
Searle goes on to say that there is no “reason at all to suppose that this necessarily requires language” (67). What is particularly problematic about Searle’s objection is that while he dismisses language as a necessary requirement for belief, he permits “belief” to stand as is. (I address the issue briefly in my previous post, “Taking Lions Talking Lion.”)
For Searle, “beliefs and desires are embedded not only in a network of other beliefs and desires but more importantly in a network of perceptions and actions, and these are the biologically primary forms of intentionality” (67).
Searle’s logic raises two questions: First, why move beyond “perceptions and actions” to “belief” when describing non-human animal behavior? As Dave Beisecker puts it, “[W]hy exactly should a system being in a state with such and such a causal profile specifically count as having, say, a belief (or other form of mental representation) that such and such is the case, or an intention to bring about a certain state of affairs?" Second, does "intentionality” lose its force if non-human animals are non-believing agents?
Searle seems to conflate perception-action and belief-intention (again, Searle places belief within the larger, more primal, primary network of perception-action). His examples suggest a begging-the-question anthropocentrism: “Why is my dog barking up that tree? Because he wants to catch up to the cat. Why does he believe the cat is up the tree? Because he saw the cat run up the tree” (68).
At one point, Searle acknowledges the objection to his understanding of belief:
“But why do we need to ‘postulate’ beliefs and desires at all? Why not just grant the existence of perceptions and actions in such cases? The answer is that the behavior is unintelligible without the assumption of beliefs and desires; because the animal, for example, barks up the tree even when he can no longer see or smell the cat, thus manifesting a belief that the cat is up the tree even when he cannot see or smell that the cat is up the tree.” (68)
Must “beliefs and desires” be the only answer to why the dog remains at the tree? The only reasonable conclusion one can draw from the above example is that humans witnessing this non-human animal behavior are the ones ascribing a status of belief—theirs—to make sense of the dog’s behavior. That is to say, the “unintelligible” is as much ours as it is the dog’s. Searle relies on reductionist, cause-and-effect biological determinism for verification:
“I am suggesting that the grounds on which we found our certainty that animals are conscious is not that intelligent behavior which is the same or similar to ours is proof of consciousness, but rather that causal structures which are the same or similar causal structures to ours produce the same or similar effects. Behavior, even linguistic behavior, is only relevant given certain assumptions about structure. That is why we attribute consciousness to humans and animals, with or without language, and we do not attribute it to radios.” (74)
Given that the understanding of belief is “grounded” in similar causal relations—man’s and dog’s—one can only assume that Searle has in mind a complex science informing the understanding (i.e., a biology of belief), and he does. But here in a Wittgensteinian flourish science is subsumed by a kind of pragmatism, as one’s response to dog behavior:
“I do not infer that my dog is conscious, any more than, when I come into a room, I infer that the people present are conscious. I simply respond to them as is appropriate to respond to conscious beings. I treat them as conscious beings and that is that…. Another way to put this is to say that it does not matter really how I know whether my dog is conscious, or even whether or not I do “know” that he is conscious. The fact is, he is conscious and epistemology in this area has to start with this fact.” (75)
Such a privileging of response over epistemic fact suggests a Skinnerian language-game, but not Skinnerian science. In the same paragraph Searle blames Behaviorists (and many others) for pushing dated epistemology—for purporting epistemology in the first instance. The problem has been Philosophy asking the wrong question: “How do you know?” For Searle, one perceives non-human animal consciousness neither through Cartesian dualism nor Hegelian inferentialism. That is to say, one perceives another’s consciousness from one’s own response to it, not through inferences drawn from observed similarities or reciprocal relations.
But what exactly does Searle mean by “response”? Why does one treat a dog as if it is conscious? Is a response’s appropriateness merely another formulation of the Myth of the Given? Does Searle see “response” as already conceptual and normative in nature, nothing more and nothing less? Does the latter mask an epistemic fact implicit in “response”? If so, what is the difference between Searle’s anthropocentrism that gives non-human animals consciousness and, say, Rousseau’s which does not:
"I see in all animals only an ingenious machine to which nature has given senses in order to keep itself in motion and protect itself, up to a certain point, against everything that is likely to destroy or disturb it. I see exactly the same things in the human machine, with this difference: that while nature alone activates everything in the operations of a beast, man participates in his own actions in his capacity as a free agent.” (87)
Surprisingly if not contradictorily Searle concludes by differentiating such ostensible pragmatism (the response that brings non-human animal consciousness) from scientific enterprise, an Enlightenment telos of progress:
“However, though the general or philosophically skeptical form of the ‘other animals’ minds problem seems to me confused, there are quite specific questions about specific mechanisms the answers to which are essential to scientific progress in this area. For example, how are cats’ visual experiences similar to and different from those of humans?” (75)
These “genuine epistemic” questions are for Searle not the same as the metaphysical ones described above. These questions are regularly answered in laboratories and hospitals and on drawing boards. Their answers bring a better understanding of the world, including non-human animal consciousness, which, one recalls, is ultimately one’s response to consciousness. The distinction, then, between genuine and non-genuine epistemic questions would seem to permit Searle to be both Darwinian and Wittgensteinian insofar as “genuine” is not just another game: biological naturalism provides access to similar causal structures across species; language-games give meaning to a non-human animal’s experiential realities. We are no doubt reminded here of Donald Davidson’s coherence theory of truth that grounds a belief in its relation to a belief system that gets its “adaptive appropriateness through causality, which originates from the physical world” (Boros), as well as Robert Brandom’s understanding that language has a “downtown,” where some language-games—assertions, inferences—are privileged over others. But Searle is not clear if we are to see his naturalism as a game or something else. In the end, one may wonder about Searle’s intentions, but not a dog’s beliefs.
Beisecker, Dave. “Normative Functionalism and its Pragmatist Roots." Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective. 23 December 2012. Web.
Boros, Janos. “Representationalism and Antirepresentationalism – Kant, Davidson and Rorty.” 10 Aug. 1998. The Paideia Project. Web.
Davidson, Donald. “A Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge.” Truth and Interpretation. Oxford: Blackwell, 1993.
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. A Discourse on Inequality. London: Penguin, 1984.
Searle, John. “Animal Minds.” Consciousness and Language. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002.
STEVE WEXLER 