On the evolution of representational and interpretive capacities

Monist, The, Jan, 2002 by Peter Godfrey-Smith

1. Introduction

How did our capacities mentally to represent the world evolve? Here is one kind of answer: To represent the world is to have a special kind of wiring inside your head, and special physical connections between that wiring and the world. How do organisms come to have that kind of wiring? Both evolution and individual learning are involved, but there has at least to be an evolutionary explanation of how some organisms acquired the capacity to wire themselves up as representers. This evolutionary story probably will be one about the usefulness of that special kind of inner wiring for dealing with environmental problems; we owe this special wiring to a long history of mutation and natural selection. Asking about the evolution of mental representation is no different form asking about the evolution of the immune system or warm-bloodedness. We might hear this first answer from people like Fred Dretske (1988), Ruth Millikan (1984), David Papineau (1993), and Kim Sterelny (2001).

That is one kind of answer; here is another. We asked: How did representational capacities evolve? The question is not properly posed. To represent the world is not to have some particular kind of wiring inside your head, or to have some particular scientifically describable connection between your internal states and the environment. Instead, to represent the world is no more than to be interpreted (or interpretable) by people like us using a special conceptual framework. We use this framework for predicting and rationalizing each other's behavior, and when we use it we apply a "principle of charity" according to which most beliefs must be regarded as true. Because representing the world is not a matter of having a special kind of inner wiring, there is no story about the evolution of inner wiring that we should tell in order to understand the evolution of representational capacities.

This second approach can accept that it was evolution that made us into the kinds of organisms we are now. Evolution made us behaviorally complicated. Somehow we became the kinds of beings that deal with each other using a special kind of interpretive framework. But we should not ask "how representational capacities evolved" in the same kind of way we ask how the immune response evolved or warm-bloodedness evolved.

This second answer is closely related to, but perhaps not quite the same as, Daniel Dennett's position (1987). We might also hear something like this second answer from those; influenced by Donald Davidson's views in the philosophy of mind (1980, 1984).

What one thinks about the evolution of representational capacities depends on what one thinks mental representation is. And there is no consensus on these topics. (1) The views battling in the literature differ not just in detail, but in their fundamental orientation to the question of how mental representation evolved. That is the point of the two stories outlined above.

So we face a difficult situation. The most familiar kinds of "interpretationist" or "interpreter-dependent" views of belief and representation are very unsatisfactory. Many tend towards behaviorism, and some are badly anti-naturalistic. But the more "realist" rivals have been encountering vexing problems too. I suspect that the true theory of mental representation will be something that combines, in presently unexpected ways, aspects of both these approaches.

However the details fall out, at the end of the day our "final story" about mental representation will have to integrate empirical facts of two different kinds:

(i) Facts about the inner wiring of organisms that deal with the world in smart, adaptable ways, and

(ii) Facts about our habits of interpretation of organisms--of humans especially, but of others too--using familiar concepts of belief, motivation and meaning.

A complete understanding will require that we tie these together somehow, but there are many ways in which these two sets of facts might be related (see also Stich 1992).

In the face of this uncertain situation, one thing that we can do is discuss various natural package deals--various ways in which a total story might connect together the facts about how organisms are wired and the facts about our practices of interpretation. That is the project of this paper, and the package deals will be discussed without taking sides. I organize the package deals around some of the most interesting recent work in this area: empirical work on the structure and ontogeny of folk psychology. Here I have in mind the debates between the "theory theory" and simulationism, discussions of whether our folk psychological understanding uses a module, discussions of whether chimpanzees and other primates have a theory of mind, and the autism debates (see Davies and Stone 1995, Carruthers and Smith 1996). The package deals discussed will be combinations of views on the (i) structure, (ii) ontogeny, (iii) phylogeny, and (iv) truth of folk psychology. How might these different sets of issues be related? That is the topic of this paper.