The Origin of Language

Philosophy

REVIEW OF: The Symbolic Species - The co-evolution of language and the human brain, by Terrence Deacon, Penguin, 527pp, 1997.

          Terrence Deacon works at the interface between neurobiology, developmental biology and biological anthropology. He is ideally placed to bring together the insights of the very different sciences of palaeontology and physiology into the nature and origins of language. The pleasures of his book are in the detail, the expert knowledge that the author brings to bear, the lucidity of writing that must at times be quite technical.

          The reviewer sees a main inadequacy of the book in its cavalier treatment of language itself, and especially of what the author calls "Chomsky's Handstand".

PDF of this article Download Adobe Acrobat Reader Email the reviewer Reviewer's web site Author's web site Search for papers by Deacon, T. W. Send a response to this article Search the web for related items Contact the Editor Search Home Human Nature Review | Human Nature Review ISSN 1476-1084 | Table of Contents | What's New | Search | Feedback | Daily News | Submit A Manuscript | The Human Nature Review 2002 Volume 2: 84-87 ( 21 February ) URL of this document http://human-nature.com/nibbs/02/spr.html Book Review The Origin of Language The Symbolic Species: The Co-evolution of Language and the Brain by Terrence W. Deacon Penguin, 1997 Reviewed by Desmond Fearnley-Sander *, School of Mathematics and Physics, University of Tasmania, GPO Box 252-37, Hobart, Tasmania 7001, AUSTRALIA 'In the beginning was the Word'. So the Bible seems to acknowledge the specialness of language, the distinctive characteristic that separates the human from all other species, even from the other great apes. It is not the ability to communicate that distinguishes us. Other species communicate and depend for their continued survival upon successful communication. It is communication of a particular kind: no other species makes promises or poems. When did language arise, and how? And why? If it is of value for the survival of a species, as it clearly is, then why has only one species succeeded in acquiring full-blown language? The theory of evolution offers a framework in which these questions may be addressed. The difficulty is that language, spoken or signed, leaves no lasting trace. Which of our ancient ancestors had language, and what form their language had are matters that must be inferred from a record of fossils and ancient artifacts that is extremely sparse. The idea of studying the generation and processing of language in brains by the standard experimental method of science meets a different difficulty: ethical constraints severely limit the types of experiment that may be performed. Much of what is known about the workings of the brain has had to be gleaned from evidence that is only serendipitously available: for well over a century, careful observation of what goes wrong in brains that are physically damaged (by accident or through beneficial medical procedures such as the removal of tumours) has contributed to the development of a picture in which, broadly speaking, certain areas of the brain are distinguished by their special functions. The Symbolic Species includes a nice overview and analysis of the extraordinary ways in which different types of brain damage and genetic defect are manifest in linguistic and other behaviours. But, by bringing to bear observations made with new technologies, it calls into question accepted views of what is going on. Thanks to PET (positron emission tomography) scans and magnetic resonance imaging we are now able to look into brains at work. These methods give a limited indirect picture of brain activity, showing only levels of blood flow or glucose metabolism, rather than the firing of individual neurons which is presumed to be the core activity of the brain. Nevertheless a picture of language processing is emerging that is much more complex. Rather than a division of the brain into regions with different tasks, the new picture is one in which connections between diverse regions assume much greater importance. The brain circuits that go to work when you mechanically recite a known list of words, such as the days of the week, are different from those that are active when you utter a list of words that requires more thought, such as naming several kinds of cat, though there may be some overlap between the two. Moreover, in listening to sentences many connections are active in parallel, so that, for example, one circuit may be handling the construction of words from phonemes, while another is engaged in building meaning and another deals with emotional nuances. It appears that this break-down into modular tasks is determined to a substantial extent by issues of timing, so that tasks which must be performed quickly are handled by communication between physically close regions of the brain, while those that can be done more slowly are more spread out. Little is known of how all this activity is synchronized to give our coherent serial output of speech and unitary awareness of conversation, but it may be expected that the welldeveloped mathematics of signal processing will have to be brought to bear on these problems. Terrence Deacon works at the interface between neurobiology, developmental biology and biological anthropology. He is ideally placed to bring together the insights of the very different sciences of paleontology and physiology into the nature and origins of language. The pleasures of his book are in the detail, the expert knowledge that the author brings to bear, the lucidity of writing that must at times be quite technical. To omit the details of brain physiology, for example, and of the extraordinary process of individual brain development from birth to maturity would have been to short-change the reader. The detail is necessary and Deacon is skilled in making it accessible to the non-expert. One concession that might have been made to the limitations of the brains of ordinary readers would have been to provide a glossary; it is annoying to have to turn to a dictionary for the meanings of essential technical terms like 'dorsal' or 'Pleistocene'. The span of time over which language has been around is a subject of debate. One popular view, based on the sudden appearance in the archaeological record of evidence for a jump in sophistication of primitive technologies and of representational art, sees language with syntax (rather then just individual words) as very recent in the evolutionary scheme: perhaps it has been with us for as little as one or two hundred thousand years, a very short period in the evolution of our species. From his knowledge of brain structure, and of the rates of evolutionary change Deacon convincingly argues for a very different story. He sees language as evolving slowly in fits and starts over a period of two million years or more. He suggests that our ape-like ancestors prior to that, the australopithecines, had the kinds of communication capabilities that can be observed today in apes and monkeys. They made sounds or signs of aggression and appeasement, sounds or signs to warn and perhaps to comfort. Relics of those primitive calls persist in humans to this day, for example in the tongue clicking and other noises that we use when we communicate with babies. The evolutionary move forward to language, made only by humans, was triggered, Deacon believes, by the change that humans made from a largely vegetarian diet to one that regularly included meat, a change marked in the fossil record by the first appearance of tools stones with sharp edges intentionally shaped by chipping to allow the hacking of meat and hide. That change of behaviour was preceded and accompanied by slow evolutionary changes of physiology, including the transition to bipedal gait and to a hand structure that allowed efficient gripping, and by increases in brain size and complexity. Homo habilis, the new species that appears in the fossil record about two million years ago had a brain that was about fifty percent larger than the australopithecine's, though still only half the size of a modern human brain. Adding a hunting mode to a gathering mode of subsistence reduced dependence on seasonal vicissitudes, and supported greater mobility, but it also brought about new pressures to be dealt with by natural selection. The strong instinct, naturally selected, of males is to support and promote their own genes through their progeny. How is the hunter, away from the community for long periods, to be sure that the young that he provides for are his own? It is an ancient concern! The suggestion is that the need for binding contractual supports of mating exclusivity, guaranteed by the community―in a word, of marriage―may have been a main pressure to which an elaborated language was the response. Over hundreds of thousands of years, developing language provided this and other benefits. Deacon's construction of this story, to which no brief outline could do justice, is fascinating in its detail and careful argument. The book's title picks up a conception of the very original American mathematician C. S. Peirce. He distinguished between different kinds of representation: the iconic, the indexical and the symbolic. In an iconic representation (such as a drawing) there is a clear connection between the representation and what it represents. In an indexical representation, the connection between the two is purely conventional. The lack of any connection between (the sound of) a word and what the word names is an essential feature of language; it brings with it the freedom to create new words at will, to name whatever we want to name. But it is the step to the symbolic, Deacon suggests, that has only been made by humans. In symbolic representation, relationships between objects are represented as relationships between words. Deacon's analysis of these matters is the most conceptually difficult and least satisfactory part of the book. The problems stem, I think, from his refusal to consider seriously the formation and significance of the basic unit of symbolic language: the sentence. What is most obviously missing from Deacon's account is what, on the face of it, should be most relevant: linguistics, the study of language as it actually is. In a section called 'Chomsky's Handstand', and elsewhere, he effectively dismisses what, until now, has been recognized as one of the great revolutions in thought of the twentieth century. One feels that the author may view this negative as the main contribution of his book. The gist is suggested by this sentence: "Children's minds need not innately involve language structures, if languages embody the predispositions of children's minds!" Language, in other words, has evolved to fit the capabilities of brains, more than brains have evolved to fit language. This is typical of the kinds of insight, or ways of talking, that are offered by the natural selection point of view, at the same time apparently profound, but somehow curiously trivial or even vacuous. Chomsky's arguments are carefully constructed and sophisticated, but the essence is familiar to people interested in language. He noted that the acquisition by children of language skills far exceeds what could be achieved if they began, so to speak, with a blank sheet―if they had to learn their native languages inductively, merely from the evidence provided by speech that they hear. 'The poverty of the stimulus' is the catch phrase. Therefore, the argument goes, the infant brain must be pre-disposed to the acquiring of language. There is nothing here that conflicts with the idea that language has evolved to fit the capabilities of brains. In his early writings, forty years ago, Chomsky spoke, perhaps unfortunately, of a 'language organ'. The term suggests the possibility of usefully isolating in the brain those mechanisms that contribute to the generation and understanding of speech. The evidence of brain research presented in The Symbolic Species suggests that the exercise may not be worthwhile. Language processing is mixed with too many other kinds of processing to be viewed as the independent activity of a specialized organ. The evidence is that language processes are substantially supported by pre-existing brain mechanisms, mechanisms that have been commandeered for speech by virtue of the survival benefits that speech brings. For example, as you formulate a phrase, one of your brain activities is the motor control of tongue and larynx needed to produce the sounds, and it appears that some shadow of these processes occurs even if you don't actually speak. Processes needed for motor control appear to be used for thinking. The brain has not been tidily designed to achieve goals that would be of value to the human species; rather, over hundreds of thousands of years genetic modifications of the brain have serendipitously occurred, and those that happened to be of survival value have persisted. That is the process of natural selection. The result is a mess, but a mess that works. Natural languages differ from one another in many ways, but they have much in common too. Universal grammar is the name that has been given to what is shared. According to Terrence Deacon, "the idea that an innate universal grammar is the only way to account for language abilities was first argued by the MIT linguist Noam Chomsky." But this misconstrues the situation. Rather, it is universal grammar that must be accounted for by any theory of the evolution of language. Why is it that natural languages have so much in common, a shared core, not of words, but of structure? It is inadequate to say that the universal features "have emerged spontaneously and independently in each evolving language, in response to universal biases in the selection processes affecting language transmission". Account must be taken of the power of structured language to support not just communication but creative rational thought. The studies of brain processes and brain evolution presented in The Symbolic Species point the way towards a multi-faceted solution. What brains do when they process sentences of a natural language is to some extent independent of the language. The commonalities are manifest externally in the utterances themselves―in universal grammar, about which a good deal is known―and internally in the activity of the neuronal circuits―about which some basic facts are currently being discovered. Natural selection has made brains that way, but thanks to the thinness of the pre-historical record, it seems that the story of how that happened will remain largely speculative. Before long, however, it may be that computer simulations will contribute to such speculations in the same kind of way that they have contributed to speculations about the origins of the universe. What will be needed is to bring together two strands of computing that are currently under vigorous development: agent computation, in which more or less autonomous computer entities communicate with one another, share information and learn, and genetic computation, in which the mechanism of natural selection is harnessed to improve performance of programs. The twentieth-first century will bring answers, one hopes, to deep questions about language that are essential to filling out the story, questions that are not asked in Deacon's book. Why is it that we say what we say when we say it? This is not a problem of grammar or semantics. It is not easy to see how to come to grips with it. Perhaps for that reason, this problem of the mechanisms that generate speech and thought has not attracted much attention from linguists either. It is a problem that must be addressed if we are to come to understand how it is that the human brain―a wonderfully intricate and powerful physical system, but a physical system nonetheless―can produce the most distinctively human characteristic: language, and what it supports, abstract thought. And prior to this is an even more basic problem: what is it about the stringing together of words in sentences that produces the power that natural selection has latched onto in the co-evolution of the human brain and human language. Why does language work? Buy The Symbolic Species: The Co-evolution of Language and the Brain from Amazon.com Amazon.co.uk Amazon.fr Amazon.de Amazon.co.jp Amazon.ca Computer-generated translation of this page français deutsch español português italiano ― also try this alternative fast translation service. © Desmond Fearnley-Sander. * Desmond Fearnley-Sander is a mathematician with research interests in language and rationality. Citation Fearnley-Sander, D. (2002). Review of The Symbolic Species: The Co-evolution of Language and the Brain by Terrence W. Deacon. Human Nature Review. 2: 84-87. USSearch: All Products Keywords: UKSearch: All Products Keywords: The Human Nature Review Top 5 Large Cars Every Large Sized Car Rated. Our Experts Pick the Top 5 in Class


Epistemology of Intelligence Analysis

Philosophy

In intelligence, epistemology is the study of the threat awareness and the way the threat is understood in the field of intelligence analysis. Most definitions of intelligence do not consider the fact that the epistemic normative status of the intelligence analysis is knowledge rather than a lower alternative. Counter-arguments to the epistemological status of intelligence are their purpose-oriented action, and their future-oriented content. Following the attacks of September 11, a terrorism commission was set up to identify the failures and weaknesses of US intelligence agencies, to learn from security vulnerabilities and to avoid future attacks on national safety and security.
          DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.30264.70400

Epistemology of Intelligence Analysis Nicolae Sfetcu March 21,2019 Sfetcu, Nicolae, "Epistemology of Intelligence Analysis", SetThings (March 20, 2019), MultiMedia Publishing (ed.), URL = https://www.telework.ro/en/epistemology-of-intelligenceanalysis/ Email: firstname.lastname@example.com This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International. To view a copy of this license, visithttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/. A partial translation of: Sfetcu, Nicolae, "Epistemologiaserviciilor de informații", SetThings (4 februarie 2019), MultiMedia Publishing (ed.), DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.19751.39849, ISBN 978-606-033-160-5, URL = https://www.telework.ro/ro/e-books/epistemologia-serviciilor-de-informatii/ Epistemology of Intelligence Analysis In intelligence, epistemology is the study of the threat awareness and the way the threat is understood in the field of intelligence analysis. Most definitions of intelligence do not consider the fact that the epistemic normative status of the intelligence analysis is knowledge rather than a lower alternative. Counterarguments to the epistemological status of intelligence are their purpose-oriented action, and their future-oriented content. (Rønn and Høffding 2013) Following the attacks of September 11, a terrorism commission was set up to identify the failures and weaknesses of US intelligence agencies, to learn from security vulnerabilities and to avoid future attacks on national safety and security. The conclusion was that the US intelligence institutions lacked the imagination and ability to make relevant predictions that is to connect the relevant "points" and reach relevant conclusions. (Anderson, Schum, and Twining 2009) Sherman Kent, in Strategic Intelligence (1949), divides the field into three components:(Kent 1966) knowledge, organization, and activity. In the opinion of Michael Herman in Intelligence Services in the Information Age (2001), the field of intelligence can be divided into: activity, subjects, product, and function. (Herman 2001)Scott and Jackson in The Study of Intelligence in Theory and Practice, introductory article in Intelligence and National Security Journal no. 19 of 2010, (Scott and Jackson 2004)complements Kent and Herman's divisions by providing an analysis of how to make significant distinctions in the field of intelligence. The intelligence contrasts with information and knowledge and can be placed in a pyramidal continuum of data, information and knowledge. (Dean and Gottschalk 2007)Intelligence can be inserted into two different positions: either between information and knowledge, or at the top of the knowledge hierarchy. (Rønn and Høffding 2013) In the first case, the intelligence is an epistemic step above the information: Geoff Dean and Petter Gottschalk consider that "intelligence is placed between information and knowledge on the continuum as ideally intelligence represents (...) a form of validated information." (Dean and Gottschalk 2007)Normative understanding of intelligence can be seen as the most "plausible information." Intelligence is often referred to as "prior knowledge" understood as information and evaluation of future activities. (Wheaton and Beerbower 2006)Specifically, the pre-scientific attribute of the intelligence is characterized as a warning about events and potentially harmful actions. The question then is whether it disqualifies intelligence as knowledge. (Rønn and Høffding 2013) If the intelligence is placed above knowledge, it is more than mere knowledge. Jerry Ratcliffe justifies this ranking as follows: "So why the extra step of adding intelligence to the continuum? It is due to the fact that intelligence products are inherently action products. In other words, knowledge products can generate understanding, but intelligence products are supposed to generate action."(Ratcliffe 2008) This means that intelligence generates "actionable knowledge". But this interpretation, though claiming that intelligence is a type of knowledge, seems to confuse its epistemic status with its normative function, that of actions and decisions of orientation. According to Simon Høffding, when we compare the epistemic status of intelligence according to the above positions, the relationship between information and knowledge in continuum is asymmetric due to the different level of plausibility and relevance. (Rønn and Høffding 2013)However, what matters is the agent's propositional attitude towards the content of an information. In this sense, information and knowledge are interdependent, and both can thus be intelligence. The main concept of intelligence is the threat. This is reflected in the seminar work of J. David Singer in 1958, Threat Perception and the Armament-Tension Dilemma, (Singer 1958)through a quasi-mathematical model: Threat-Perception = Estimated Capability x Estimated Intent Intent and capability parameters can be described as the dominant episteme used to understand the threat in the field of intelligence analysis. (Vandepeer 2011)Since only the threat actor is important from the ontological point of view, it means that for Singer only the intentions and abilities of the threat actor matter. Samuel Huntington, in The Soldier and the State (1957), claims that military personnel are qualified to assess their capabilities, but not their intentions. (Huntington 1981)Despite the changes that include non-state actors' assessments as a priority, the threat remains defined using only one model, focusing specifically on the threat actor. This assumes that analysts already know and understand the threat actor they are trying to assess. Threat evaluation is based on the knowledge and understanding of an actor. Identification is presumed. The Singer model was later extended by adding new parameters, of which the most common are vulnerability and opportunity. The vulnerability parameter focuses rather on the threat reference, resulting in vulnerability being defined as the susceptibility of a reviewer to an attack. Richard Pilch uses the following formula: (Howard and Sawyer 2003) Threat = Vulnerability x Capability x Intent One of the issues of the vulnerability parameter is that the more generic the target (referent) potential, the less correct will be the threat assessment. The opportunity parameter also appears as a complement to the conventional model: Threat = Intent x Capability x Opportunity Opportunity incorporates an understanding of both the threat actor and the referent and can be defined as a favorable time or opportunity for a threat actor in relation to a reviewer. (Vandepeer 2011) Despite efforts to incorporate additional parameters, the primary assumption is that the dominant episteme, with a primary focus on the threat actor, remains essential to assessing the threat. Investigation theory addresses different ways in which each type of investigation achieves its purpose. Bennets(Holsapple 2004) distinguishes between data, information and knowledge, stating that: "data is discrete, objective facts about events which include numbers, letters and images without context, while information is data with some level of meaning as it describes a situation or condition. Knowledge is built on data and information, and is created within the individual. This knowledge represents understanding of the context, insights into the relationships within a system and the ability to identify leverage points and weaknesses and to understand the future implications of actions taken to resolve problems." In order to produce objective intelligence, the analyst must use a process tailored to the nature of the problem, using one of the fundamental ways of reasoning: (Krizan 1999)induction (causality search, discovery of the relationships between the studied phenomena), deduction (general application, from general to specific), trained intuition (applying a spontaneous perspective, validated with available facts and tools), scientific method (hypothesis falsification and fictitious scenario testing). Induction: When analysts make a generalization or discover relationships between phenomena based on observations or other evidence. "Induction consists in establishing syllogistically a relation between one extreme and the middle by means of the other extreme, e.g. if B is the middle term between A and C, it consists in proving through C that A belongs to B. For this is the manner in which we make inductions."(Aristotle 1989, chap. 2.23) Stephen Marrin expands the inductive approach, indicating that analysts have an analytical approach in two stages. (Marrin 2012)They use intuitive "pattern and trend analysis" identifying repetitive behavior over time, then relying on ad hoc rules or mental models derived from the study of relevant theory for example, economics, political science or psychology to determine the meaning of the model. (Duvenage 2010)Michael Collier argues that the inductive method leaves too much room for conjecture, superstition and opinion. Deduction: Judgment starting from general rules to specific cases, if the hypothesis is tested, contrary to the inductive reasoning where the hypothesis is created. "Whenever three terms are so related to one another that the last is contained in the middle as in a whole, and the middle is either contained in, or excluded from, the first as in or from a whole, the extremes must be related by a perfect syllogism. I call that term middle which is itself contained in another and contains another in itself: in position also this comes in the middle. By extremes I mean both that term which is itself contained in another and that in which another is contained. If A is predicated of all B, and B of all C, A must be predicated of all C: we have already explained what we mean by 'predicated of all'. Similarly also, if A is predicated of no B, and B of all C, it is necessary that no C will be A." (Aristotle 1989, chap. 1.4) Krizan quotes Clauser and Weir (Krizan 1999) who warn that deductive reasoning should be used with care in the intelligence analysis, as there are rarely closed systems, thus premises based on another set of facts, applied to a new problem and supposed to be true may be false and lead to incorrect conclusions. Unlike deductive arguments, in inductive reasoning there is the possibility that the conclusion is false, even if all the premises are true. Instead of being valid or invalid, inductive arguments are strong or weak, which shows how likely it is that the conclusion is true. Abduction: The unofficial or pragmatic way of reasoning to describe how we "justify the best explanation" in everyday life. "We have Reduction (1) when it is obvious that the first term applies to the middle, but that the middle applies to the last term is not obvious, yet nevertheless is more probable [credible] or not less probable [credible] than the conclusion; or (2) if there are not many intermediate terms between the last and the middle; for in all such cases the effect is to bring us nearer to knowledge." (Aristotle 1989, chap. 2.25) Waltz asserts that abduction is, in intelligence, a practical description of an interactive analysis and synthesis set to arrive at a solution or explanation, creating and evaluating more hypotheses. (Waltz 2003, 173)In abduction, the analyst creatively generates a set of hypotheses and sets out to examine whether the available evidence is unequivocally supported by each other. The final step, namely testing the evidence, is a deductive inference. Abduction can be likened to the intuition of the analyst. This reasoning is erroneous because it is subject to cognitive errors but has the ability to extend the understanding of the intelligence matter beyond the original premises. Scientific method: It uses induction to develop the hypothesis, and deduction is used to be tested. If testing does not validate the hypothesis, a new hypothesis should be formulated, and new experiments designed to validate this hypothesis. (Marrin 2012)In the analysis of information there are no direct experiments and observations of the subject, but the analyst can develop hypotheses or explanations from information obtained from different sources. Hypotheses can then be examined for plausibility and iteratively tested against new information. (Duvenage 2010) Structural analysis: It represents additional tools for traditional and intuitive analysis methods and are not just alternatives. Using structural analysis methods could not only improve the quality of intelligence analysis but also enhance the credibility of the analysis that is often prone to criticism of actual or perceived politicization and other organizational pressures. Heuer and Pherson(Heuer and Pherson 2010) classifies 50 structural analytical methods in eight categories that correlate with common cognitive traps and indicates the functions that analysts have to meet to overcome these traps. Some of these methods are: • Decomposition and view: to exceed the limits of the working memory • Idea generation techniques: stimulating the analyst's mind with new possibilities to investigate and visualize an intelligence problem from different angles • Scenarios, indicators, bookmarks: identifying those who could change a situation and outlining the various possible scenarios • Generating and testing hypotheses: analysts, in the subconscious, hypothesize each information and validate them intuitively; structured analytical tools help to examine a wider range of alternative hypotheses, possibilities and explanations • Analysis of causes and effects: analysts should be cautious in unsafe assumptions and conclusions regarding the cause and effect of certain events or indicators • Reframing techniques: helps analysts to change their reference/mentality frameworks to an analytical problem by changing questions or perspectives • Challenge analysis techniques: helps deliver the best possible product to customers where there are major differences in views, highlighting minority views • Analysis of decision support: allows analysts to see the issue from the perspective of decision-makers. Biases: Biases can distort the correct application of inductive argumentation, thus preventing the formation of the most logical conclusion based on clues. Examples of such prejudices include availability heuristics, confirmation biases, and prediction biases. Bibliography Anderson, Terence, David Schum, and William Twining. 2009. Analysis of Evidence. 2 edition. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press. Aristotle. 1989. Prior Analytics. Hackett Publishing. Dean, Geoff, and Petter Gottschalk. 2007. Knowledge Management in Policing and Law Enforcement: Foundations, Structures and Applications. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press. Duvenage, Magdalena Adriana. 2010. "Intelligence Analysis in the Knowledge Age : An Analysis of the Challenges Facing the Practice of Intelligence Analysis." Thesis, Stellenbosch : University of Stellenbosch. https://scholar.sun.ac.za:443/handle/10019.1/3087. Herman, Michael. 2001. Intelligence Services in the Information Age: Theory and Practice. Taylor & Francis. Heuer, Richards J., and Randolph H. Pherson. 2010. Structured Analytic Techniques for Intelligence Analysis. CQ Press. Holsapple, Clyde, ed. 2004. Handbook on Knowledge Management 1: Knowledge Matters. International Handbooks on Information Systems. Berlin Heidelberg: Springer-Verlag. //www.springer.com/gp/book/9783540435273. Howard, Russell, and Reid Sawyer. 2003. Terrorism and Counterterrorism: Understanding the New Security Environment, Readings and Interpretations, Revised & Updated 2004. 1 edition. Guilford, Conn.: McGraw-Hill/Dushkin. Huntington, Samuel P. 1981. The Soldier and the State: The Theory and Politics of Civil– Military Relations. Revised edition. Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press: An Imprint of Harvard University Press. Kent, SHERMAN. 1966. Strategic Intelligence for American World Policy. Princeton University Press. https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt183q0qt. Krizan, Lisa. 1999. "Intelligence Essentials for Everyone." ResearchGate. 1999. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/235073074_Intelligence_Essentials_for_Everyo ne. Marrin, Stephen. 2012. Improving Intelligence Analysis: Bridging the Gap between Scholarship and Practice. Routledge. Ratcliffe, Jerry H. 2008. Intelligence-Led Policing. 1 edition. Cullompton, Devon: Willan. Rønn, Kira Vrist, and Simon Høffding. 2013. "The Epistemic Status of Intelligence: An Epistemological Contribution to the Understanding of Intelligence." 2013. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/263573379_The_Epistemic_Status_of_Intellige nce_An_Epistemological_Contribution_to_the_Understanding_of_Intelligence. Scott, Len, and Peter Jackson. 2004. "The Study of Intelligence in Theory and Practice." Intelligence and National Security 19 (2): 139–69. https://doi.org/10.1080/0268452042000302930. Singer, J. David. 1958. "Threat-Perception and the Armament-Tension Dilemma." The Journal of Conflict Resolution 2 (1): 90–105. https://www.jstor.org/stable/172848. Vandepeer, Charles. 2011. "Rethinking Threat: Intelligence Analysis, Intentions, Capabilities, and the Challenge of Non-State Actors." Thesis. https://digital.library.adelaide.edu.au/dspace/handle/2440/70732. Waltz, Edward. 2003. Knowledge Management in the Intelligence Enterprise. Artech House. Wheaton, Kristan J., and Michael T. Beerbower. 2006. "Towards a New Definition of Intelligence." Stanford Law School. 2006. https://law.stanford.edu/publications/towardsnew-definition-intelligence/.


Sainsbury on Thinking about an Object

Philosophy

R.M. Sainsbury's account of reference has many compelling and attractive features. But it has the undesirable consequence that sentences of the form "x is thinking about y" can never be true when y is replaced by a non-referring term. Of the two obvious ways to deal with this problem within Sainsbury's framework, I reject one and endorse the other. This endorsement is also within the spirit of Sainsbury's account of reference. /// La explicaciÃ³n que ofrece R.M. Sainsbury de la referencia tiene muchas caracterÃsticas convincentes y atractivas, pero tiene la consecuencia indeseable de que oraciones de la forma "x estÃ¡ pensando acerca de y" nunca pueden ser verdaderas cuando se reemplaza y con un tÃ©rmino no referencial. De las dos maneras obvias de tratar este problema dentro del marco teÃ³rico de Sainsbury, rechazo una y acepto la otra. Aceptar esta Ãºltima tambiÃ©n cae dentro del espÃritu de la explicaciÃ³n de la referencia ofrecida por Sainsbury.

CRÍTICA, Revista Hispanoamericana de Filosofía. Vol. 40, No. 120 (diciembre 2008): 85–95 SAINSBURY ON THINKING ABOUT AN OBJECT TIM CRANE Department of Philosophy University College London email@example.com SUMMARY: R.M. Sainsbury's account of reference has many compelling and attractive features. But it has the undesirable consequence that sentences of the form "x is thinking about y" can never be true when y is replaced by a non-referring term. Of the two obvious ways to deal with this problem within Sainsbury's framework, I reject one (the analysis of thinking about as a propositional attitude) and endorse the other (treating "thinks about" as akin to an intensional transitive verb). This endorsement is also within the spirit of Sainsbury's account of reference. KEY WORDS: reference, empty names, intensional transitives, propositional attitudes, propositionalism RESUMEN: La explicación que ofrece R.M. Sainsbury de la referencia tiene muchas características convincentes y atractivas, pero tiene la consecuencia indeseable de que oraciones de la forma "x está pensando acerca de y" nunca pueden ser verdaderas cuando se reemplaza y con un término no referencial. De las dos maneras obvias de tratar este problema dentro del marco teórico de Sainsbury, rechazo una (el análisis de pensar acerca de como una actitud proposicional) y acepto la otra (que trata "pensar acerca de" como semejante a un verbo intensional transitivo). Aceptar esta última también cae dentro del espíritu de la explicación de la referencia ofrecida por Sainsbury. PALABRAS CLAVE: referencia, nombres vacíos, transitivos intensionales, actitudes proposicionales, proposicionalismo 1 . Introduction One of the many distinctive and plausible features of R.M. Sainsbury's Reference without Referents (2005) is the way it treats all singular referring expressions uniformly, whether or not they have referents, without assigning them all descriptive content. Moreover, Sainsbury's system (RWR) does this while preserving a conservative, orthodox ontology: non-empty terms refer to ordinary things, but empty terms do not refer to non-ordinary things, like non-existent objects, abstract objects, concrete possibilia or other "exotic" things. Sainsbury (rightly, in my view) holds the orthodox opinion that there are no such things. Empty terms do not refer to anything, but they are semantically significant. I believe that RWR solves many of the outstanding puzzles about empty terms, fiction and non-existence, and gives a very plausible 86 TIM CRANE account of names and their role in thought. However, RWR in its 2005 version seems to have the consequence that it can never be literally true that someone can think about a non-existent object. In Reference without Referents, Sainsbury explicitly accepts this consequence. But given the centrality of the notion of "thinking about" to the study of intentionality, this seems somewhat perverse. In some recent work, Sainsbury agrees, and has given a different account of "thinking about" consistent with the main theses of RWR (see Sainsbury forthcoming). My aim in this note is threefold: to explain the problem with the 2005 account; to criticise Sainsbury's proposed solution; and to sketch an alternative solution which is within the spirit of RWR (even if it is not quite within the letter of the 2005 book). 2 . Negative Free Logic and Empty Terms Sainsbury follows Burge (1974) and others in endorsing a negative free logic (NFL), which holds that all simple sentences containing empty names are false. A simple sentence Sainsbury defines as "one constructed by inserting n referring expressions into an n-place predicate" (Sainsbury 2005, p. 66). So sentences which are embedded in non-truth-functional or intensional operators do not count as simple. According to NFL, "Sherlock Holmes is a detective" is false. Not (as Nathan Salmon (1998) says) because Sherlock Holmes is an abstract object, and no abstract object is a detective, but simply because Sherlock Holmes does not exist. Likewise, "Sherlock Holmes exists" is false, and its negation "Sherlock Holmes does not exist" is true. This account of negative existential sentences has a pleasing simplicity compared to a view like Evans's (1982), which holds that "Sherlock Holmes does not really exist" (rather than "Sherlock Holmes does not exist") is the negation of "Sherlock Holmes exists". NFL also can maintain an intuitive conception of predication and truth: where "a" is a name and "is F" is a predicate, a simple sentence of the form "a is F" is true iff there is an object denoted by "a" and the object denoted by "a" has the property denoted by "F", and false otherwise (Sainsbury 2005, p. 46).1 When simple sentences containing empty names are embedded within intensional operators 1 Cf. Quine: "Predication joins a general term and a singular term to form a sentence that is true [ . . . ] accordingly as the general term is true [ . . . ] of the object [ . . . ] to which the singular terms refer" (1960, p. 96). It takes only a small modification to make this consistent with Sainsbury's NFL. Crítica, vol. 40, no. 120 (diciembre 2008) SAINSBURY ON THINKING ABOUT AN OBJECT 87 like "believes that", then of course there is no mechanical way to calculate the truth-value of the resulting sentence, which is just as things should be. One obvious question for the view is how exactly we should demarcate the "simple" sentences. Mere morphology or surface form will not do it: "Holmes is unreal" or "Holmes is non-existent" may look simple, but treating them as such under NFL would give the wrong truth-value: false instead of true. So we have to treat (surely not implausibly) the sentence "Holmes is non-existent" as meaning "It's not the case that Holmes is existent" to get the right result. Sainsbury addresses the question of what simplicity is head-on, and frankly concedes that the notion of a simple sentence is itself partly a product of the theory (2005, p. 69). This seems right: the detection of more hidden structure in a sentence is not ad hoc but rather is a result of getting the best balance of semantic, syntactic and logical requirements. A deeper problem arises, however, when we consider apparently simple sentences which themselves explicitly concern thought about the non-existent. NFL treats "Sherlock Holmes is a detective" as false, as we know. So it should do the same with (S): (S) Vladimir is thinking about Sherlock Holmes (S) looks like a simple sentence because it seems to be constructed out of a two-place predicate and two names. But since one of these names is empty, then (S) is false. So it is not true that Vladimir is thinking about Sherlock Holmes. Yet surely there can be such a thing as thought about the non-existent? In his 2005 book, Sainsbury bites the bullet and denies that there is such a thing: How could Le Verrier have used an individual concept to think about Vulcan if there is no such object? On the face of it, thinking about is a relation, and "x thinks about y" entails that y exists. The obvious conclusion is that we speak incorrectly when we say that Le Verrier thought about Vulcan [ . . . ]. Strictly speaking, there is no state of thinking about something which does not exist. We use this loose description when the thinker is trying but failing to think about something, which typically means (setting aside pretence, fiction, etc.) that she is in a state which she cannot discriminate from one in which she is actually thinking about something. (2005, pp. 237–238) Crítica, vol. 40, no. 120 (diciembre 2008) 88 TIM CRANE I find this hard to accept. A thought about the planet Vulcan is as much a genuine case of thinking about something as a thought about the planet Neptune. I think it is literally true that the Greeks thought about Zeus, that Le Verrier thought about Vulcan, and that Vladimir thought about Sherlock Holmes. Moreover, the idea that these claims are not literally true is somewhat out of tune with the spirit of RWR. After all, RWR's aim is to treat all referring expressions in the same way, regardless of whether they have a referent, and surely one of the roles for empty terms is to pick out episodes where someone is thinking about the non-existent?2 If we reject Sainsbury's response, then it seems that there are only two possibilities. One is to insist that (S) expresses a relation after all, and that Sherlock Holmes is one of its relata. Sherlock Holmes would have to be what Sainsbury (forthcoming) calls an "exotic" relatum: abstract, non-existent, merely possible or some such. I agree with Sainsbury that we should not take this route. The other is to deny that (S) is a simple sentence after all. As noted above, something can seem like a simple sentence even when it is not. But filling out what exactly this means in the case of "thinking about" is a little more complicated. For it means that the inferential role of sentences containing "thinking about" cannot be derived on the basis purely of its apparent form as a two-place predicate. Any attempt to show that sentences like (S) are not simple will require a substantial analysis of "thinking about". Such analyses are inevitably controversial, but I think the outlines of one can be provided. But first I must say something about the way I think an analysis should not be given. 3 . Propositionalism It is natural to say "(S) is not a simple sentence because the context 'x is thinking about y' is an intensional context". This is true, I think; but it does not get us very far. It is sufficient for a context to be intensional that classical existential generalisation is not a valid rule of inference for such a context. In other words, something like "There exists something, namely Sherlock Holmes, such that Vladimir is thinking about it" cannot be validly inferred from (S). But this is something we already know, since we already know that Vladimir is thinking about the non-existent. So calling (S) an intensional context does not solve our problem; it names it. 2 The point is not unique to "thinking about"; the same could be said of "represents" or "thinks of". Crítica, vol. 40, no. 120 (diciembre 2008) SAINSBURY ON THINKING ABOUT AN OBJECT 89 The question is not whether (S) is an intensional context, but why? One answer is that (S) might be shorthand or elliptical for a description of a propositional attitude, and propositional attitude contexts are one of the paradigms of intensional contexts. If sentences like (S) should be analysed in terms of some propositional attitude construction, then this would explain why in its underlying structure it is not a simple sentence. Suppose, for example, that (S) could be analysed as something of the form: (S*) Vladimir is in some propositional attitude state with the content that Sherlock Holmes is F (for some value of F) (S*) clearly isn't a simple sentence, since the name "Sherlock Holmes" is embedded within a non-truth-functional construction, its truth is compatible with the falsity of the embedded sentence. Whether or not (S*) is true depends on Vladimir's state of mind and not simply on the semantic facts. The view that all reports of intentional states can be analysed as propositional attitude reports is what I call "propositionalism" (some call it "sententialism").3 Propositionalism says that (S) is really a report of a propositional attitude state. But is propositionalism true? Certainly in a case where someone is truly describable as thinking about something, this may because they are in a propositional attitude state. My conscious judgement that Wagner wrote Parsifal in Ravello, for example, is a case of thinking about Wagner. But the question is whether all cases of thinking about an object can be analysed in terms of the propositional attitudes. Or to put it more directly, are all intentional states propositional attitudes? Philosophers often use "intentional state" and "propositional attitude" as names for the same subject matter. But there seem to be many apparently intentional states whose content is not given by a complete sentence. On the face of it seeing the Pope, noticing the guests arriving, admiring the Dalai Lama, are all intentional states. They all involve the direction of the mind upon objects, and represent their objects in particular ways: these are some marks of intentionality. However, seeing, noticing and admiring, like loving, hating and knowing (someone) are all relations to their objects. And it might be thought that since one of the marks of intentionality is the possible absence of the object, then these relations are not really properly 3 See Forbes 2006, Larson 2002 for opposing views on this. Crítica, vol. 40, no. 120 (diciembre 2008) 90 TIM CRANE called intentional states. Maybe they are some kind of hybrid of a propositional attitude and a non-mental relation -as, for example, in those theories which analyse seeing X in terms of having a visual experience with the propositional content that X is F (for some visible property F), plus some causal relationship to X itself. So perhaps the existence of these relational states does not threaten propositionalism. But even once we put these relational states to one side, there seems to be a large class of intentional states which are neither relations nor propositional attitudes. These are the states ascribed by verbs which have become known as intensional transitives: transitive verbs (verbs which take direct objects) which exhibit the characteristics of intensionality (that is, non-extensionality). Here are some categories of intensional transitive verbs (drawn from the taxonomy in Forbes 2006, p. 37) which seem to describe (or to depend upon) intentional states: 1. Verbs of depiction or representation: imagine, portray, visualize, write (about), belief (in). 2. Verbs of anticipation: anticipate, expect, fear, foresee, plan. 3. Verbs of desire: prefer, want, hope (for). 4. Verbs of evaluation: fear, worship, scorn, respect. 5. Verbs of requirement: need, require, deserve. And there are others, some of which have to do with actions (seeking, hunting for, etc.) and some more remotely connected to intentionality properly so-called (avoiding, lacking, omitting). In all these cases, it is plausible that we have linguistic constructions which bear all the marks of intensionality (with an "s") -resistance to substitution of co-referring terms, and to classical existential generalisation. If these constructions describe genuine intentional mental states, then we seem to have clear examples of non-relational intentional states which are not propositional attitudes. If Vladimir fears the ghost under the bed, then it does not follow that there exists such a ghost. And nor does it follow that he fears the gorgon under the bed even though (on some popular semantic treatments) "the gorgon" and "the ghost" have the same extension, namely: nothing (Forbes 2006, p. 37). Propositionalists believe that intensional transitive verbs like "think about", "hope for", "fear", "want" (etc.) have underlying Crítica, vol. 40, no. 120 (diciembre 2008) SAINSBURY ON THINKING ABOUT AN OBJECT 91 forms or truth-conditions of propositional attitude attributions. Antipropositionalists (like Zoltán Szabó 2003 and Graeme Forbes 2006) reject this analysis: some intensional transitive constructions have propositional attitude truth-conditions and some do not. In his recent paper, Sainsbury (forthcoming) explicitly addresses the problem that intensional transitives pose for RWR. He rejects his previous analysis which led him to say that sentences like (S) are false. Maintaining his ontological conservativeness, he argues that intensional transitives encode a hidden structure, and he proposes a propositionalist account of certain central cases of intensional transitives. The essence of his analysis is that whenever someone thinks about X, they are in some propositional attitude state with a propositional content that concerns X. And there is a one-way entailment from these propositional attitude claims to the troublesome intensional transitive sentences. This proposal enables him to maintain the central theses of RWR by relegating all intensionality into the propositional attitude constructions. However, although I think Sainsbury is right to reject his previous analysis, he is wrong to embrace the essence of propositionalism, as I shall now explain. 4 . The Reduction of Intensional Transitives The usual way to defend propositionalism is to say that ascriptions of intentional states by intensional transitives can be analysed to reveal covert material which shows their true propositional structure. The psychological implication of this semantic proposal is to identify a propositional attitude the existence of which makes true the ascription of any intentional state by means of an intensional transitive. I will refer to this idea (with an abbreviation hiding a harmless usemention conflation) as the reduction of intensional transitives. Philosophers of mind will be familiar with this proposal, since they will be familiar with the usual reduction of desiring something (or wanting something) to desiring/wanting that p. Although we talk in an everyday way about wanting a bottle of burgundy, etc., what this really means, on reflection, is that we want to have a bottle of burgundy. "To have a bottle of burgundy" is an infinitival complement which is normally taken to have the underlying form of a propositional construction. As Sainsbury (forthcoming) notes, the linguistic evidence for this kind of "reduction of desire" is strong (see also Larson 2002, and Larson et al. 1997). For example, the ways in which verbs of desire interact with adverbs seems to support it: if I say "Vladimir wanted a Crítica, vol. 40, no. 120 (diciembre 2008) 92 TIM CRANE drink before everyone else" what does "before everyone else" modify? It could modify his wanting -i.e. his want occurs before everyone else's wants- or it could modify his actually having (i.e. drinking) a drink -he wanted to start drinking before everyone else. Both these readings can be heard in "Vladimir wanted to have a drink before everyone else" and this is evidence for the evidence of a covert "have" in the structure. But although this might work for desire, this is only one example, and there are many others for which it doesn't work as well, as Graeme Forbes has shown (Forbes 2006). To take a couple of examples: "looking for an X" cannot mean the same as "looking to find an X" because "Vladimir will look for a bottle of burgundy tomorrow" does not mean the same as "Vladimir will look to find a bottle of burgundy tomorrow". The first refers to when his looking will get started, but the second has an extra meaning, referring to when the object of the search should be found (Forbes 2006, p. 58; the same point applies to "looking to have"). And attempts to fill out the covert material in the case of verbs of depiction have met with similarly little success. For example, it has been proposed (by Larson 2002) that "Vladimir imagines a unicorn" would amount to "Vladimir imagines a unicorn in front of him". But as Forbes points out, this does not deliver the right result when negated: "Vladimir does not imagine a unicorn" does not mean "Vladimir does not imagine a unicorn in front of him". The second could be true even when Vladimir is still imagining a unicorn. These examples suggest, I think, what an uphill task it would be to defend the propositionalist strategy for all the intensional transitives. So it looks as if there will still be intractable intensional transitives for RWR to deal with. What, then, should we say about "thinking about" itself? 5 . Thinking about an Object On the face of it, the problem we encountered for RWR suggests that "thinking about" is an intensional transitive. But as noted above, Sainsbury proposes a specific propositionalist reduction of thinking about an object, which I paraphrase as follows: whenever someone is in the state of thinking about something X, they are in a propositional attitude state whose propositional content concerns X. What should we make of this? It is true that thinking about something always entails having some beliefs about it. I can hardly imagine winning the lottery -a form Crítica, vol. 40, no. 120 (diciembre 2008) SAINSBURY ON THINKING ABOUT AN OBJECT 93 of thinking about winning the lottery -unless I have some beliefs about what the lottery is. But this is just a necessary condition for imagining; the beliefs do not constitute imagining it. The same is true of "entertaining the proposition that": whenever anyone thinks about X, they are ipso facto entertaining some proposition about X. This may be plausible as a necessary condition for thinking about X; but, as just noted, Sainsbury wants more than a necessary condition. It would not be easy to establish that every case of thinking about something can simply be identified with entertaining the proposition, or with believing that, or with holding some other propositional attitude. I doubt that thinking about should be identified with a propositional attitude at all. It seems that whenever someone thinks about X, they have to be thinking about it in some way. That is, they might be imagining X, visualising X, speculating about X, contemplating X, judging something about X, fearing X, hoping for X and so on. And for only a few of these is a propositionalist reduction available. My alternative suggestion is that rather than being a specific or determinate kind of mental state, "thinking about" picks out a determinable kind. Some of the determinates of this kind will be propositional attitudes (judging); but some will not (fearing, visualising). What all these determinates have in common is that they all involve consciously mentally representing X. Unconscious intentional states do not count as cases of thinking about something. This suggests the following analysis of "thinking about X": (T) S thinks about X =d f S is in some conscious state of mind which represents X. Of course, this is not a reductive analysis, since the right hand side of (T) introduces the ideas of consciousness and representation. But this is the whole point, since the defence of the claim that (S) is not a simple sentence requires that it has "hidden" semantic structure. I am proposing that the hidden structure makes reference to conscious states of mind and mental representation: in fact, it contains a quantification over conscious representational states of mind. Because of this, we should say that the predicate "is in a conscious state of mind which represents" is not semantically or syntactically simple. If this is true of some thinker, then it is also true that they are in some state of mind, that they are conscious, and that their state represents something. This kind of complexity is of just the sort to create an intensional context. Crítica, vol. 40, no. 120 (diciembre 2008) 94 TIM CRANE My speculative hypothesis is that the same is true for all intensional transitives: they all involve a reference to a representation in their semantic analysis (see Forbes 2006, chapter 5). Verbs like "think about" create intensional contexts precisely because they contain a reference to something other than their extension. We might say, roughly speaking, reference is made to their intensions. But because of the rather specific meaning that has now come to be attached to the term "intension", I would rather say that these verbs make reference to a mental representation of their objects, by quantifying over such representational states. These tentative suggestions are, it seems to me, entirely in harmony with the basic principles of RWR. As Sainsbury says, according to an "exotic" view, "intensional verbs emerge as semantically ordinary, and only metaphysically strange. I prefer a more conservative view according to which they are metaphysically ordinary and semantically (slightly) strange" (Sainsbury forthcoming). I agree. The semantic strangeness of intensional transitives resides in the fact that they are not semantically what they seem: analysis reveals that their semantic structure is not that of a two-place predicate, but makes reference to a representation. 6 . Conclusion Sainsbury's RWR gives a very convincing account of empty names in general, but (in its 2005 version at least) it assigns the wrong truth-value to sentences like (S). I have argued that the way out of this is not to give a propositionalist reduction of thinking about an object (as Sainsbury does) but rather to treat "thinking about" as an intensional transitive. As such, it needs to have a semantic analysis to display its hidden semantic structure. But such a semantic analysis is quite consistent with the basic principles of RWR.4 REFERENCES Burge, Tyler, 1974, "Truth and Singular Terms", Noûs, vol. 8, no. 3, pp. 309–325. Forbes, Graeme, 2006, Attitude Problems, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Larson, Richard, 2002, "The Grammar of Intensionality", in G. Preyer and G. Peter (eds.), Logical Form and Natural Language, Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp. 00–00. 4 Thanks to Mark Sainsbury for helpful discussion, and for letting me see his unpublished work. Crítica, vol. 40, no. 120 (diciembre 2008) SAINSBURY ON THINKING ABOUT AN OBJECT 95 Larson, Richard, Marcel den Dikken, and Peter Ludlow, 2007, "Intensional Transitive Verbs and Abstract Clausal Complementation", Linguistic Inquiry, vol. 35, pp. 255–267. Quine, W.V.O., 1960, Word and Object, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass. Sainsbury, R.M., 2005, Reference without Referents, Oxford University Press, Oxford. ––--, forthcoming, "Intentionality without Exotica". Salmon, Nathan, 1998, "Non-Existence", Noûs, vol. 32, no. 3, pp. 277–319. Szabó, Zoltán, 2003, "Believing in Things", Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, vol. 66, no. 3, pp. 584–611. Received: August 18, 2008; accepted: October 31, 2008. Crítica, vol. 40, no. 120 (diciembre 2008) critica / c120crane /