ron2
so far, you are only defining symbolic thought as being expressed by creatures that have a spoken language of symbols, primarily Man.
Perhaps you missed something I wrote in a previous post: "In The Symbolic Species (1997) Terrence Deacon, a professor of Biological Anthropology and Linguistics at Berkeley (formerly of Boston Universitiy), writes, 'Species that have not acquired the ability to communicate symbolically cannot have acquired the ability to think this way either.'" Deacon's statement reflects years of research in areas of neurobiology, anthropology, and linguistics. So clearly I'm not alone in making this distinction. In fact, if anything it was Deacon's work which helped solidified my own thinking in this area.
ron2
So what is more egocentric? Only man can communicate, or that dreams mean something?
I'm not sure what kind of argument you're making here. This is partly because I've said repeatedly that there are two types of communication, one that requires symbols, and one that doesn't. (And again, that's not just me spouting off, it comes from Daniel C. Dennett, in his book Consciousness Explained (1991), which I highly recommend to anyone interested in understanding some of these issues.) So I never said that only Man can communicate. I even made the point that when an ant excretes certain semio-chemicals he's, in effect, communicating with other ants who come into contact with them. So your phrasing (underlined) gets its effects from hyperbole, not logic. (I'm no stranger to the use of hyperbole, a failing I've come to recognize in my arguments and have since tried to avoid.) But just because an ant communicates with other ants through the release of certain pheromones doesn't mean that he's capable of forming the conscious intent to communicate when he secretes them, which is the issue under discussion here. In fact, from the perspective of emergence theory the dumber the individual parts the smarter the overall system, which is why, in some cases, ant colonies as a whole exhibit more intelligent behavior than wolf packs.
As for whether dreams mean something, I'm sure in certain circumstances they do. I think I even said that, Ron. Most neuroscientists would disagree, but I'm not partial to that narrowly defined view. Also, I'm not sure the fact that dogs seem to dream (they certainly experiment REM sleep, which is a pretty clear indicator that they're dreaming at those moments), automatically means they're capable of symbolic thinking. I also don't know why being skeptical about there being a direct correlation (whether it's me that's being skeptical or whether it's most of the cognitive scientists and linguists on the planet) is the same thing as being egocentric (or anthrocentric).
Lee Charles Kelley
If dogs exhibited other forms of symbolic thinking
ron2
As defined by you?
No, as defined by Terrence Deacon, Daniel C.Dennett, and others. I'm going by their definitions, not making up my own on the fly.
ron2
Or the spoken language, such as English or swahili? How about chinese, a tonal language. One word can have four different meanings based in inflection of tone rising or descending, or steady, and context within the sentence.
Again, I'm not sure what your point is. If a spoken language operates via a set of sounds or inflections which symbolize objective (external) and/or subjective (internal) phenomena, then those sounds are what are known as words; I don't think it matters what kinds of sounds the words are made of. They have to be made of some kind of sound in order to be audible. So what's your point, again?
Lee Charles Kelley
Since they [dogs] don't [communicate symbolically], the fact that they dream doesn't really prove anything about their ability or inability to think symbolically.
ron2
And I don't see how your view necessarily disproves it either. It's a bit of a semantic game of tic tac toe.
Okay, fine. But in the absence of any real proof, and due to the fact that there are a number of very strong indicators from various dedicated and hard-working scientists in various (you might say a multitude of) disciplines, and given the proscriptions of Ockham's razor, not to mention Morgan's canon, I think I'm in pretty safe territory with what I'm saying. Could I be wrong? Anything's possible. But so far no one here as offered anything close to real proof that I am.
LCK
From Rational Animals?:
"Following Dennett (1969, 1978, 1991), many philosophers distinguish descriptions of contentful mental states and processes attributed to persons from subpersonal descriptions of information being processed and passed between subsystems (see Hurley’s chapter for a similar distinction for animals). Cognitive science shows us how the mental lives of persons are enabled by subpersonal information processes (McDowell 1994a). Subpersonal processes can be described functionally or in terms of their neural implementations. Some subpersonal processes are described in cognitive terms, involving representations; some in terms of symbolic representations; others merely in terms of associative mechanisms.24 [To me this means that potentially conscious organisms such as apes, dolphins, whales or humans (persons) may use sub-personal (unconscious) information processing systems such as pattern recognition and/or associative mechanisms to generate higher (conscious) cognitive functions. These processes may involve representations, but some are clearly symbolic in nature, others aren't.--LCK]
"Reasoning is a personal-level process; it seems natural to assume that rational processes more generally are also personal-level processes. But it might be held that a genuinely rational process, one that provides a rational explanation of behaviour, must be enabled by subpersonal processes that correspond to it structurally in certain ways*. For example, the subpersonal cognitive processes enabling rational thought processes might be required to have a structure isomorphic to the structure of rational thought.25 [I referred to this as "sub-routines" in one of my posts--LCK] This may be regarded as part of what it is for a rational process to be the right kind of process. It wouldn’t be enough, on this view, for subpersonal cognitive processes to enable people reliably to arrive at the right answers, if those subpersonal processes bear no intelligible relationship to personal-level processes [Which is why I refer to them as sub-routines--LCK].
"Related issues also arise for animals. It may be tempting to explain the successful performance of certain complex tasks by animals in terms of cognitive processes such as inference, following abstract rules, or metacognition.26 But often sophisticated performances can also be explained in terms of associative mechanisms (see the chapter by Papineau and Heyes). How are associative explanations related to cognitive explanations (explanations in terms of [symbolic] representations), and to rational explanations “at the animal level”? Does some version of an associative/cognitive distinction hold up? Do associative mechanisms implement explanatory rational processes, or do they undercut them, leaving them with no real explanatory work to do? If associative explanations exclude rational explanations, should we always prefer the former in accord with Morgan’s Canon, on the grounds that they are simpler or “lower” processes ?27 What kind of behaviour, if any, firmly resists explanation in associative terms, and does it matter?
"(e) Widely distributed processes: extended rationality? It is a familiar idea that representations and cognitive processes may be distributed. This is often assumed to mean: distributed within the head, as in distributed neural networks. However, the distribution may be wider than that: the situated cognition, extended mind, and ecological rationality movements suggest the possibility that the cognitive processes explanatory of behaviour can be distributed across agents and the information-carrying environments with which they interact. This view in turn raises the questions of where rational processes can be located, and how they are bounded. Must rational processes be wholly internal to the rational animal’s brain or body, or can they be distributed across the animal’s brain, body, and environment? Must the external portions of animal-environment interactions merely stand in causal relationships with rational processes, or can they be part of what constitutes a rational process? On what principles should such a causal/constitutive boundary be drawn? Can we regard an animal itself as rational if its ongoing behaviour is best explained by such extended processes, not just by internal processes? If so, are the boundaries of extended rational processes provided by biological evolution, or by culture? What is the role of interactions with social and symbolic environments in human rationality? Can reasoning processes extend to include discussion and argument, or the use of pen and paper in proofs? When animals are enculturated, raised by and with human beings and trained to use symbols, do they become more rational than they would be “naturally”?28 [This is the theory I'm working on in regards to dogs; it turns out that it's already a subset of cognitive psychology called "Embedded Cognition." (see link at bottom)--LCK]
"The explanation of behaviour in terms of widely distributed processes, including processes of language use29, begins to blur the distinction between rational processes and rational behaviour. Extended explanations of behaviour are dynamic explanations, of behaviour conceived as extending through time. They explain how ongoing patterns of behaviour are sustained in terms of the dynamic interactions between brain, body, and environment, as one round of movement in a given environment has feedback effects on internal mechanisms that produce the next round of movement, and so on. Bodily movements and their environmental results are an essential part, on the “embodied, embedded” view, of the processes that explain behaviour. Hence they may be an essential part of the subset of rational processes—at least the basis for insisting that rational processes must be wholly internally constituted is unclear. On this conception, rational processes are on view in the world.
"A conception of rational processes that is liberal on all the above issues would admit rational processes other than reasoning processes, which could include the use of domain-specific heuristics, processes implemented by non-isomorphic subpersonal mechanisms including associative mechanisms, and widely distributed processes—if these processes are part of what explains why the person (or other animal) reliably gets the right result. If this is too liberal a view of the processes that could provide a rational explanation, how exactly should it be tightened up, and why? A critical question for animal rationality is how to motivate and characterize a middle ground between a requirement of reflective, domain-general reasoning and what might be viewed as excessive liberality about rational processes.
*And from "A New Kind of Social Science:"
"Pattern recognition is the ability of an individual to consider a complex set of inputs, often containing hundreds of features, and make a decision based on the comparison of some subset of those features to a situation which the individual has previously encountered or learned. In problem solving situations, recall can substitute for reasoning. For example, chess involves a well-defined, entirely deterministic system and should be solvable using purely logical reasoning. Chess-playing computers use this approach, but Chase and Simon (1973) found that human expert-level chess playing is done primarily by pattern recognition.
"Recall is preferred to reasoning because working memory, which must be utilized in deductive reasoning, is slow and constrained to handling only a few items of information at a time. The long term memory used in pattern recognition, in contrast, is effectively unlimited in capacity and works very quickly—on the order of seconds—even when solving a complex associative recall problems across thousands of potential matches.
"In all likelihood, the human brain evolved with a strong bias towards pattern recognition rather than deductive reasoning.
"The biological world ... is a world of individuals constructed from complex feature vectors made of DNA, with billions of components, and selected solely by the ability of their ancestors to reproduce, oftentimes in unusual circumstances such as the aftermath of asteroid collisions. Such a world cannot be described deductively in any practical sense, but because it is very repetitive, pattern recognition is an effective information-processing strategy. If one Tyrannosaurus Rex tries to devour you, the next one is likely to as well. Since critical decisions must be made in real time ("Is the object approaching me sometime I can eat, something that will eat me, or something I can ignore?";), evolution will select for high recall speeds under noisy environmental conditions. It does not select for theorem proving or the minimization of quartic polynomials.
"This neural bias would emerge early in the biological record, well before the development of primates, or mammals, or even vertebrates. Homo sapiens is endowed with sophisticated pattern recognition capabilities honed through eons of evolution, and it is unsurprising that this capacity is put to use in social behavior. Deductive reasoning, in contrast, is a comparatively recent development and is much more difficult. While we are very proud of deductive reasoning, it is not necessarily more useful, particularly when dealing with social behaviors which may also have some evolutionary roots."
What I get from these snippets is that the sub-personal (unconscious) cognitive process of pattern recognition is a) more adaptive than deductive reasoning and/or the use of symbolic language, b) that no one here (meaning me) is any way denigrating a dog's ability to perform complex tasks by suggesting that their brain structures and behaviors are incapable of symbolic thought or forming an conscious intent to communicated (iff chess masters use pattern recognition more than deductive reasoning, how "dumb" can a dog be if it's his personal (sorry, sub-personal) ace-in-the-hole), and c) the complexity inherent in pattern recognition (among other sub-personal processing systems, such as drives and emotions), sans conscious awareness or intent, is enough to explain the complexity in canine behavior; we don't need to add conscious, symbolic, or intentional states to the mix in order to explain a dog's marvelously complex abilities.
Anyway, that's how I see it,
LCK
From "Why Evolution Has to Matter to Cognitive Psychology" by Joelle Proust.