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The Anti-Naturalism of Some Language Centered Accounts

of Belief
Ruth BARCAN
MARCUS’

Summary
Common sense explanationsof human action are often framed in terms of an agent’s beliefs
and desires. Recent widely received views also take believing and desiring (as well wishing, in-
tending and even thinking) as attitudes of an agent to linguistic or quasi-linguistic entities. It is
here claimed that such a narrow view of cognitive attitudes is not supportable, since even
among linguals non-verbal responses are often overriding evidence for belief and desire, even
where they run counter to sincere verbal assents. The view is also curiously non naturalistic in
that it disallows ascribing beliefs and desires altogether to non-linguals and pre-linguals. In the
present paper a “common sense” explanation of action in accordance with the triad <Desire,
Belief, Action, is seen as a useful phenomenological“theory”provided that language centrality
is not taken as essential.

Language centered accounts of belief and believing have been a focus of


philosophy of mind and philosophy of action in recent decades. Some trace its
origins to Plato’s silent forum. It is such accounts of belief which have been
viewed as central to what has been called, often pejoratively, “folk psycho-
logy,” or more neutrally “common-sense” psychology, and lately come under
attack.

F.P. Ramsey at one point was a proponent of the language centered view
but with some ambivalence. He allows a sense of “belief” in which, for
example, a belief may be attributed to a chicken who has an aversion to eating
a species of caterpillar due to unpleasant prior experiences. But he suggests
that in attributing to the chicken a belief that the caterpillar is inedible is an
“ambiguous”use, and he goes on to say that “without wishing to depreciate
the importance of this kind of belief, .. . I prefer to deal with those beliefs
which are expressed in words. . .consciously asserted, or denied. . .The men-
talfactors [my emphasis]of such a belief I take to be words spoken aloud or to

Halleck Professor of Philosophy, Yale. National Humanities Center.


The Foundations of Mathematics (Routledge, London, 1931): 144.

Dialectics Vol. 49, No 2-4 (1995)


114 Ruth Barcan Marcus

oneself or merely imagined, connected together and accompanied by a feel-


ing or feelings of belief.” On Ramsey’slanguage centered view an agent (pres-
umably a competent language user) believes that ‘P’where the agent is con-
sciousof those “mental factors” designated as utterances “spoken aloud or to
oneself,” and toward which the agent has an affirmative feeling. “Accompa-
nied by a feeling,” allows prying about, at least conceptually, the feeling and
the understood sentence. [In his later account of degrees of belief, he defines
such degrees in terms of betting behavior.]
Ramsey pries apart, as is common to language centered views, the attitude
from the object of the attitude - the understood sentence. He may be seen as
endorsing what has come to be called a disquotation principle. On the as-
sumption that an agent is a sincere competent language user there is a condi-
tional and biconditional version.
Disquot.: If A assents to ‘P’then A believes that P.
The converse
Disquot,: If A believes that P then A assents to ‘P’
requires amplification. Assenting is an occurrent action, and is evoked in spe-
cial circumstances as, for example, when an agent is asked whether he or she
believes that P. If believing is always a relation of an agent to a linguisticentity,
then the converse of Disquot, would have to suppose that agent wouldsincer-
ely assent to ‘P’ if he or she believes that P. The conjunction of Disquot and
Disquot is the biconditional version.
What should be noticed on the Ramseystyle account is that (1)it clearly
excludes the attribution of belief to non-linguals and (2) it disallows attribu-
tion of unconscious believing where unconscious supposes that a sentential
correlate, a correlative assent cannot be evoked. It excludes the possibility
that the agent believes but cannot generate the appropriate sentence - doesn’t
have the words. “If you can’t say what you believe you can’t whistle it either.”
Unconscious beliefs whether or not of psychoanalytic interest are especially
problematic since they are attributions which are initially and often persist-
ently disavowed by the agent. Topics to which I will return.
Frege3pries apart the sentence from its content and makes the latter the
object of believing yet he must be counted as having a language focussed ac-

See S. Kripke. “APuzzle About Belief,” Meaning and Use, ed. A. Margalit (Dordrecht,
1979): 234-83.
“Onsense and Nomenatum” and other essays in G. Frege. Translationsfrom The Phil-
osophical Writings, trans. P. Geach and M. Black (Oxford, Blackwell, 1952).
The Anti-Naturalism of Some Language Centered Accounts of Belief 115

count. Believing for Frege relates an attitude to a content under a mode of


presentation. That content is a Fregean proposition - which he postulates as
an abstract non-psychological entity. It is a curious fact that he calls them
“thoughts”of which he believed there was a common stock. We “havethem in
mind when we entertain them or believe them. I will not discuss here the
many difficulties with this notion of proposition. Suffice it to say they are
quasi-linguistic intensional entities that mimic those properties which on a
Tarskian semanticsare more properly attributes of interpreted sentences such
as true, false, logically valid, contradictory, consistent, etc. Frege’s contents
are parasitic on sentences in their formal features. They are not actual or non-
actual states of nor are they structures with non-intensional real
world constituentssuch as Russell’s propositions. Recall Frege’s astonishment
at Russell’s5bland agreement that on his (Russell’s) use Mt. Blanc itself was a
constituent in the proposition that Mt. Blanc is more than 4000 feet high. Nor
are they sets of worlds or functions from worlds to truth values. They are ab-
stract intensional entitieswhich mimic sentences, share formal and semantical
features of sentences and can arguably be understood as quasi-linguisticen-
tities which are the objects of believing.
A minimalist version of a language centered view is (or was) that of
J. Fodor.7 On the model of some computational theories of artifical intel-
ligence, propositions are sentences in the language of thought, independent
formulae stored in the brain. Much simplified the subject has an internal regis-
ter of sentence constituents and basic sentences which are correlated with
natural language sentences. Syntax and rules generate complex sentences.
Mental analogies of ‘yes’ or ‘no’ responses are elicited on appropriate cues.
An agent believes ‘P’ when the formula which is a correlate of ‘P’ in the lan-
guage of thought elicits an assenting response.
Fodor is narrowly focussed on questions about cognitive attributions to
language using agents. But a more global language-centered view of mind is
that of Davidson, since he denies that any cognitive attributions to non-lan-
guage users are warranted. Non-language users do not have thoughts, beliefs;
not even desires or intentions. For Davidson, beliefs of agents are the objects

4 See for example, A. Plantinga, The Nature of Necessity (New York: Oxford Press,
1974) and R.Chisholm, “Events and Propositions,” Now, IV, 1 (1970).
G. Frege, Philosophicaland Mathematical Correspondence,ed. G. Gabriel,et al. (Chi-

Modularity of Mind
(Cambridge, Mass.:MIT Press, 1983).
“Thought and Talk,” in Mind and Language, ed. Samuel Gattenplan(New York: Ox-
ford Press 1975).
116 Ruth Barcan Marcus

of attitudes of members of a linguistic community. Those objects are senten-


ces in an interpreted language. The attitude is that of holding the sentence
true. ‘True’as a predicate of beliefs is parasitic on ‘true’as attached to senten-
ces and unlike truth as a sentential property it is redundant and dispensable.
To believe that P is true is simply to believe that P. Davidson says, “Such an
account of true belief depends on the notion of true sentence,” and the se-
mantical account of truth requires a sharedxlanguage and a large measure of
competence. The “sincereassent of competent languageusers” of the disquo-
tation principle is a manifestationof the “holdingtrue” of Davidson. Sincefor
Davidson it is only language users who have beliefs, he makes adjustments,
especially for the converse. Since assenting is episodic, an agent must be dis-
posed to assent. Where some language users lack vocabulary or are claimed to
have tacit beliefs whether or not they are of the psychoanalytic kind, such
species of belief, if there are such, can be accommodated by Davidsonian
views, but not without some highly speculative stretching. Given the agent is
in a language community of interpreters, if it is unavailability of vocabulary,
the vocabulary can be ferreted out. Some tacit beliefs, given the known ab-
sence of closure for believers over logical consequence,might be those which
a deductively rational agent would assent to up to a point, which does not re-
quire logical omniscience but is a minimal criterion of logicality. Psychoana-
lytic or motivated unconscious beliefs, require an account of unconscious as-
sent to sentences which would not readily be consciously assented to. Some
theory about divided mentality is required, one submerged, but with its own
complement of sentencesunconsciously assented to, a topic to which I will re-
turn. But Davidson’s language centered views are not confined to an account
of cognitive verbs of attributions. It is global in that it is extended to a large
range of mental phenomena.
In Thought and Talk he9says, “the attribution [emphasis mine] of desires
and beliefs (and other thoughts) must go hand in hand with the interpretation
of speech.”Such a claim is ambiguous. In one sense it is a conceptual truth. At-
tributions are made by language users. If I attribute to a dog Fido a desire for
food or the belief that what is in his dish is edible, I am using languageto make
the attribution. Fido makes no attributions. But Davidson goes on to say that
“the attribution of thought depends on interpretation of speech” by those of
whom the attribution is made. One reason given is that otherwise “ we cannot
make the fine distinctions between thoughts that are essential to the explana-
tions we can sometimes confidentlysupply” in making attributions. He notes
the familiar examples of belief claims of human agents where substitution of

“Throught and Talk,” especially pp. 19-23.


The Anti-Naturalism of Some Language Centered Accounts of Belief 117

coreferential terms converts true belief claims into false ones. Language is a
means of “fine tuning.” We sometimes mistakenly or ambiguously report the
thoughts of others or even of ourselves. We do not always “know our own
mind,” but non-language users make no attributions at all.
Granted that faulty attributions to language users can often, be corrected
by proper interpretation - often by an agent’s first-person honest testimony
about what he or she thinks, believes, desires, although recent research seems
to support the conclusionthat even sincerefirst person verbal accounts of rea-
sons for behavior are not as reliable as we supposed. But confirming assents
are not possible in the case of non-linguals.
Yet is that, on the face of it, sufficient grounds for denying a non-lingual
thoughts, beliefs, or desires altogether? That is a large step. Davidson claims
that any attribution of thoughts of any kind to “dumb creatures,” to non-lan-
guage users, is ruled out altogether. Not because of the obvious difficulties of
correct attribution and fine tuning but because all thought he says is essen-
tially linked to language. Davidson outlines some considerationsby virtue of
which ”to have a thought would be to have a disposition to utter certain sen-
tences with appropriate force under given circumstances.” He sets out to
show, “that only creatures with speech have thoughts” and that believing,
doubting, desiring and other “sentential” attitudes, are not detachable from
thinking or conversely.
The argument runs something like this. The basis for interpretation is the
sentential attitude - the attitude of holding true. A feeling about sentences.
That feeling is in turn a function of what the sentence means and what else is
believed. The meaning of the sentence is given by agreed upon truth condi-
tions in a linguistic community on an extension of a Tarski-style semantics. It
is also taken as true that most beliefs are correct since too many false beliefs
frustrate the possibility of identifyingtrue beliefs. A large set of sharedstable
beliefs is required to identify further beliefs whether true or false. On this ac-
count we are supposed to see how essential common agreed upon assentings
are to a theory of belief. Not only must there be a large measure of agreement
but “a theory of interpretation cannot be correct that makes a man assent to
very many false sentences. It must generally be the case that a sentence is true
when a speaker holds it to be. . .A method of interpretation. ..puts the inter-
pretation in general agreement with the speaker.” On Davidson’s account,
which he calls a theory of radical interpretation, concepts of truth and error
are language bound and “Belief takes up the slack between objective truth
and sentences held true.’’ But, and here is the giant step, belief as an attitude
outside of the context of a shared language is therefore not intelligible. More
generally, only a speech interpreter can have the concept of a thought or the
118 Ruth Barcan Marcus

concept of a belief or the concept of a mistake. Without the exercise of a ca-


pacity for linguistic behavior an agent, he says, has no such concepts and
hence has no thoughts or beliefs or even desires. Where language is absent,
other behavioral markers of believing, desiring, thinking are ruled out al-
together. It is in this sense that such language-centered views are in my view
anthropocentric and non-naturalistic and in many features just a small step
from Cartesianism. One is reminded that Descartes denied that non-humans
had pains since they had no pain thoughts. Never mind the physical trauma
and overt behavior so similar to ours. That “behavior” was just a failure of
mechanism. Our empathy is misplaced anthropomorphism. I’m supposing
that Davidson, unlike Descartes and Le Mettrie, allows animals their pains.
But is it not equally Cartesian to deny that organisms engaged in such seem-
ingly intentional behavior, often similar to our behavior in similar circumstan-
ces, have no intentions or desires or beliefs. In a previous paper loI described a
man and his dog in a desert, long deprived of water with observable physio-
logical manifestations of thirst, racing toward a mirage which appears as
water. The mirage recedes, they both behave as one does when expectations
are unfulfilled. If the disappearance of the mirage was sudden, they may act
startled. But on Davidson’s account, only the language user desires to drink,
believes that there is something potable ahead, and then is mistaken.
In “RationalAnimals,” Davidson l1 reviews his arguments for the insepar-
ability of belief (and indeed all intentionality and intentional action) from lan-
guage. To have a belief it is necessary to have the concept of belief, and to have
the concept requires language. He bolsters his argument with the element of
surprise. Surprise he says is “a necessary and sufficient condition for thought
in general.’’ “Surprise” he takes to be what would be evoked in an agent when
a sentenceheld true is shown not to be so. But it does not seem to me that first-
order surprise of an agent requires that there be a sentence held true which is
shown to be false. It can also be manifested by distinguishable non-linguistic
responses to the unexpected and can be noted in linguals as well as pre-lingual
children - and for all I know, in animals.
We noted above that Descartes, viewing non-human animals as robots,
denied them pain. There is a curiously resonating analogy in “Rational Ani-
mals.” Davidson notes that a self-guided missile might be described as want-
ing to destroy its target and believing that the end would be realized by taking

lo “Some Revisionary Proposals about Belief and Believing,” Philosophy and Phenom-
enological Research I (Supplement 1990): 133-53. Also Modalities Oxford 1993.
l1 “Rational Animals” in Actions and Events, ed. E. Le Pore and B. I. McLaughlin
(Blackwell, 1985): 473-80.
The Anti-Naturalism of Some Language Centered Accounts of Belief 119

the path it takes. But of course, he says, we know that those are the beliefs and
desires of the design engineer, and to attribute them to the missile is clearly
misattribution. The missile lacks the mental, physiological, or behavioral
complexity of a thinking being, as well as language. In the case of similar at-
tributions to some non-lingual animals we are misled by the fact that many
non-lingual animals have a repertoire of a wide range of non-longual behav-
ior, as well as physiologicalmake-up, similar to humans. It may be useful, Da-
vidson says, as a manner of speaking, to deploy a belief, desire, action frame-
work and vocabulary in the absence of further explanationsabout the origins
of the seemingly intentional actions as in the case of the missile. We can, he
says, “continue to explain the behavior of speechless creatures by attributing
propositional attitudes to them while at the same time recognizing that such
creatures do not actually have propositional attitudes and hence have no in-
tentions, thoughts, beliefs, desires.” Such creatures ore autometa.
Richard Jeffrey’s paper, “Animal Interpretation” is a succinct response.
He describes undertakings of animals which are continually adjusted to ends
and have all the features of intentional actions. He notes that rats have pat-
terns of preferenceswhich have the clear structure of probabilisticjudgments,
absent the conceptof subjectiveprobability. He claims, as have I, that we can
try to deploy a minimalist language in belief attribution to non-linguals which
more accurately describe non-lingual motives or intentions or beliefs. He re-
jects the implausible global, holistic, account of all belief - where ascribing a
belief also requires ascribing an awesomely complex (possibly total) network
of beliefs. We can,and I agree, determine that Fido is thirsty, desires to drink,
believes that there is something drinkable nearby, and would satisfy that
desire in the act of drinking as in the case of humans, without getting tangled
in the total web of objects of propositional, i.e., sentential, attitudes. We can
for example, empathize from our own experience. As Jeffery puts it, in the
case of animals, the nodes in the account are non-propositionaland sub-dox-
astic.
The range of believings of non-linguals are clearly vastly narrower than
our believings. We have beliefs about language, for example, about remote
pasts and futures, and also second order beliefs, second order desires and in-
tentions, and the like which figurein Davidson’s narrow account of rationality.
Such second order thoughts and intentions may in fact entail propositionalor
sentential attitudes. But recent research in animal psychology and psychology
of pre-linguals would seem to suggest that the apparent range of intentional,

l2 “AnimalInterpretation,” ibid.: 481-87.


120 Ruth Barcan Marcus

planned, experientially grounded, motivated behavior of many non-lingual


animals and pre-lingual children is not so narrow as previously supposed.l3
What makes me read Davidson’s program as non-naturalistic and Carte-
sian is not that he believes in disembodied minds, or thoughts. He does not.
Tokens of believing (i.e., the state of holding a sentence true) in an agent are,
for him, correlated with tokens of brain events. It is rather the radical discon-
tinuity, the great divide he sees between all intentionality of post-lingual
human behavior and seemingly intentional behavior of pre-lingual and non-
lingual animals. In the latter case, such attribution, as in the case of rockets, is
also only a manner of speaking.
Consider by contrast the radical continuity argued by Hume. l4 In “Of the
Reason of Animals,” he says:
Next to the ridicule of deying an evident truth, is that of taking much pains to defend
it; and no truth appears to me more evident, than that beasts are endow’d with thought
and reason as well as men. The arguments are in this case so obvious, that they never es-
cape the most stupid and ignorant.
We are conscious, that we ourselves, in adapting means to ends, are guided by rea-
son and design, and that ‘tis not ignorantlynor casually we perform those actions, which
tend to self-preservation, to the obtaining pleasure, and avoiding pain. When therefore
we see other creatures,in millions of instances,perform like actions, and direct them to
like ends, all our principles of reason and probability carry us with an invincibleforce to
believe the existence of a like cause. ‘Tis needless in my opinion to illustrate this argu-
ment by the enumeration of particulars.The smallest attention will supply us with more
than are requisite. The resemblancebetwixt the action of animals and those of men is so
entire in this respect, that the very first action of the first animal we shall please to pitch
on, will afford us an incontestable argument for the present doctrine.
This doctrine is as useful as it is obvious, and furnishesus with a kind of touchstone,
by which we may try every system in this species of philosophy. ‘Tis from the resem-
blance of the external actions of animals to those we ourselves perform, that we judge
their internal actions likewise to resemble ours; and the same principle of reasoning,
carry’d one step farther, will make us conclude that since our internal actions resemble
each other, the causes, from which they are deriv’d, must also be resembling. When any
hypothesis, therefore, is advanc’d to explain a mental operation, which is common to
men and beasts, we must apply the same hypothesis to both; and as every true hypo-
thesis will abide this trial, so I may venture to affirm,that no false one will ever be able to
endure it. The common defect of those systems, which philosophers have employ’d to
accountfor the actions of the mind, is, that they suppose such a subtility and refinement
of thought, as not only exceed the capacity of mere animals,but even of children and the
common people in our own species; who are notwithstanding susceptible of the same
emotionsand affectionsas persons of the most accomplish’d genius and understanding.

Donald Griffin, Animal Thinking (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard Press, 1984).


l3
David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge, second edition
l4
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1978): 176-79.
The Anti-Naturalism of Some Language Centered Accounts of Belief 121

Such a subtilityis a clear proof of the falshood, as the contrary simplicityof the truth, of
any system.
Let us therefore put our present system concerning the nature of the understanding
to this decisivetrial, and see whether it will equally account for the reasonings of beasts
as for those of the human species.
Here we must make a distinction betwixt those actions of animals, which are of a
vulgar nature, and seem to be on a level with their common capacities, and those more
extraordinary instances of sagacity, which they sometimes discover for their own pres-
ervation, and the propagation of their species. A dog, that avoids fire and precipices,
that shuns strangers, and caresses his master, affords us an instance of the first kind. A
bud, that chooses with such care and nicety the place and materials of her nest, and sits
upon her eggs for a due time, and in a suitable season, with all the precaution that a
chymist is capable of in the most delicate projection, furnishes us with a lively instance
of the second.
As to the former actions, I assert they proceed from a reasoning, that is not in itself
different, nor founded on different principles, from that which appears in human na-
ture. ‘Tis necessary in the first place, that there be some impressionimmediatelypresent
to their memory or senses, in order to be the foundation of their judgment. From the
tone of voice the dog infers his master’s anger, and foreseeshis own punishment. From a
certain sensation affecting his smell, he judges his game not to be far from him.
Sesondly, The inference he draws from the present impression is built on experi-
ence, and on his observation of the conjunction of objects in past instances. As you vary
this experience,he varies his reasoning. Make a beating follow upon one sign or motion
for some time, and afterwards upon another; and he will successively draw different
conclusions, according to his most recent experience.
Now let any philosopher make a trial, and endeavour to explain that act of the mind,
which we call belief, and give an account of the principles, from which it is deriv’d, inde-
pendent of the influence of custom on the imagination,and let his hypothesisbe equally
applicableto beasts as to the human species; and after he has done this, I promise to em-
brace his opinion. But at the same time I demand as an equitable condition, that if my
system be the only one, which can answer to all these terms, it may be receiv’d as entirely
satisfactory and convincing. And that ’tis the only one, is evident almost without any
reasoning.
Paul Churchland l5 said that what is called by him and others “folk psycho-
logy,” a “theory” which takes believing and intending as sentential or quasi-
sentential attitudes “has changed little or none since ancient times.” That is an
inaccurate and a - historical view. Hume’s Treatiseis explicity a theory of psy
chology. Granted that Plato described thinking as an internal dialogue, but for
Plato proper thinking was not about particulars. It was not about practical
reason. “Opinions” about particular persons or events were not for Plato of
doxastic interest. For Aristotle, who addressed practical as well theoretical
reasoning, not all reasoning is propositional. Aristotle’s account of practical

l5 “eliminative Materialism and Porpositional Attitudes,” Journal of Philosophy 78


(1981).
122 Ruth Barcan Marcus

reasoning, if he is taken literally, does not take language or propositions as es-


sential to an explanation of intentional actions.
It has been plausibly claimed that the practice of sraftingpropositional or
sentential argument forms onto Aristotle’s theory of practical inference of
agents is mistaken. That such a grafting is spurious except as a third person at-
tribution, has been persuasivelydefended by M.Nussbaum,l6 nor is her read-
ing idiosyncratic.Action or refraining from action is the conclusion of a prac-
tical syllogism, not a proposition.
Actions must be motions. The triple <Desire,Belief, Action>is, for A r i s -
totle, explanatorybut neither desires nor beliefs are necessarily dependent on
language. His theory is after all deployed to explain intentional or goal di-
rected behavior of all animals, including non-linguals.
As Nussbaum puts it 17, “Desires and Beliefs [in Aristotle] are in the prac-
tical syllogism itself not [isolatable] Humean causes: They cannot be inde-
pendently picked out, and yet, under another description, Aristotle believed
they are causes. Each of them can also be described as some physiological
change, and these changes cause the motion.. . Of course in most particular
cases the appropriatephysiological description for a complicateddesire or be-
lief will not be available to us. Aristotle never (I believe), ever claims that the
two descriptions are related in any constant or predictable fashion. Token-re-
lations like these are not going to be of much use to the scientist.. . In some
cases, e.g. desire, it seems to be an article of faith with Aristotle for which he
has no evidential support that there is such a physiological description. But
that he wants to assert both a causal and conceptual relationship among
desire, belief, and action and along what lines he tries to do this should be evi-
dent from MA‘s (De Mom Animalium’s) double account.’’ More recently,
G.H. von Wright, l8 in a paper on practical inference specifically developed
along Aristotelian lines, says, “It‘isof the essence of propositions that they are
expressed by sentences.. I’He notes that theoretical reasoning is proposi-
tional and language bound - but goes on to say that in practical inference,
“Wants,states of knowing or believing, and acts have no analogous essential,
COMedion with language. The relation of language to practical inference in
the first person is in principle different from the relation to language of practi-
cal inference in the third person? Language, on von Wright‘s reading, may be

l6 Aristotle’sde Motu Animalium (Harvard, 1978), esp. Essay 1 and Essay 4.


Ibid., p. 188.
G. H. von Wright, “PracticalInference,” Philosophical Review 72 (1963): 168-69. It
was Nussbaum’s reference to von Wright which directed me to his interesting discussion of the
practical syllogism.
The Anti-Naturalism of Some Language Centered Accounts of Belief 123

It occurred to me in reading De Motu Animalium and Nussbaum’s and


von Wright’s commentaries, that Aristotle might consistently have taken the
position that theoretical reasoning is a species of practical inference peculiar
to language users who, in addition to having a range of speculative, represen-
tational, logical abilities, have higher order desiresto which linguistic abilities
may be essentially connected.
Nussbaum says of Aristotle, that in the literal reading of De Motu “the
conclusionis in the practical case, not a propositionbut an action. ..of course
a human agent might verbalize his conclusion but this will not in any way alter
our account of his behavior.” But here again, there is the persistent tendency
to ignore the fact that assentingto a sentencewhich describes a state of affairs,
or to a sentence which is a logical consequence of prior assents, is an action.
Such assenting may sometimes be instrumental in practical reasoning which
culminatesin actions that are not speech acts. In purely theoretical reasoning,
viewed as a speciesof practical reasoning, we might take the operative desirelg
as the desire to know for its own sake, which Aristotle attributed only to hu-
mans, and the speech act of assentingor asserting is the outcome of theoretical
reasoning. Here too, the conclusion is an action, a speech act.
The model of Plato’s internal dialogue may be, despite Churchland, plaus-
ible for much of theoretical reason but even here it seems inadequate to ac-
count for idiot savants or, for example, the mathematical insights of someone
like Ramanujan2o some of whose astonishing claims about numbers seemed
often, to Hardy’s despair, not to be bolstered by arguments or proof or prior
premises. It is more plausible to suppose that the mode of thought even in
such an abstract context, was not to be explained as wholly linguisticalthough
jus-g those insights, given the norms of mathematics, required finally, set-
ting out a proof. In my example of the thirsty desert wanderer and his dog,
there is no reason to suppose that either the desires, beliefs, and actions of the
desert wanderer or his dog are accompanied by a sententidobligato of mental
assentings.
Aristotle, on literal interpretation, Hume, and, more recently, versions of
behaviorism, Ryle, versions of pragmatism, some recent modal accounts of
cognition, do not fit Churchland’s description of folk psychology. Nor is what
they call folk psychology very folksy or commonsensical. Recall that Hume in

l9 “All men desire knowledge,” The Metaphysics, Book I, 1 ( h e b Library, Harvard


Press, 1980).
2o Robert Kanigel, The Man Who Knew Infinity: A Life ofthe Genius, Ramanujan(New
York: Scribner’s, 1991).
124 Ruth Barcan Marcus

the quoted passage argues that attributing thought and reason to non-lingual
animals is so obvious it does not escape even the most stupid or ignorant folk.
Representing in language is one mode of representation which is a dra-
matic enlargement of our cognitive abilities but it is a natural ability and far
from the whole story about thought. Imaging, for example, is a mode of think-
ing. It is closer to direct perception but it is a mode of thinking. Some lan-
guage-centered accounts of thought, though they acknowledge mental “ac-
tion” like silent affirmations, have resisted the notion that there actually are
mental picturings. They claim that the notion of a mental-picture is mistaken
psychology, and a conceptual mistake at that. The status of mental images in
reasoning has been a matter of continuing debate among psychologists,*l al-
though its cognitive role is once again acquiring respectability.
There are very likely, even among language users, a wide range of cogni-
tive states and styles which ground belief and which have a wide range of
neuro-physiological underpinnings. The extraordinary thing about linguistic
capacity is that we can communicateabout what we believe through speech
acts in a public language despite the variant causal histories. The speech act of
assenting to a sentence ‘P’which assentingwe share with others in our speech
community may in each case terminate a process which emerges from quite
divergent mental or neurophysiologicalcausal histories. One can say impress-
ionistically, that we might view Hume as focussing on a narrow range of rep-
resentations; sensory or pictorial modes or representation. Language fo-
cussed theories of mind are preoccupied with linguistic representation which
are at some causal distance from objects represented. The causal link between
pictorial representation,perceptual and sensory experience, and the world, is
close. But as we Know, a picture theory of linguistic representation is not sus-
tainable. In a complex organism there is a chain of learning grounded initially
in encounters with the environment, and undergirded by our neuro-physio-
logy - which may show considerable individual variation given our variant
histories and cognitive styles. A genuine folk psychologist is more likely to
offer highly condemned platitudes such as that seeing and feeling is believing,
or that non-verbal behavior of even language users is a reliable guide to what
they believe, than that believing is having a pro-attitude to an understood sen-
tence by a member of a speech community. The Cartesian analogue of lan-
guage centered views is to see believing, thinking, intending, in all their
possible manifestations as necessarily restricted to language users. Replace
“havinga soul” with “having language”. Nor am I motivated to question this
languagecentered non-naturalistic account because I am one of those who

See Michael Tye, The Imagery Debate (Bradford, M.I.T.,


1991).
The Anti-Naturalism of Some Language Centered Accounts of Belief 125

Davidson refers to as an “animal lover,” to which he might have added, baby


lover. It is because such a restricted theory generates problems, not just with
respect to the believings of non-language users but in conjunction with believ-
ings of language users.

I1
The legitimacy of attack on what is called folk psychology should not be
addressed to the desire-belief-explanatory model of action, writ large, but
with the centrality of sententialor quasi-sentential entitiesor states as the only
proper objects of verbs such as think,intend, believe, desire, expect, and the
like. No language,then no thought, no intentions,no desires, etc. On an inter-
nalist folk-psychological view, the mind is in its essential features a complex
system of evocable attitudes to internal linguistic entities or semantical states
isolable and determinable. Hence the seeming plausibility of the mind as a
souped up Turing machine or conceivable as a brain in a vat. But it is not
plausible, although there are surely features of human mentality which can be
so described.
Nor is the implausibility simply that the objects of propositional attitudes
are on this “narrow” view, all in the mind (or head). Adding the “externalist
rider” which requires that the sentential object of attitudes must be inter-
preted sentences within the framework of a public language does not appreci-
ably ameliorate the implausibility. Meanings on an externalist account are
world bound and are not wholly in the agent’s head. But that does not make
the objects of thought, desire, belief, intention less linguistic, but only less so-
lipsistic.
It seems to me that the Desire-Belief model of action explanation is a
plausible, rough, phenomenologicaltheory provided that the role of language
is assigned its proper place. A kind of Copernicanrearrangementis warranted
with language no longer at center stage.
Complex organismsvary enormouslywith respect to their needs and capa-
cities - and those capacities will naturally play a role in action explanation.
The special capacitiesfor language and for the wide range of communication,
speculation, and inference it affords will, of course, play a role in human ac-
tion explanation, but it is hardly the whole story.
We began the paper by characterizingthe disquotation principle as central
to language-focussed accounts of belief. Sincere assent entailed belief and ar-
guably conversely, among competent non-confused language users. On a
more general account, the objects of believing are not necessarily linguistic
entities although such entities will sometimesbe the objects of believing as in
126 Ruth Barcan Marcus

the belief that a certain sentence is grammatical. The disquotation principle


will fall into place as a claim which takes speech acts of assent by competent,
sincere,non-conceptuallyconfused linguals as a privileged mark of believing.
A claim which recent research suggests may not be wholly warranted. 22
Consider the following more general dispositional account. 23
D. An agent believes that S just in case (1) under agent-centered circumstances
such as desires, need, an other psychological states including other believings and (2)
external circumstances(3) the agent will act as if S obtained,i.e., will act in ways appro-
priate to S being the case,where S is a state of affairs, actual or non-actual.
Paraphrasing an example of Braithwaite,24 elaborating on what it is to be-
lieve that strawberriesgive him indigestion, he says that to believe that straw-
berries give him indigestion means that under relevant external circumstances
such as being offered strawberries and internal needs and desires such as the
need to preserve health and to desire to avoid pain, he willbehave in a manner
appropriate to their indigestibility. For example, he will refuse them. Under
other circumstanceswhere he has a need to have indigestion to avoid an un-
pleasant obligation, he will accept the strawberries.
Who, under D are the agents? They are organisms of sufficient complexity
and apparently goal directed behavior such that viewing them, as closer to
hard wired rockets, the design of which we happen to be ignorant, is unwar-
ranted - unless of course we should also so view ourselves.
The hungry chimpanzee who improvises “tools” and tries out various
strategiesfor obtaining what looks like bananas out of reach could surely be
counted as an agent who believes that the objects within view (we call them
‘bananas’) are edible. The chimp is related to a possible state of affairs, the
edibility of that object and acts accordingly.
It is equally plausible that Norman Malcolm’s now celebrated dog believes
that whatever it is it pursued (we call it a ‘cat’) is in an object where it disap-
peared from view (we call it a ‘tree’).

** See T. Wilson, “Strangers to Ourselves: The Origins and Accuracy of Beliefs About
Ones Own Mental States,” ed. J. Harvey and G . Weary,Attribution in ContempomryPsycho-
logy (New York: Academic Press, 1988). Also, notes 26 and 28.
23 Principle D is adapted from R. B. Braithwaite, “The Nature of Believing” in Knowl-
edge und Belief, ed. A. P. Griffiths (Oxford Press,1967).
Braithwaite required the entertaining of proposiaons and that the agent act as S were
true. SinceBraithwaite’s propositions do seem to be quasi-linguistic entities, I have modifiedhis
Bcco\ult so that the principle is not essentially language bound. Braithwaite also required that S
bs contingent (or in my account, a possible state of affairs).
See my “SomeRevisionary Proposals About Belief and Believing”and ”Rationalityand
Believing the Impossible,” Journal of Philosophy LXXX (1983).
a Bmithwaite, p. 31.
The Anti-Naturalism of Some Language Centered Accounts of Belief 127

Of course as we descend the hierarchy of animal organisms, the behavior


may become more analogous to hard wired rocketry. But it does not seem to
me that a cut-off point is clear, or necessary, or possible. Sorites are every-
where.
What counts as “acts as if“ under D? Perhaps “responds as if“ would be
preferable to “acts as if“ which in turn is preferable to “behaves as if.’’ The lat-
ter has been identified with the rigid constraints of Watsonian or Skinnerian
Behaviorism which insisted on publicly displayable responses - thereby
allowing uttering out loud or vocal chord motion as behavior, but excluding
mental utterances in accounts of thought. But mental events such as framing
intentions, making decisions, picturing, humming to onself will count as ac-
tions - whose connectionswith explanation of further action are part of com-
mon sense psychology divested of language centricity. If the “acts as if“ is
broadened to “respondsas if“ then that leavesroom for further neuro-physio-
logical responses in some causal hierarchy. But so far, and despite the
promises of cognitive theorists, such deep theory is unavailable, and we
“theorize” or explain on the phenomenological level.
It is a curious fact that the obsession with linguistic behavior for defining
belief, intention, thought, rationality seems to motivate animal psychologists
to try to locate languages in animals25who are otherwise so patently inten-
tional in their behavior. As if that were required if their behavior is to be en-
dorsed as intentional or rational or even cognitive. But the putative language
ascribed for example by Primack to chimps is abjectly primitive compared to
the complexity of some of the chimps’ other goal directed behavior. Indeed,
some linguists are reluctant to characterizethe behavior as genuinely linguis-
tic.
Robert Stalnaker is among those who has proposed an account of the ob-
jects of propositional attitudes which are not the states of &airs I have in
mind, but they are also clearly non-linguistic entities. For Stalnaker the inten-
sions of sentences are not linguistic nor do they closely mimic language. They
are rather functions from worlds to truth values. I have difficulties with those
objects as the objects of attitudesalthough there is a powerful rationale behind
it which must be weighed but I will not consider here. But what k stressed by
Stalnaker and which I have been urging, is that “If desires and beliefs are to be
understood in terms of their role in the determination of action, then their ob-
jects have nothing essential to do with language.” “It is conceivable (whether
or not true) that there are rational creatures who do not use language, who

25 D. Premack, The Mind of An Ape (New York, 1983). Also Gavagai: Or the Future
History of the Animal Language Contmversy (Cambridge, Mass.:MIT Press, 1986).
128 Ruth Barcan Marcus

have no internal representations of their attitudes which have a linguistic


form.I think this is true of many animals - even rather stupid ones - but there
might be clearer cases.”
Even among language users, an account of the attitudes which does not
take the objects of such attitudes to be necessarily linguistic or quasi-linguis-
tic, permits a better solution to problems not easily addressed by language
bound uses. Consider the related phenomena of tacit, unconscious and con-
flicted belief.
In accordance with our account, the propositional attitude of believing is
not confined to a disposition to verbal behavior. A range of actions other than
speech acts may count as evidence for an agent’s being in a believing relation
to a state of affairs, not necessarily actual. Long before some recent psycho-
logical research,26 which seems to support the claim that “cognitive”causes of
non-verbal behaviors are distinct from cognitive causes of verbal behavior, it
was, among real common-sensical folk, recognized that a language-endowed
agent’s non-verbal behavior might run counter to his sincere assents to sen-
tences understood and held true. There is the familiar case of someone who
sincerelyavows he loves another yet through non-verbal action and seemingly
unaware of the dissonance, persistently inflicts harm. Such examples of con-
flicted believing are echoed in examples of conflicted desiring.
If believing is a verbal disposition then how to account for the occasions of
failure of fit of non-verbal actions (broadly conceived) with verbal actions of
sincere assent. This is not a matter of inconsistency of sentences assented to
but of a lack of coherence between sincere verbal responses and other mani-
festations of belief. Those for whom believing is, of necessity, language bound
could say that there are sentences unconsciously held true to which there is
unconscious assent. Those sentences causally and selectively are claimed to
influence our non-verbal actions but not our conscious verbal actions which
manifest our conscious believing. It is as if there is within us a hidden alter-
ego, assenting to sentenceswhich do contradict those consciously assented to.
But that is an hypothesis difficult to sustain. 27 More plausible is the range
of explanations recently advanced for the fairly frequent divergence of verbal
from other behavioral indicators of believing, not all of which can be ac-
counted for by a repressive mechanism. Non-linguistic behavioral indicators
of believing sometimes have no linguistic behavioral correlate. Sometimes
they are in parallel with verbal behavioral indicators and their failure to mesh

See R.Nisbett and T.Wilson, “TellingMore Than We Can Know,”Psychological Re-


view 84,No.3 (1977).
27 See A. Collins, “UnconsciousBelief,” Journal of Philosophy LXVI, No. 20 (1969).
The Anti-Naturalism of Some Language Centered Accounts of Belief 129

seems not always to be motivated in a way consistent with psychoanalyhc ac-


counts. Indeed, Timothy Wilson says28 “people can often make accurate re-
ports about their attitudes, moods, motives and evaluations. Often they can-
not and it is under these conditionsthat behavioralmeasuresof internal states
are useful.”
A non-language centered account of cognitive attitudes allows a more
plausible account of rationality. Rationality as common-sensicalfolk know, is
not merely a matter of being a reliable deducer of logical consequences or a
good computer of probabilities or a non-assentor to contradictory sentences
ans so on. Rationality is a feature of behavior writ large. It is not misplaced
rocket-talk to describe somebehavior of a non-lingual as rational, or somebe-
havior of a logical lingual as irrational where in the latter case norms of logic
are preserved but other behavior is at odds with sincere verbal assent. I ex-
clude here such cases as those given in the puzzle about belief. (See footnote
2)
A purpose in this paper was to challengewhat philosophershave recently
called “folk psychology”, not for its recalcitrance to reduction or for the diffi-
culties in pinpointing reference, but for its being a highly non-commonsensi-
cal, non-naturalistic account of intention, cognition, thought and action. It is
an account of thought, of intentional states of cognition, of many seemingly
affective attitudes which is grounded exclusively in attitudes to linguistic or
quasi-linguistic entities. That is already questionable for verbs like “believe”
and far more questionable for verbs like desire, need, want, pursue, seek, im-
agine, and a large family of cognates. For genuine common sense psychology,
sentences or quasi-linguistic propositions do not play an exclusive role.
Speech acts are among the many acts which are manifestations of cognitive
states and crucial as language is to theoretical reasoning, it is only a part of the
story in the explanation of action of linguals. It plays no role in explanationsof
action of non-linguals. But the absence of language does not primafaciecon-
vert non-linguals into thoughtless automata.

za T. Wilson, “Self Deception Without Repression,” p. 113.

Dialectica Vol. 49, No 2-4 (1995)

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