Breeding and Evolution

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Breeding and Evolution

The most obvious theory of animal existence is one I have never heard mentioned. The standard theories are (i) that a divine being created all the species independently and (ii) that the existing species all evolved by natural selection from earlier species with no rational agency involved. We now know that the second theory is true. But there is a third alternative that never seemed to gain any adherents or even proponents, viz. that all the species are the result of intentional breeding. Darwin drew attention to the human breeding of animals and made an analogy to evolution by natural selection, but what about the idea that someone in the distant past bred all the animals that now exist? Wouldn’t that be the natural way to think before we knew much about world history? Some enterprising animal breeder decided to breed a massive variety of animal types, perhaps starting with something pretty unimpressive, say a mongoose (a pair of them). This theory is highly explanatory and fits the facts of breeding as we know it. Prima facie it is better than the two theories we are familiar with—less speculative and gappy. Why wasn’t this the dominant theory up till the time of Darwin? It would be possible to combine it with a religious theme: the original breeder was a type of god, perhaps on the level of the Greek gods (special but not that special). This theory doesn’t seem difficult to figure out. We could call it “breederism”. There could be a myth about how the breeder came up with the idea—say, his wife grew bored with mongooses and craved some variety in her animal companions, so she petitioned her powerful husband, Xeus, to do something about it. It all happened underground and then the species were let loose on the planet’s surface. I rather like this myth and I wonder why it was never invented. It’s not true, of course, but when did that ever deter people from framing and accepting theories? We have a puzzle in the history of ideas—why people didn’t come up with breederism.

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Not So Naive Realism

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Not So Naïve Realism

We are usually faced with a binary choice between naive realism and sense-data theories, as if naive realism had only one strength or type. But really there is a spectrum of positions aptly so described, according to their degree of naivety. The strongest type—the most naïve—says that the objects of perception are objectively precisely as they seem subjectively: if the object seems to have a certain property, then it objectively has that property, whether it is perceived or not. If it seems elliptical, then it is objectively elliptical; if it seems red, then it is objectively red; if it seems hot, then it is objectively hot, etc. Such a view comes under pressure from visual illusion, quirks of perspective, lighting conditions, and species-specific perceptual biases and projections. It is too naïve (“naïve naïve realism”). We do well to dial it back a notch. Thus, we reach a more sophisticated form of naive realism: exclude anything idiosyncratic to the perceiver and peculiar to a particular viewing situation. This will give us the distinction between primary and secondary qualities, the latter assigned to the perceiving mind not to the mind-independent object. Perceptions of shape and size are objectively veridical, but not perceptions of color and smell. We can be naïve about some perceived properties, but not all. But this position too can come under pressure, on two fronts. First, physics might indicate that even these supposedly objective properties do not really belong to the objects, being rather projections from our innate perceptual geometry. Nothing is really straight or intrinsically heavy, not when you get right down to it. Second, nothing about the object is precisely as it seems—there is always some degree of inaccuracy. We don’t see objective shape exactly as it is, if we see it at all (i.e., the objective spatial properties of the object). Following this line of thought, we conclude that ordinary perception is never completely veridical with respect to the actual object—never perfectly true to it. Some properties may be better perceived than others, but none are perceived exactly as they objectively are. The subject always gets in the way, as it were. This may be called wised-up naïve realism, as opposed to the dumb kind.

But doesn’t that mean that naïve realism is actually false and that we only perceive sense-data (subjective states)? I think not, because there is room for very sophisticated naïve realism, as sophisticated as you like. We never see objects as they are in themselves, in any respect, but we still see them—or we still see them.For we don’t see anything else, certainly not our states of mind. We see real physical things, just not as they really (objectively, intrinsically) are. Their properties line up with perceived properties (they covary) and in virtue of this they are seen objects. The mug on my table lacks all the properties it seems to me to possess—a certain color, shape, weight, warmth, etc.—but I still see it, that physical thing. What else would I be seeing? So, we can still be naïve realists about perception, but highly sophisticated, scientifically well-informed, super-smart naïve realists—just not naive naïve realists. I rather suspect this position is correct: our perceptual experience never accurately represents the actual objective nature of things—it doesn’t need to from a biological point of view—but that doesn’t prevent us from seeing them. I see my mug all right (not my mind or brain), just not as it is in itself, independently of my visual system. Isn’t the same thing true of all seeing, human and animal? It tracks and mirrors, but it doesn’t transparently portray—it isn’t like a high-resolution photo. Even insects can be granted naïve realism, though they never get the object precisely right—as it is sub specie aeternitatus. I therefore advocate what may be called hyper-sophisticated naïve realism. We really do see physical objects but never as they are from their point of view. Our perceptions are all completely false of the things perceived, but we still perceive those things.

I hear a piercing bellow from the back row: “But don’t we really know the properties of the objects of perception?!” Answer: no, we don’t, not as a result of our perceptual experience anyway; but it is okay to talk as if we do. I can say that I know my mug is blue just by looking at it, but it is not really blue, not in the way it seems to me (it can be said to be relationally blue). Error does not preclude efficacy. Pragmatically, we can talk this way, but strictly speaking things are not as they seem, ever. We can even have true beliefs about the true objects of perception, recognizing their divergence from our perceptions of them; the rampant falsity of our perceptions does not prevent that. Perceptual error does not imply cognitive (intellectual) error. I can know the truth concerning what my senses deceive me about, e.g., the location of color. My senses can be riddled with illusion and falsehood, but my mind may be omniscient, or at least undeceived. The senses do their job, but objective accuracy is above their pay grade. They may not even be anywhere close to the truth, but still serve their biological purpose. The point I have been making here is that naïve realism is not committed to uncritical acceptance of the contents of perception, only the most simple-minded version of it is. Naïve realism can be as sophisticated and revisionary as you like; it can even describe physical objects as totally unlike the way they seem. They might be ideas in the mind of God, not material things in physical space with shape and size; but still, we are seeing them. We don’t know we are looking into the mind of God—we think we are looking into an ungodly physical space—but we are. Objects are what they are, however they seem to us, and they may be very different from the way they seem. We could be seeing noumenal objects all the time (ripples in a ten-dimensional continuum) despite the fact that they seem to us like solid bounded things in three-dimensional space. Perception can pierce its own veil. It has the power to transcend its content. It is like a telescope trained on an occluded star.[1]

[1] It is an interesting point that we are ready to accept that our perceptions of distant stars fail to reveal their intrinsic nature, even to be radically misleading, but we naively assume that nearby objects are seen pretty much as they really are. Why is this? Why aren’t nearby objects as underperceived, or misperceived, as distant stars? Yet we can still see them. Seeing is one thing, correctly characterizing is another. After all, you can see a person in disguise as someone he is not—yet you still see him.

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Bertrand Russell and Me

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Bertrand Russell and Me

When I was young, I idolized Bertrand Russell—I idolized the man. It was largely because of him that I fled psychology into the arms of philosophy. But I am not the same kind of philosopher as Russell: my interests are different and always have been. I find his interests somewhat chilly and unnatural. I would say his main interest (his only interest really) is knowledge and skepticism. Everything else grows out of that: he is obsessed with doubt and the skeptical challenge (how can we know anything?). That question has never really troubled me, except academically; it isn’t a living problem for me. It doesn’t pulsate within me or keep me awake at night. Why this difference? Why the difference of intellectual temperament?

I mean this as a psychological question, specifically a child-psychological question. What is it about our background and upbringing that explains the difference? Why was he so obsessed with doubt and the possibility of knowledge? The answer is staring us in the face, though it wasn’t appreciated in Russell’s day. Namely: he lost both of his parents at an early age. His mother died of diphtheria in 1874 when he was 2 and his father died in 1876 of bronchitis (possibly also a broken heart) when he was 4. This was a double blow: he must have suffered acutely from maternal deprivation and paternal deprivation, even though he would have little or no memory of either parent. This is traumatizing stuff, inflicted on a barely rational infant. Just think of the shock to his heart and brain. No mother to hold and be close to and love; then, no father to admire and depend upon. His father’s deep depression over his wife’s early death would have hung heavy in the air, underscoring little Bertie’s own loss. His mother would have been an absent presence, actively non-existent. He knew of her, but he hardly knew her. In later life his parents would have seemed like Meinongian objects: subsisting in the recesses of memory but never robustly existing. Simply put, he didn’t know his parents—not as you and I know ours. He didn’t grow up with them around, save for a few short years, only surrogates for them. Wouldn’t it be natural for him to yearn for knowledge of what had been lost—long to be acquainted with those vanished figures? He might well grow skeptical of anything remaining in existence. He might be riddled with uncertainty in the marrow of his being. He would certainly not be psychologically normal. He might even find refuge in the certainty of mathematics and its ability to stay the course—as he confessed about his childhood (Euclid was his parental substitute). He was a lonely little boy, parentless, adrift, stricken with doubt and fear. Numbers became his Mum and Dad—and they are not too warm as parents. I, on the other hand, had a normal upbringing in this respect: my parents were always around, never in doubt, a source of security and certainty, enormously salient. So, I am not riddled with doubt, obsessed with existence and non-existence, in need of knowledge I don’t and can’t have. For children do need knowledge, particularly with regard to parental presence, and I had it but Russell didn’t. Accordingly, I am not deeply troubled by skepticism; it doesn’t frighten me. I am more interested in the nature and origin of things—not in their mere existence. Thus, my early interests were in chemistry and biology not mathematics and logic. I took existence for granted. Baby Bertie woke up one day and found his mother was dead; two years later the same thing happened with his father. Gone, just like that, never to return. I had no such soul-shattering experience. I gravitated towards butterflies and their life-cycle not numbers and their everlasting existence.

But there is a more perplexing part to this epistemological story: for Russell was deeply ambivalent about doubt and certainty. He craved certainty, needed it, felt it in his bones (at least in some areas—though here too doubts would creep in); but he also distrusted it, excoriated it, spurned it. His entire ethical and political life revolved around questioning dogma and extolling skepticism; not for nothing was he called a passionate skeptic—he was passionately skeptical. He hated certainty—while not being able to live without it. Why? The answer is not hard to find: his mother wanted Bertie raised as an agnostic, but his grandmother had other ideas and raised him as a dogmatic Christian. She raised him to believe that he was justifiably certain about highly uncertain things; not surprisingly, when adolescent rationality set in, he began questioning all of that and ended up an atheist. So, we have skeptical forces at work in his psyche combined with the love of logical and mathematical certainty: he was both certain of some things and profoundly skeptical about others. He wasn’t a passionate skeptic about logic! We might call this “Russell’s paradox”: certainty is to be deplored and avoided, on the one hand, but it is to be adored and celebrated, on the other. It was both good and bad, virtuous and vicious. It would be psychologically more harmonious to adopt a uniform attitude: either nothing is certain or everything is. Mathematics is certain but everything else (especially religion) is uncertain. Of course, his position is logically consistent, but psychologically there are stresses and strains at work (“cognitive dissonance”). And things get murky when we consider the paradoxes of set theory and the questionable epistemic status of atheism: the former undermines mathematical knowledge, the latter impugns the right to be certain of the non-existence of God. None of this is psychological plain sailing, especially if you have serious hang-ups about knowledge deriving from parental death.[1]

Back to Russell and me. We both love to write and we are both good at it. We both love philosophy, though we were initially trained in other subjects. We were both cancelled (by American zealots in both cases) and accused of all manner of nonsense. We both agonize over the folly of mankind and despise uncritical convention. We both enjoy humor (too much for our own good sometimes). We are both haughty and contemptuous where fools are concerned (that is, everywhere). But I am not obsessed with skepticism and human knowledge (its scope and limits), though I am interested in what is mysterious and what is not. I am more interested in the mind than he was, and more artistically inclined (music seems to have had little appeal for him). I like to know the make-up of things as opposed to knowing their existence or otherwise. I like fiction but not “logical fictions”. I wonder how things would have gone if our roles had been reversed: what if I came first and he started reading me in his late teens? What if he had been studying mathematics but found myautobiography inclining him in a philosophical direction? What if he had never lost his parents at an early age? Allow me, please, to fantasize that he would have become a philosopher in my mold and left skepticism to the existentially insecure (in both senses). In splendid old age he would then write about my influence on him and our philosophical differences. He might be heavily into ethics and aesthetics and wonder why I spent so much time worrying about what we can and cannot understand—why all the tormented mysterianism? Were my parents perhaps mysteries to me, though always around?[2]

[1] If the skeptic is right, your parents might never have existed; they might have always been dead. They might be illusions like everything else. You might have always been maternally deprived, despite appearances.

[2] It gives me pleasure to write about Bertie and me after all this time, a perk of old age. I never knew him, though I did once receive a letter from him, but he has been a continuous presence my whole life.

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Tennis with Lolita and Eddy

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Tennis with Lolita and Eddy

I was playing tennis with my friend Eddy yesterday, as I have done thousands of times before. We were at the Coral Gables Country Club (which is less tony than it sounds). It was a clear crisp sunny day, which is unusual for Miami (humid, hot). We were virtually alone at noon on a clay court. Eddy is a sixty-eight-year-old retired Swiss banker—slim, fit, fast, skilled, hard-hitting, six-foot tall. The man can play tennis (no weakness on the backhand). That morning I had been reading Brian Boyd’s gripping biography of Nabokov, which had reached the point at which Lolita was written (700 pages in). As it happens, I had suggested to Eddy that he read that novel. He opened his tennis bag and pulled out a brand-new copy of the book. He had brought it in order that I could indicate to him what part of the preliminaries he should read (he had the annotated version), since I had told him not to skip the Foreword by John Ray, Jr., PhD. So, there we were on the tennis court book in hand, with Nabokov’s words spilling out (“white widowed male”, “light of my life”)—he being himself a tennis player and chronicler of Lolita’s tennis game. I told Eddy that in a few days he would be reading the greatest description of the game of tennis ever written. I wonder what he will make of the book whose magic never seems to dim. I wonder what discussions we will have of it on court as he reads it. Will it affect our tennis? Eddy, me, Nabokov, Lolita—all together on the tennis court—a sublime confluence, in my book. We went on to play for nearly two hours in that bright clear air. If only Vladimir could have witnessed it.

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My Honest Views II

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My Honest Views II

I see that my innocuous post “My Honest Views” has rubbed some people up the wrong way. I confess I find this very amusing. Clearly, my little poem was meant as partly tongue-in-cheek and set to trap the unwary reader (I made a large catch). I notice that people don’t seem to object to the truth of my remarks, only to the person they think is making them—all about my “arrogance” etc. Who cares if I am arrogant—what skin is it off your nose? I confess too that I had been reading a lot of (and about) Nabokov lately, whose scathing views on hallowed writers were notorious and sometimes excoriated (but always bracing and largely correct). Also, I like to try out new literary forms of philosophical discourse designed to challenge and provoke. But let’s get boringly factual and prosaically pedestrian (there will be no backing down, I’m afraid). Everyone thought that David Lewis’s views on possible worlds were bonkers, as he explicitly recognized (those “incredulous stares” were genuinely incredulous). Now I don’t mind the consideration of bonkers views in philosophy and I thought his views on the ontology of possible worlds were well worth thinking about (I wrote about them seriously). But come on, really, they were completely bonkers. As to Quine, all the crack logicians (I’m thinking of Saul Kripke in particular) thought Quine was a pretty amateurish mathematical logician (Quine’s theorem anyone?). Outside of that he confined himself to a very narrow strip of philosophy and seemed to have little interest in, or knowledge of, other strips. He wasn’t what you might call a generalist. And his philosophical views were pretty out there and not exactly lucidly defended (I reviewed him once and also wrote about his attack on the analytic-synthetic distinction). Quine basically thought that most traditional philosophy was rubbish, and he said as much (see “Epistemology Naturalized”). He was an unreconstructed positivist and behaviorist. Hardly anyone agreed with him. Now consider Strawson, my dear teacher and friend: a very able and significant philosopher, but baffled by tracts of the subject. When I first met him as a student, he asked me how advanced my formal logic was; I said not very. He smiled broadly and said “Good!” He found that subject difficult (don’t we all?). I don’t believe he ever mastered Tarski’s theory of truth—all the rage in Oxford at the time. I don’t think he had much of a grip on large parts of the philosophy of language and mind, let alone existentialism. Fine, understandable; but a fact. He was no philosophical polymath. Dummett, for his part, knew very little about large areas of contemporary philosophy; I remember him being quite baffled when I brought up Jerry Fodor. And yes, Jerry Fodor: brilliant man, fast as a speeding bullet and just as deadly, but completely deaf to most of philosophy, which he thought was a total waste of time and shouldn’t even be taught. He was a psychologist without a lab. Academics are apt to be narrow, and can be pretty clueless outside of their specializations. And so with the other philosophers I concisely characterized. I’m not seeing the problem that my critics are so up in arms about; they just don’t like me saying it. I wasn’t writing an academic reference for these chaps after all, just giving my own sincere thoughts about them. You got a problem with that? Free speech and all that muck. I even gave an unflattering description of myself in the comments following my post. We all have our blind spots, our philosophical scotomas.[1]

[1] In case you think I am getting soft in my old age, let me add that the comments I have seen have been absolutely ridiculous (and so depressingly American). Why-oh-why do people insist on being so plain dumb? Is thought really that difficult?

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Folk Philosophy

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Folk Philosophy

Is there such a thing as folk philosophy? We have heard of folk physics and folk psychology, but does philosophy have a folk version? Is there a determinate philosophy held by ordinary blokes (and blokettes)? Such a philosophy would have to be common to all (normal) human beings, part of human nature, possibly innately fixed. It would have to be ancient and indeed prehistoric—certainly not a result of formal education. People since antiquity might well share certain beliefs about the world, but would that count as a philosophy? They all believe in space and time, earth and sky, minds and bodies, right and wrong—but do they have a philosophy of these things? It has been supposed that they do: G.E. Moore believed in something called commonsense philosophy and P.F. Strawson believed in “descriptive metaphysics” (i.e., a study of a universal human system of metaphysical beliefs about reality).[1] If there were a folk philosophy in this sense, it would presumably cover the basic areas of academic philosophy: metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, philosophy of mind, aesthetics, etc. Theories within academic philosophy could agree or disagree with the philosophy of the folk (“bloke philosophy”), so they could be complacent or revisionary (to use Strawson’s term): you could be a commonsense philosopher, sticking with what you have always believed as a human being, or you could be an anti-commonsense philosopher, out to correct the philosophical mob (“bespoke philosophy”). It would be like folk physics and folk psychology: you might insist that the folk are right about the physical and psychological worlds, or you might accuse them of error in the light of modern science (then you are a revisionary physicist or psychologist). You might applaud the folk bloke or you might condemn him (conceivably you might have a different “feminist” attitude toward folk blokette philosophy). For example, you might hold that the folk believe in naïve realism about perception, accept materialism about ordinary objects, and reject skepticism about our knowledge of the external world. Depending on your academic philosophical views, you would then either congratulate the folk or criticize them. What you would not do is deny that they have a philosophical opinion—an opinion about what is true philosophically. You would suppose that everyone is a philosopher at heart, as everyone is a budding (if fallible) physicist or psychologist at heart. Philosophical views are thus thought to be natural to us, part of being human (unlike other animals).

I think this view is false: the folk don’t philosophize, whether they be ladies or gentlemen. There is no such thing as folk philosophy or commonsense philosophy or “descriptive philosophy”. Thus, there is no such thing as revisionary philosophy (corrective, critical) if that means taking a negative stand against what the folk believe philosophically. There is no such thing as the “metaphysics of the stone age”, right or wrong—or the epistemology or moral philosophy of the stone age. No philosophical theory is either accepted or rejected by the unwashed mob, nor even by the refined aristocracy (kings and queens have no philosophy, unless instructed in it or are unusually academically inclined). The simplest way to see this is to consider animals and children: surely no dog or ape or strapping toddler believes any particular philosophical doctrine; no philosophical proposition enters their bright and breezy little minds. No lively preschooler is a naive realist about perception or a materialist about the external world. Here you might suavely protest my confidence: “But surely, my good man, even beasts and babes believe that objects continue in existence when you are no longer perceiving them—they are instinctual realists” (at this point the protestor looks around the room expecting to see a sea of nods). But this is completely wrongheaded (the nods are few and far between), because that commonsense observation does not demonstrate adherence to a recognizable philosophical theory; for it is quite compatible with Berkeleyan idealism. There is no commitment here to the materialism opposed by the resourceful bishop of Cloyne, or implicit rejection of his idealist alternative (the idea of a table persists in the mind of God). The cited belief is not a philosophical belief; it is neutral between metaphysical theories. Similarly, a belief in human fallibility is not an acceptance of the skeptical philosophy; nor is moral judgement the acceptance of a particular normative philosophical theory (say, utilitarianism or deontology). All that is at a different level—the meta level, we might say. Beasts, babes, and rednecks (I mean no disrespect) don’t dabble in philosophical theories and arguments; they just get on with life. Philosophy is for us nerds.

The point is not that your average tinker or tailor is never a freelance philosopher—he may well be of that turn of mind—but rather that he is not one simply in virtue of being a normal human. Everyone thinks about things that are of interest to professional philosophers (bodies, minds), but that does not imply that everyone thinks philosophically about these things. The folk may even think about things in a way that is relevant to philosophers, but that doesn’t make them philosophers either.  The regular old cove down at the pub is simply not thinking about philosophy as he drinks his pint (or at any other time), any more than untutored stargazers are doing astronomy. Philosophy is not in the human genotype and not in the human environment either; it isn’t part of universal folk cognition. It arises from other sources. Just so, ordinary speakers are not closet scientific linguists consciously equipped with this or that linguistic theory (say, late Chomsky or early Chomsky); there is no folk linguistics (why should there be?). The fact is that the physical environment and the psychological environment present practical challenges to the imperiled member of Homo sapiens, but the “philosophical environment” presents no such challenge; you can live a perfectly healthy life and not give philosophy a second thought (I am talking about survival and reproduction). There are pressing reasons why folk physics and folk psychology exist (also folk chemistry), but they don’t go over to some supposed folk philosophy. No philosophy is “common sense” in the sense philosophers have intended by that phrase. Nor is there such a thing as folk neurophysiology or folk renaissance literature or folk Latin. These are all specialist studies not universal human competences. They aren’t part of general human biology. There is no philosophy instinct shared by all members of the human species: that is, there is no set of philosophical doctrines installed in us by our genes or our environment.

There is no natural ontogeny to philosophy either. Children don’t go through a dualist phase which they grow out of by age 8. They do go through developmental phases in their understanding of the physical world and other minds, but they don’t exhibit a maturational sequence in their grasp of philosophy (ditto astronomy and renaissance literature). So, let’s not overdo the whole mental module thing; some of the human mind is notmodular and not pre-programmed. Maybe in Vulcans philosophy has its own genetically fixed module with a specific set of beliefs built in: but we are not Vulcans. Philosophy arises in us from mysterious human capacities for reflective thought, probably triggered by conceptual snarl-ups and puzzling experiences (dreams, ethical dilemmas), and no doubt from matters of intellectual taste. There is no philosophy gene or philosophical environmental niche. I think people have supposed that there is such a thing as commonsense philosophy, or such a subject as descriptive metaphysics (describing the human conceptual scheme in its philosophical part) because they confuse general principles with philosophical propositions—as with the example of the persistence of unperceived objects. The whole idea of ordinary language philosophy really rests on the myth of commonsense philosophy, the thought being that such a philosophy must have withstood the test of time (or come from the hand of God); but if there is no such thing, then ordinary language contains no philosophical tenets or tendencies. It may furnish data for philosophy but not doctrines. There is no philosophical knowledge embedded in common sense or in ordinary language. Nor, by the same token, is there any philosophical error embedded in it, so no revision of such error is necessary. Ordinary language is all right as it is, philosophically, though it may not be all right ethically or politically or astronomically. Philosophical theories belong to philosophers not regular chaps and chappesses.[2]

[1] See my “Is Descriptive Metaphysics Possible?” for background to this paper.

[2] They may also belong to religions, but again these are not part of commonsense as understood by philosophers (e.g., the belief in immortality). For the record, I don’t think that common sense believes in free will as a philosophical doctrine; it just believes that people are often free to do as they please (they are not confined or in jail or some such). The folk have no view about whether or not this is compatible with determinism or whether there are other viable notions of freedom. Of course, it is quite possible for ordinary non-philosophical people to become philosophers relatively quickly; the intellectual ability was present all along. It is just that there is no philosophical doctrine embedded in what they ordinarily believe. They don’t have philosophical beliefs. Philosophy belongs in the classroom not in the billiard hall (or on the tundra).

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Malcolm Budd

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Malcolm Budd

I just found out that Malcolm Budd has died. He was my colleague and close friend at UCL when we were both there (1974-85). We had lunch and tea together every work day, sometimes breakfast. He was a person of enormous intelligence, rock-solid integrity, and great personal charm (humorous, handsome, generous). He was an excellent philosopher: I recommend his book on Wittgenstein (which I reviewed rapturously in the JP) and his Music and the Emotions. He was also a first-class athlete, especially football and cricket. A great friend, a brilliant mind, a beautiful soul. Would that everyone could be like Malcolm.

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Deception, Mimicry, and Meaning

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Deception, Mimicry, and Meaning

If mimicry lies somewhere in the evolutionary history of meaning,[1] and mimicry involves deception, then deception is at the heart of meaning. Language is custom-made for lying. Speech has lying in its DNA, literally. The octopus can change its color and texture to mimic its environment to an uncanny degree, the better to fool a potential predator. I see no reason to deny that this is a conscious intentional act on the octopus’s part: it is trying to deceive another animal, to produce a false belief (or some equivalent). It is telling a lie. It isn’t under the illusion that it has become part of its environment; it knows quite well that it is still a squishy tasty octopus. Butterflies deceive with their wing designs, the better to survive in a world of butterfly eaters. Some predators mimic their prey in order to get in close. Some male animals impersonate females so as to elude the notice of the presiding alpha male, thereby gaining mating opportunities. We also have stick insects, parrots, and cuckoos. Deceiving is a tried-and-true means of surviving and reproducing. Humans disguise themselves in war and love (camouflage and make-up, respectively), impersonate others, play mimetic games, wear wigs, dress up, etc. Human life is rife with mimetic deception. With it we communicate falsehoods constantly. We could even say that genes are mimics, copy-cats: they copy each other as they are passed down the ancestral line. The mimetic gene. Genes can’t survive without the power to imitate other genes. The biological world is an imitation game.

Now suppose we have persuaded ourselves that meaning in human languages depends on mimetic neural machinery and overt behavior; in short, that speech acts are imitative. To make things simple, let’s suppose that the speech act is (perhaps covertly) mimetic (think onomatopoeia). The phonology mimics the phonology of other speakers, and the meaning itself is constituted by acts of mimicry, internal and external, past and present, original or derivative (for concreteness you might think of it as an imitative act of the imagination). Then we can draw the following conclusion: meaning is inherently deceptive—not all the time, to be sure, but potentially, dispositionally, intrinsically. It is built for lying, designed for it. It can easily slip into lying mode. But isn’t that exactly what we observe about human speech? it functions as a powerful organ of deception. It isn’t as if sentences stubbornly refuse to tell a lie; they are practically on the point of it all the time. Language is not designed with truthfulness in mind; it is designed with lying in mind. It is really good at lying. It has an uncanny ability to deceive, like the octopus’s epidermis. And that is not surprising, given that its roots lie in deceptive mimicry.

Did speech evolve precisely so as to deceive—is that why meaning exists? Not to inform, but to misinform. We can imagine such a scenario: a social animal striving to survive in a world of competitors, conspecific and interspecific. Lying is a way of life (part of the species’ “form of life”). Bartering, mating, befriending, stealing, tricking, bull-shitting, manipulating, exploiting: all these will naturally call on a person’s ability to tell a convincing lie, of varying shades of gray. Those with the “gift of the (deceptive) gab” will win out in the struggle for survival—the smooth talkers, the oracular fibbers. Speech is power, and power requires persuasion. It could be done with non-linguistic imitation perhaps, but language streamlines the process; it is the greatest engine of deception ever invented by nature—even better than the octopus’s skin! Thus, the human brain assigns precious space to language and its deceptive machinery. True, we sometimes use it non-deceptively—we call that “teaching”—but we also, and primarily, use it manipulatively, employing our prior mimetic prowess. This would explain why only we have the awesome power of language at our disposal; for we are the deceptive animal par excellence. We live by strategic deception. Language is cognitively expensive, so a species will not adopt it lightly; but our social existence came to depend on our ability to mislead and deceive and misdirect. Call this the “deception hypothesis”: meaning evolved in humans in order to prop up and promote our deceptive proclivities (it wasn’t for the poetry or the altruism). We deceive, therefore meaning exists. Language has allowed us to become unbelievable liars (very believable ones). We can out-deceive all-comers. Meaning is saturated with the bitter juice of deception. A proposition is a lie waiting to happen. The theory of meaning is therefore the theory of linguistic mimetic deception. Syntax and phonetics are the enablers of mendacious meaning. Children start lying as soon as they start talking; they aren’t stupid, they realize what kind of power they now possess. Semantic knowledge is knowledge of the possibilities of deception—you just have to produce a few sounds in a grammatical order and you can control the world! To mean is to have power over other people’s minds—the greatest power of all. Propaganda is just the natural upshot of the mimetic history of human speech. Language is built on deceptive foundations. It is as if the octopus had a language that evolved from its powers of mimicry; that language would have deception built into its foundations. Thus, the mimicry theory of meaning leads to the deception hypothesis. We have lying in our linguistic bones. Meaning is fundamentally unethical.[2]

[1] See my “Meaning Explained (Finally)”.

[2] This isn’t to say it can’t be ethical; it clearly can. Some of us are more ethical speakers than others. But the theory I am sketching awards pride of place to the deceptive powers of meaning: this is what recommended meaning to amoral natural selection—what gave speakers the edge in the fight for survival. It wasn’t that speaking could benefit other people (how would that help me?); it was that speaking served the speaker’s interests by allowing a measure of control over others. Crudely, speaking enables me to enlist you in my survival plans, by hook or by lying crook. The gene for meaning is a selfish gene, and lying is just one tool at its disposal (a particularly sharp one). Meaning is a device (an adaptation, a weapon) for misleading individuals with whom I am competing. No doubt this produced an evolutionary arms race in which humans tried to out-deceive each other linguistically. As it were, Shakespeare is the alpha male (Jane Austen is the alpha female). Insincerity is like a sharp tooth—good for getting your way in a ruthless world. Ethics pits itself against meaning, inter alia.

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