âPhilosophy, psychiatry and avoiding real mischief"

Philosophy

METAPSYCHOLOGY ONLINE REVIEWS PHILOSOPHY AND PSYCHIATRY Full Title: Philosophy and Psychiatry: Problems, Intersections and New Perspectives Author / Editor: Daniel D. Moseley and Gary Gala (Editors) Publisher: Routledge, 2015 BUY ON AMAZON Review © Metapsychology Vol. 20, No. 36 Reviewer: Anya Daly Philosophy, psychiatry and avoiding 'real mischief' "What is Dr. Monro? A mad-doctor; and pray what great matter is that? What can mad-doctors do? Prescribe purging, physic, letting of blood, a vomit, cold bath, and a regular diet? How many incurables are there?... physicians .... are often poor helps; and if they mistake the distemper, which is not seldom the case, they do real mischief." Alexander Crudden, The Adventures of Alexander the Corrector, London 1754 [Quoted by Andrew Scull at the beginning of his chapter "The mad-doctor and his craft", in The Insanity of Place/ The Place of Insanity, London, New York: Routledge 2006] What can philosophy offer psychiatry? What can psychiatry offer philosophy? Simply, there is nothing as harmful as a bad theory put into practice and conversely the constraints of practice and the recalcitrance of the realities of anomalous experiences offer instructive challenges to theory. We know well that the history of medicine and psychiatry have many examples of bad theory having been put into practice often with tragic consequences. Equally the extremes of armchair philosophy and far-fetched thought experiments, while keeping some philosophers busy chasing zombies or possible worlds in which minds can be uploaded into a computer hard-drives, leave philosophy open to accusations of irrelevance and obfuscation. Andrew Scull, and he is not the first, calls our attention to the political, economic and social dimensions of insanity, he writes: "For the lunatic, the madman, the psychotic, the schizophrenic, call them what you will, suffer a sort of social and moral death. Their wishes and will, their very status as moral actors, as agents capable of expressing valid preferences, and exercising autonomous choice are deeply suspect in light of their presumed pathology, as the often dark history of their treatment under confinement abundantly shows." (Scull, The Insanity of Place – The Place of Insanity, 2006: 52). The stakes are thus immeasurably high and our efforts to avoid 'real mischief' demand critical appraisals of both philosophy and psychiatry, critical appraisals internal to each discipline and between these disciplines. The collection of original essays in Philosophy and Psychiatry: Problems, intersections, and new perspectives, edited by Daniel D. Moseley and Gary J. Gala brings together diverse philosophers and psychiatrists in this effort of mutual critical engagement spanning the domains of phenomenology[αα], psychoanalysis, neuroscience, neuroethics, behavioral economics, evolutionary psychiatry, biopsychosocial models and virtue theory. In Part 1, Psychiatric Diagnosis and Agency and Part 2, Ethical Dimensions of Psychiatric Treatment, philosophers reply to the essays of psychiatrists and vice versa, addressing key issues in psychiatric practice and also the wider ethical implications of confinement and treatment. Part 3, Philosophy Out of Psychiatry, takes the discussion in a socio-cultural direction. The collection of essays brought together here goes to the heart of the many heated and often fraught debates within psychiatry about the autonomy of the psychiatric patient, the status of the mental disorder, the ethics of committing a person to psychiatric care, and of imposed medication and treatment. These issues all gear into the objectivism versus constructivism debate questioning whether psychiatric diagnosis is some absolute declaration of reliable authority on the part of psychiatric specialists on the state and status of an individual presenting with anomalous experience or whether this is an overt or covert mechanism of reinforcing social norms. Both the expertise of the psychiatrists and the benignity of the system within which they work and from which they draw authority, are called into question by constructivists. The question of moral responsibility of the patient also renders these investigations urgent as psychiatrists and those working in cognate disciplines are called on for expert testimony in courtrooms across the globe. What is particularly heartening and interesting about this volume is that each of the contributors offers their analyses and critiques for the most part from outside of the domain of their interlocutor as they seek to address the theoretical and practical intersections galvanized by those with non-normal experiences of themselves, others and the world. They thus approach the task set by the editors with a freshness and openness increasingly less often encountered in academia wherein 'expertise' is not only reified but has also become yet another fetish of exchange in a socalled knowledge economy reliant on 'market forces'. As the editors explicitly state, their aim is to invigorate the conversations across the disciplines of philosophy and psychiatry so as to make a positive contribution to the advancement of research, care and service. This volume in no way represents a comprehensive nor final statement on the issues under investigation and this is in fact a key feature of its modus operandi – final statements are impossible and if claimed become immediately suspect. The domain perhaps more than any other academic domain is characterized by inherent contingencies, evolution and fruitful intersections. Psychiatrists who ignore philosophy as much as philosophers of mind who ignore psychiatry do so to the detriment of their discipline and to their duty of care to patients, to students and to the wider society. In the Introduction, the editors define the differentiation between the disciplines of psychiatry and philosophy in terms of their methodologies and subject matters. They propose psychiatry "include[s] the statistical and scientific tools of psychology, medicine, epidemiology, neuroscience and genetics. [Whereas] the methods of philosophy include the tools of conceptual, linguistic and logical analysis and the theories and interpretive techniques that have developed in the various traditions of philosophy" (p.2). This differentiation is in my view my first point of critique. Firstly, the neat distinctions they seek to draw here do not in fact hold up to scrutiny. These days there is much cross-fertilization between domains and furthermore this differentiation seems at odds with both the very project they are engaged in with this book and also with some of the claims of contributors. Secondly, crucial elements are missing in setting out the methods and subject matters. In the description of psychiatry the significant contributions of phenomenology have been overlooked and correlatively the research in perception, embodiment, empathy and intentionality in philosophy. These last are key conceptions in the phenomenological tradition of Husserl, Stein, Scheler, Jaspers, Schneider and Merleau-Ponty, all of whom engaged with either aspects of philosophy of mind and/ or neurology and psychopathology and none of whom appear in the index. There is also a conspicuous absence of any of the current philosophers and psychiatrists working in the domain of phenomenological psychiatry. Thomas Fuchs, Shaun Gallagher, Dan Zahavi, Josef Parnas, Lisa Bortolotti, Matthew Broome, Chris Frith, Matthew Ratcliffe, to name a few that immediately come to mind. Nicholas Kontos, Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School launches the exchanges with his thought-provoking article "Can what's in your head be 'all in your head'?: Possibilities and problems of psychological symptom amplification (PSA)". He notes that the central problem of psychiatric diagnosis is that it suffers from inherent contingencies and uncertainties. This is due in large part to the inevitable reliance on the testimonies of both patient and family as well as due to the lack of reliable biomarkers apart from those that indicate the more definitive states of catatonia and other motor disturbances. Symptoms and signs comprise the core of any medical diagnosis and the signs are now bolstered with the information afforded via the various technologies of blood tests, scans and genetic screening etcetera. These latter provide the more 'objective' measures and the former, while crucial, are always subject to revision and doubt. Kontos describes the especially fraught challenge the psychiatrist faces in establishing a diagnosis with any confidence. Despite the fact that our strongly-held assumption that symptoms, the interior experience, of the patient should figure prominently in diagnosis, much of what is reported defies the classifications offered by manuals such as the DSM. Kontos presents us with some concerning statistics that reveal that the on-the-ground practice of psychiatrists is less symptom dependent than supposed and, furthermore, that the process of psychiatric diagnosis suffers from a circularity which renders unexplained symptoms impossibilities (p.8). Kantos' essay invites us to consider the controversial question as to whether the idea of a medically unexplainable symptom can be usefully transposed into the domain of psychiatry. He writes: "this means asking if there exists a psychological analogue of somatizing" (p.8) and this would be "psychological symptom amplification". Importantly, Kantos acknowledges that not only does this issue concern the reliability of diagnosis and the patient-doctor relationship, but is also underpinned by more metaphysical concerns of identity and dualism. Kontos' begins his analyses by explaining the medical concept of Somatic Symptom Amplification and highlights the contested nature of the terms used to describe this. The terms 'medically', 'unexplained' and 'symptoms' are all open to interpretation and this again brings to the fore the question of underpinning metaphysical assumptions. He then goes on to discuss how the notion of somatization has evolved drawing on key developments in psychiatric history up until its official recognition with DSM-III and beyond to the now predominant integrative model. Kontos offers an insightful discussion of the psycho-social, politico-cultural dimensions in the endeavor of gaining 'sick-role status', drawing out the covert and complex motivations on both sides of the equation, whether as diagnosing psychiatrist or as diagnosed patient. Kontos empathically asks – "who among us could not at one time or another use a little absolution, release and nurturing?" (p.12). Returning to the issue of underlying metaphysical assumptions, Kontos proposes that "there are few card-carrying dualists on the record in psychiatry" (p.15). Nonetheless, despite this claim, dualist thinking still continues to inform much of the conceptual analyses of psychiatry in general which tends to draw on the conceptual frameworks of the mainstream analytic philosophical tradition rather than with the more complementary tradition of phenomenology. Puzzling? Paradoxical? Or just politics? Kontos' concluding remarks bring us back to the conundrum that faces psychiatrists – do they assert an absolute authority to make the call on whether the symptoms of the patient are veridical or not, or do they give the 'benefit of the doubt' to all the patients' claims? Ultimately, neither approach is satisfactory. Philosopher, Justin Garson, provides the response to the essay by Kontos and declares he has nothing in the way of criticism but that he would offer a complementary essay that provides more of the historical context for the debates addressed. Garson is particularly concerned with the issues around what he calls "the hiddenness of psychological symptom amplification", which he rightly argues has deep historical and institutional origins (p.29). Garson notes that the ascendency of the view that symptoms were indications of inner dysfunction as opposed to the preceding view which regarded them as means for coping with untenable external situations, has effectively elided PSA from psychiatric consideration. Trainee psychiatrists are not trained to ask whether the patient might be faking it or exaggerating their symptoms or erroneously identifying non-existent symptoms. Their role is in the alleviation of suffering and confusion, and if they have medical means at their disposal to make the patient feel better, they will understandably pursue this path. The medicalization of everyday problems is yet another cause of the hiddenness of PSA according to Garson. Quoting Thomas Szasz, he writes that medicalization occurs when 'problems of living' transmogrify into 'medical problems' (p.30). While this has had positive benefits for the destigmatization of mental illness, it has also led to an explosion of people seeking 'sick role status' for the benefits this affords. Garson then goes on to track the historical and institutional factors that have contributed to the hiddenness of PSA in American psychiatry. The second pairing of thinkers, Marc Lange – Theda Perdue Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Abraham M. Nussbaum – Assistant Professor in Psychiatry at the University of Colorado Medical School, tackle the specificities of mental illnesses, 'How are mental illnesses different?' – (1) from one another, (2) as opposed to mental health, (3) in distinction from unhealthy mental states that are not in themselves illnesses, and also (4) in differentiation from somatic illnesses. As Lange notes with regard to the first difference, mental illness is regarded as a medical natural kind when what is discovered persists across all instances independent of context and discoverer, thus avoiding the critiques of constructivists (p.37). Such facts can then be used to determine whether one patient shares the same illness as another, and by extension if this is so, then the treatment of one will be just as effective for the other. Lange proposes that the second distinction between mental health and mental illness could be teased out according to whether, as he puts it, "unwellness [is understood as] a departure from statistically normal functioning, or [a] reduction of evolutionary fitness, or [an] interference with human flourishing, or [a] deviation from prevailing cultural ideals" (p. 37). He chooses not to pursue these lines of investigation because he wishes to focus specifically on etiologies as set out with the first differentiation. With regard to the third differentiation, between mental diseases and pathological mental conditions that are not in themselves diseases, Lange suggests this will only become clear once the first issue is addressed. Finally, the fourth differentiation gears into all the previous issues. Lange writes: "I will examine whether mental and somatic illnesses differ in the grounds of their individuation, their status as medical natural kinds, and their distinction from pathological conditions that are not diseases" (p.37). Throughout his analyses, Lange makes pertinent comparisons between disease as understood in general medical contexts and those in psychiatric contexts so as to more effectively draw out the specificities of psychopathology and these comparisons hinge on whether the disease in question can be considered a natural kind. Importantly, Lange stresses that manuals such as the DSM serve to provide diagnostic criteria and do not provide definitions as such. In this way the heterogeneity of mental disease can be accommodated without reductivism. In his concluding remarks, Lange suggests that the very notion of disease will play a lesser role in both medical and psychiatric diagnosis as molecular medicine gains increased currency. Nussbaum, as a practicing physician, brings Lange's philosophical interrogations into the clinic to test where they meet or fall short of the practical requirements of diagnosis and treatment. Can the specificities of general medical disease be translated effectively into the psychiatric domain? Nussbaum affirms Lange's claim that it is in virtue of being incapacitating that general medical diseases overlap with those of mental diseases, but he challenges Lange on the claim that not all incapacities are diseases (p.54). Nussbaum takes Lange to task on his discussion about mental disease and agency because this then gives mental disease the same status as mere somatic disease and in so doing fails to adequately acknowledge the pervasive stigma that attaches to mental disease. Nussbaum rightly highlights the stigmatization that almost inevitably accompanies the diagnosis of mental disease in contrast with the diagnosis of medical disease which may alleviate the distress of the patient, giving them some surety. Drawing on the work of Lisa Bortolotti, Nussbaum situates mental disease understood as irrationality in the social wherein norms of rationality have erroneously tended to dictate the terms of debate. Nussbaum, in agreement with Bortolotti, suggests that irrationality is "neither a necessary or sufficient definition" (p.55) of what it means to have a mental disease; much that is irrational does not qualify as disease. Rather they suggest neuroscience may be better equipped to offer definitive answers to the questions of the underlying conditions of mental disease. Nussbaum returns at the end of his essay to the issue of agency and acknowledges that this notion requires a more nuanced understanding in that agency is not an all-or-nothing capacity. The third exchange between Assistant Professor of Psychiatry, Warren Kinghorn and Professor of Philosophy, Christian Perring returns us to the vexed domain of diagnosis and the justifications of the highly controversial DSM-5 as a diagnostic tool. Kinghorn recounts the restrained reception of the book by clinicians who nonetheless have noted that "the DSM is too categorical in its diagnoses (as opposed to dimensional and narrative), too formal and cookbookish, too quick to pathologize, too fixed on static and stigmatizing labels, too focused on experience and behavior rather than quantifiable biomarkers where these exist, and too broad-brush in its categories – to name only a few complaints" (p.60). At the far extreme of the criticism is Gary Greenberg's – The book of woe: the DSM and the unmaking of psychiatry, New York: Blue Rider Press (2013) – which chronicles the evolution and devolution of psychiatry's principle reference and diagnostic tool. This is an informative but ultimately damning account of the latest version – the DSM-5 – and in addition to all the criticisms listed above, Greenberg exposes what he regards as the dubious ethics underpinning this particular iteration which effectively underwrites the commodification of suffering. Kinghorn's essay thus serves as a corrective to Greenberg's extreme account. Notwithstanding the legitimacy of some of the criticisms, Kinghorn asserts that the DSM is still an "important clinical and moral document" (p.61) despite the fact that it cannot claim objective and timeless status. As he writes: "It is not apolitical or timeless. It is not valuefree or culturally neutral. It is not a document that 'cuts nature at the joints' in an objective apolitical way, and therefore stands as a pinnacle of psychiatric progress. It is none of these things – which is to say that many, if not most, of the most common critiques of the DSM, are valid" (p.61). Kinghorn aligns his inquiries with those of the philosopher Alisdair MacIntyre, who rejects both the grand ethical accounts of the 19th century and the deconstructivist genealogies of Nietzsche and Foucault in seeking a situated, progressive ethical theory. Kinghorn proposes this approach honors the strengths of the DSM while not ignoring its deficiencies. Kinghorn begins by tracking the major evolutions of the DSM and its more infamous 'outings' and ommisions. He highlights the fact the one of the outstanding virtues of the DSM has been in the facilitation of communication between clinicians and patients, between different clinicians, between clinicians and the various health care systems, between clinicians and the pharmaceutical industry. This standardization of diagnostic language has informed the delivery of care, education and training, and research. And to be clear, this standardization has been the source of much controversy also. Politics at the levels of institutions and individuals have all come under scrutiny, thus muddying the waters of clear and dispassionate debate. Kinghorn questions why it is that these issues and documents arouse such outrage and indignation. He proposes that they go to the heart of very deep ethical issues and that thus the DSM must be analysed as much as a moral document, situated in time and place, as a document to facilitate diagnosis and interchange. Perring while acknowledging the appeal and plausibility of Kinghorn's defence of the DSM-5, proposes that the serious failings of DSM-5 have nonetheless not been exonerated. Perring challenges Kinghorn's account on a number of fronts. Just as the Bible is known to be one of the most bastardized documents in history, so too the 'the bible of psychiatry', the DSM, is a highly political document. Nonetheless, those who refer to it do not generally accept it letter and verse; it is always open to interpretation. While acknowledging the DSM facilitates teaching, research and treatment, Perring is understandably suspicious of those who seek to downplay or co-opt the socio-political dimensions of psychiatry. As I mentioned in the beginning of this review – the stakes are immeasurably high and 'avoiding real mischief' should always be at the forefront of consideration in addressing the sufferings of those who seek and need psychiatric care. Perring offers a through-going analysis of the terms and claims which Kinghorn aims to defend, revealing ambiguities and dismantling arguments. Underpinning Perring's criticisms is his rejection of Kinghorn's adoption of MacIntyre's tradition approach; that is, the understanding of the DSM as a contingent tradition subject to historical and political forces without any absolutist claims to objectivity. While Kinghorn upholds these are reasons to defend the DSM, Perring takes the opposite view that they are cause for alarm and we must apply stringent standards of critical appraisals to each and every classification. Perring closes his essay on a conciliatory note, but again asserts the need for criticism and skepticism to be brought to the fore in our use of the DSM. He writes: "We can admire and respect the sincerity and good will of so many who work in psychiatric and mental health professions who use the DSM and do the research that supports research around it, and we may even hold a grudging respect for the tenacity of the DSM itself. However, we should maintain a critical and skeptical stance towards it, given its historical context" (p.87). The above three pairings of essays are the opening exchanges in this collection which subsequently branches out into debates regarding ethics, free-will and responsibility, the justification of confinement and coercion in psychiatric treatment, the notions of self, autonomy and agency, and how all of these debates come to be represented in the media and film. One of the many virtues of this collection is the diversity of voices and the challenge to dominant assumptions across the domains of psychiatry and the philosophy of psychiatry. The problem of dualism underpins a number of the issues in this volume and so it is surprising and disappointing that the contributors have not availed themselves of the rich and incisive critiques of dualism and mind/ body monism (aka physicalism or identity theory) on the part of phenomenologists so as to inform their analyses. Notably Merleau-Ponty is the stand-out phenomenologist who tackled this problem and established the first viable non-dualist ontology in Western philosophy. So too, for those who bemoan the limitations of the DSM, perhaps they could usefully investigate and employ the 'phenomenological interview' and 'Shaun Gallagher's 'Pattern theory of self' [ΒΒ] as alternative methods of anti-classification. This collection of essays would make a valuable contribution to courses in philosophy of mind and psychiatry. The writing across all the contributions is generally clear and accessible to the non-specialist. These cross-disciplinary conversations will undoubtedly contribute positively to improved research, care, service and also help to guard against the dangers of 'real mischief'. Roy Porter reinforces the earlier call for caution from Crudden, Scull and Perring – he writes: "All societies judge some people mad: any strict clinical justification aside, it is part of the business of marking out the different, deviant and perhaps dangerous.... Stigmatizing – the creation of spoiled identity – involves projecting onto an individual or group judgements as to what is inferior, repugnant or disgraceful. It may thus translate disgust into the disgusting and fears into the fearful, first by singling out difference, next by calling it inferiority, and finally by blaming 'victims' for their otherness.... The construction of such 'them-and-us' oppositions reinforces our fragile sense of self-identity and self-worth through the pathologization of pariahs." Roy Porter, Madness: A Brief History, 2002: 62 & 63 Notes. αα According to G. Berrios, "Phenomenology, psychopathology and Jaspers: a conceptual history", History of Psychiatry 1991, 3: 303 – the term phenomenology has four possible meanings: 1. Phenomenology as referring to 'signs and symptoms'. It is this interpretation to which contributors in this volume refer or just more generally the analytic philosophical use of this term. This usage seems to reduce 'phenomenology' to merely a synonym for 'experience' without the historical or ontological significances attached to the term found in the tradition, past and present, of Phenomenology. 2. The second – is merely a catalogue of the history of usages of the term. 3. The third concerns Jasper's use of the term to refer to a description of mental states from an empathic and conceptually neutral standpoint. 4. Phenomenology according to the father of phenomenology Edmund Husserl and those who took up this tradition of philosophical analysis.


Armin Schulz, Efficient Cognition

Philosophy

Published online in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, December 9 2018 Armin W. Schulz, Efficient Cognition: The Evolution of Representational Decision Making, MIT Press, 2018, 280pp, $45, ISBN 978-0-262-03760-0 Zoe Drayson, University of California, Davis Much human behavior is stimulus-free. While plants and many non-human animals respond reflexively to their present environment, our own actions are mediated by our ability to represent how the world has been and how it could be, and how we might alter it to achieve our goals. Philosophers who have explored the evolutionary pressures giving rise to representational cognition, such as Godfrey-Smith (1996) and Sterelny (2003), have emphasized the role played by environmental complexity. In his book Efficient Cognition: The Evolution of Representational Decision Making, Armin Schulz suggests that an important part of this evolutionary story has been overlooked. He argues that representationally-mediated behavior is adaptive because it is more cognitively efficient than reflex-driven behavior, under certain conditions. When Schulz argues for the efficiency of representational decision-making, the representations in question are theoretical posits of cognitive science: physically-implemented (often computational) internal states that are semantically evaluable and causally efficacious; the vehicles of representational content (Drayson 2018). Schulz distinguishes between broadly belief-like cognitive representations (of the organism's environment) and broadly desire-like conative representations (of the organism's goals), but this is not a book about propositional attitudes or practical reasoning. Schulz is interested in the explanatory and predictive roles that representations play in scientific theories of behavior generation, in which there is no assumption that their contents are propositional or consciously accessible. But Schulz parts ways from cognitive science when he reserves the term 'representational' for high-level (i.e. non-perceptual, amodal) mental states that can participate in inferential processes: "distinct states that are downstream from their perceptual systems" (13). Schulz classifies as reflexdriven any behavior which is not the result of amodal representations, which puts his approach in tension with cognitive science's commitment to low-level sensory and motor representations: consider the representations in computational models of the early visual system (Marr 1982), for example, and in comparator models of motor control (Wolpert 1997). Schulz also leaves it unclear how his notion of representation applies to different cognitive architectures: in a modular architecture, for example, would the representations in an encapsulated process (such as theory of mind, or language comprehension) count as being "downstream" from perception? And in predictive-processing architectures such as those developed by Clark (2013) and Hohwy (2013), the high-level non-perceptual representations are arguably upstream from (and not entirely distinct from) perception. Schulz's approach thus seems to work best for so-called "classical sandwich" models of cognitive architecture (Hurley 1998), on which the explanatory work is done by amodal representations mediating between perception and action, and sensory-motor processes are merely inputs and outputs. Published online in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, December 9 2018 Two further features of Schulz's approach are worth emphasizing. Schulz is not concerned with the adaptivity of representational thought in general, nor with the adaptivity of a particular kind of behavior. He is specifically concerned with showing how the trait of decision-making (in both humans and non-humans) can be more cognitively efficient and adaptive when it employs internal representations. This relates to the second interesting feature of Schulz's approach, which is a terminological one. While it is common to reserve the term 'decision-making' for representational thinkers, Schulz extends it to reflex-driven organisms: he describes the stimulus-driven behavior of ants, slime molds, and magnetotactic bacteria as the result of a non-representational decision-making processes. He advises readers who are uncomfortable with this to rephrase such talk in terms of 'behavior determination processes'. I will come back to both of these features below. At the heart of Schulz's book is a question: why has representational decision-making evolved? Given that many organisms succeed by responding reflexively to environmental stimuli, what selection pressures would result in representationally-mediated behavior? Schulz's answer is that non-representational decision-making often involves a certain kind of redundancy which representational decision-making lacks. This redundancy occurs when more than one stimulus triggers the same behavioral response in a reflex-driven organism: the organism might have different ways of detecting a predator (by sight, by smell, by sound, for example) but have the same reflexive behavioral response (taking cover) to each kind of stimulus. Schulz points out that a table of such an organism's behavioral dispositions, listing each pairing of a sensory input with a behavioral output, could be lengthy; and a network diagram might require many connections to track the associations. Schulz argues that the table of behavioral dispositions would be significantly shorter, and the network diagram would require fewer connections, if the different sensory cues were bundled into one internal representation of their distal cause (the predator). Employing representations in this way, Schulz claims, would "streamline decision making by allowing the organism to react to grouped perceptual states, rather than to the perceptual states themselves", making them "more cognitively efficient than nonrepresentational decision makers" (97, author's italics). This streamlining of the connections between sensory input and behavioral output, however, is not sufficient to establish increased cognitive efficiency. The benefits gained by switching from reflexes to representations come with certain costs: a representation-using organism needs resources for storing, retrieving, and manipulating those representations. Inferential processes like these tend to use more time and cognitive resources than the non-inferential processes involved in reflexive processes of behavior determination. Schulz acknowledges this, but claims that non-representational decision-makers with large numbers of redundant behavioral dispositions can incur even greater costs. He argues that that a non-representational organism with "16 different behavioral dispositions to store and consider" (91, my italics) could reduce that number to eight by employing representations, concluding that "representational decision makers can get away with considering many fewer behavioral dispositions than reflex-based organisms have to" (104, my italics). Similarly, he proposes that an organism which can represent its goals can rely on just one explicitly-stored behavioral function, whereas the nonrepresentational organism "relies on a stored table of all the argument-value pairs that make Published online in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, December 9 2018 up this function" (121, my italics). Notice that Schulz is directly comparing the kinds of cognitive effort expended by representational and non-representational decision-makers: he thinks that both kinds of organism make decisions by storing and considering behavioral dispositions, and that cognitive efficiency increases where there are fewer dispositions to be stored and considered. This is where Schulz's preference for referring to reflexive behavior as the result of 'decisionmaking' might be misleading. It does not seem odd to refer to decision-makers as storing and considering information, as Schulz does in the above quotations, until we recall that Schulz's non-representational decision-makers are entirely reflex-driven. As such, they don't store tables of behavioral dispositions or consider which behavioral disposition to engage, at least not in the sense that representational organisms store and consider the information they represent. There will, of course, be metabolic costs incurred by reflex mechanisms, but it is not clear how we should compare these to the genuinely cognitive costs incurred by informationprocessing mechanisms that store and manipulate representations. Schulz's conclusion may be right: perhaps the costs associated with a sufficiently large number of reflex connections can be outweighed by the benefits of representations. But to evaluate this scenario, we need a more detailed account of cognitive efficiency, and an understanding of how to quantify different kinds of performance and effort. Should we, for example, calculate cognitive efficiency using a deviation model (using subtraction to calculate the difference between performance and effort) or a likelihood model (calculating the ratio between performance and effort)? Should we measure cognitive performance as an increase in the amount of information, or as in increase in the rate of accrual of information? These issues are addressed in the psychological literature on cognitive efficiency (see, for example, Hoffman 2012) but Schulz does not engage with them in his book. It would be interesting to see his argument re-run using these resources to clarify and contextualize the relative efficiency of representational and non-representational decisionmakers. If Schulz succeeds in showing that representational decision-making can be more cognitively efficient than non-representational decision-making, his next task is to show that cognitive efficiency contributes to the adaptivity of representational decision-making. His first argument for adaptivity claims that a representational decision-maker, in virtue of being more cognitively efficient than a non-representational decision-maker, will also be more efficient at altering its behavior in response to changes in the environment. Schulz proposes that while the representational decision-maker will need time and effort to change its behavioral rules, the non-representational decision-maker would need even more time and effort to alter its many redundant behavioral dispositions: "changing each behavioral disposition in a table of behavioral dispositions takes some time, concentration, attention, and energy" (122). The comparison, as before, is perhaps not as straightforward as Schulz suggests. The reflex-driven organism does not represent its table of behavioral dispositions, for example, and it is not clear why concentration and attention would be required for it to alter its stimulus-driven behavior. Schulz's claims would benefit from a more thorough account of cognitive efficiency and the measures it involves: without these, the relative adaptivity of representational and nonrepresentational decision-makers is difficult to judge. Published online in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, December 9 2018 Schulz's second argument for the adaptivity of cognitive efficiency attempts to show that cognitive efficiency correlates with neural efficiency, and that neural efficiency is adaptive. Schulz's key example of neural efficiency is synaptic pruning: the process by which neuronal structures decay during development in mammals, including humans. But a reduction in neural connections or neural activation does not necessitate an increase in neural efficiency (Poldrack 2015). Synaptic pruning only leads to increased neural efficiency if its metabolic savings outweigh any decrease in performance (according to some quantifiable measure) and/or an increase in time; factors which Schulz does not consider. (Schulz also does not establish that increased cognitive efficiency causes increased neural efficiency, but rather relies on correlational claims from the developmental literature.) Putting these issues aside, we can still ask whether neural efficiency is adaptive. As Schulz points out, it is metabolically costly to maintain a large brain. If there were increases in neural efficiency associated with synaptic pruning, for example, organisms could invest the conserved energy in more adaptive enterprises: enhancing other cognitive capacities or, Schulz suggests, just to grow a larger body. The adaptivity of increased neural efficiency, however, doesn't seem to follow automatically. Much will depend on what the savings are used for, and how the environment is: a larger body is only adaptive in an environment where there is sufficient food to fuel it, for example. If we allow Schulz his claims that neural efficiency is adaptive, that it is appropriately related to cognitive efficiency, and that representational decision-makers are plausibly more cognitively efficient than non-representational decision-makers, where does that leave us? Schulz's project starts from the idea that representational decision-making is an adaptation, and concludes that natural selection has favored representational decision-making over reflex-driven behavior determination in virtue of the fitness benefits from the former's cognitive efficiency. Schulz does not make a lengthy case for taking decision-making to be an adaptation: he proposes that "selective explanations of the evolution of this trait should be thought quite plausible" (61) in virtue of its widespread nature and complexity. Establishing whether any psychological capacity is an adaptation is a thorny issue, but it is easier where the capacity is associated with a specific kind of behavior which can help us to infer the capacity's function. The supposed adaptivity of behaviors like recognizing faces, attributing mental states to others, or detecting social cheating are sometimes used to suggest that we have evolved specific psychological capacities with these individual functions. General-purpose psychological capacities like decision-making, however, do not give rise to any particular kind of behavior: "[t]he function of a general cognitive mechanism is complex and indirect [...] [n]o particular kind of behaviour is its mark" (Sterelny 1992, 171). And notice that if representational decision-making is an adaptation, it must at minimum be heritable and confer differential fitness benefits. Schulz makes no mention of the heritability of representational decision-making, and denies that its differential fitness benefits correspond to specific behaviors: "there need not be a fundamental difference in the kinds of things cognitive representational decision makers can do (as compared to purely reflex-driven organisms) for them to be selected for: a major adaptive benefit of cognitive representational decision making lies in its allowing for more efficient behavior Published online in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, December 9 2018 generation, and not for its allowing for the generation of new kinds of behaviors" (1023) Thinking about the adaptivity of decision-making and the role of representational mechanisms brings to mind Mayr's (1961) distinction between ultimate and proximate explanations of traits. The ultimate cause of a trait is its evolutionary function (what it has been selected for); the proximate cause of a trait is the mechanism that produces it. If we want to explain the human ability to recognize familiar faces, for example, then we could specify the adaptive benefits of facial recognition (ultimate cause), or focus on the cognitive mechanisms that produce it (proximate cause). If we apply Mayr's distinction to decision-making, then questions about the selection pressures under which it evolved would be asking about its ultimate cause, and questions about the mechanisms that produce it (representational or otherwise) would be asking about its proximate cause. Schulz does not make use of Mayr's distinction, instead making claims which combine aspects of ultimate and proximate causes. He may have good reason to do so: several philosophers and scientists have questioned the usefulness of the ultimate/proximate distinction when dealing with certain phenomena including psychological traits (Laland et al. 2011). It would be interesting to know where Schulz stands on this matter. I have already suggested that Schulz's focus on high-level non-perceptual representations is at odds with certain approaches to cognitive science. Embodied cognitive science, in particular, seems to challenge Schulz's claims. Proponents of embodied cognitive science reject the idea that sensory and motor processes are mere inputs and outputs to a mediating cognitive mechanism which is responsible for intelligent behavior. Instead, they argue that closely coupled sensory and motor processing can generate flexible behavior without the need for high-level mental states, amodal concepts, or inferential reasoning. For example, a female cricket's ability to locate a chirping mate might seem to require calculation and navigation, until we realize that the differential placement of its sense organs generates auditory phase patterns that guide the cricket toward its mate without any internal representations (Webb 2001). Moreover, embodied cognitive science often appeals to evolutionary considerations that favor their anti-representational approach, so their view is directly in competition with Schulz's claims about the adaptivity of representationally-driven behavior. Schulz dedicates a chapter of his to book to addressing this issue, but focuses on extended cognition rather than embodied cognition. Both extended and embodied approaches to cognition reject 'neurocentric' approaches to the mind, but in different ways: embodied approaches emphasize how bodily sensors and effectors can replace representational processing in the brain, while extended approaches emphasize how the extra-bodily environment can supplement representational processing in the brain. There is thus nothing particularly anti-representational about extended cognitive science. In fact, many cases of putative extended cognition involve representational artefacts such as linguistic and numerical symbol systems, calendars, smartphones, and notebooks. These non-neural vehicles of representation are the reason that extended cognition is also known as vehicle externalism. When Schulz (unsurprisingly) concludes that his representational approach is consistent with extended cognition, he has done nothing to address the embodied theorist's claim that evolution may have selected for extra-neural and non-representational mechanisms of behavior determination. Published online in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, December 9 2018 There is much to recommend Efficient Cognition. Schulz's approach to philosophy is a refreshing one: he builds on the strengths of existing accounts instead of demolishing them, and he shows how his conclusions support rather than refute the claims of other researchers. Schulz distances himself from the controversial and narrow confines of the Evolutionary Psychology program, focusing instead on the evidential value of genuinely interdisciplinary work. In these respects, Efficient Cognition sets an admirable standard. The concept of cognitive efficiency has previously received little philosophical interest, and it is to be hoped that Schulz's book stimulates new work in this area. However, Schulz's strategy of focusing on the efficiency differences between representational and non-representational mechanisms may not be the optimal approach. Representations alone are neither efficient nor inefficient: much depends whether information is encoded symbolically or non-symbolically, for example, whether processing rules are explicitly represented, and how encapsulated cognitive processes are. Schulz has little to say on matters of cognitive architecture, other than to claim that his own arguments concerning cognitive efficiency are neutral with respect to modular and nonmodular architectures. This seems unlikely: the features of cognition that contribute to efficiency (e.g. speed, effort, redundancy) are precisely the kinds of features that differ across architectures. There are limits to how much we can expect to learn about cognitive efficiency from considering representations in isolation from the cognitive processes operating over them, and the cognitive architectures in which they are embedded. Acknowledgements: This review benefited from discussions with Bianca Andrade, Jordan Bell, Ellyn Daly, Lara Krisst, Shawn Miller, Khang That Vin Ton, and Danielle Williams. References Clark, Andy (2013). Whatever next? Predictive brains, situated agents, and the future of cognitive science. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 36 (3):181-204. Drayson, Zoe (2018). The realizers and vehicles of mental representation. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 68:80-87. Godfrey-Smith, Peter (1996). Complexity and the Function of Mind in Nature. Cambridge University Press. Hoffman, B (2012). Cognitive efficiency: A conceptual and methodological comparison. Learning and Instruction 22:133-144 Hohwy, Jakob (2013). The Predictive Mind. Oxford University Press UK. Hurley, Susan (1998). Consciousness in Action. Harvard University Press. Laland, Kevin N., Kim Sterelny, John Odling-Smee, William Hoppitt, Tobias Uller (2011). Cause and Effect in Biology Revisited: Is Mayr's Proximate-Ultimate Dichotomy Still Useful? Science 334 (6062): 1512-1516. Marr, David (1982). Vision. W. H. Freeman. Mayr, Ernst (1961). Cause and effect in biology. Science 134: 1501. Poldrack, Russell A. (2015) Is 'efficiency' a useful concept in cognitive neuroscience? Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience 11: 12-17. Published online in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, December 9 2018 Sterelny, Kim (1992). Evolutionary explanations of human behaviour. Australasian Journal of Philosophy 70 (2):156 – 173. Sterelny, Kim (2003). Thought in a Hostile World: The Evolution of Human Cognition. WileyBlackwell. Webb, Barbara (2001). Can robots make good models of biological behaviour? Behavioral and Brain Sciences 24 (6):1033-1050. Wolpert, Daniel M. (1997). Computational approaches to motor control. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 1 (6):209-216.


Philosophy

A response to Lee Basham's 'The Need for Accountable Witnesses: A Reply to Dentith'.

http://social-epistemology.com ISSN: 2471-9560 Treating Conspiracy Theories Seriously: A Reply to Basham on Dentith Matthew R. X. Dentith, University of Auckland –––––––––––––––––– Denith, Matthew R.X. "Treating Conspiracy Theories Seriously: A Reply to Basham on Dentith." Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 5, no. 9 (2016): 1-5 http://wp.me/p1Bfg0-3ak 1 Vol. 5, no. 9 (2016): 1-5. http://wp.me/p1Bfg0-3ak Conspiracy theories are-if you believe certain sources-rife, plentiful, and abounding. Despite this being a concern to some social scientists (see, for example, the recent declaration in Le Monde by Gérald Bronner, et al.1), the academic literature on these things we call "conspiracy theories" is still small. On the one hand, what better way to spend a week or three than in the examination of the various articles and books on the subject? But, on the other hand, the smallness of the literature reveals some peculiarities, particularly among the works of many social scientists. For example, despite "conspiracy theory" appearing to be perfectly general term (some explanatory theory concerning the existence of a conspiracy), and the apparently "curious" fact (curious in that such instances are often played down when talking about conspiracy theories) that conspiracies occur, there is already a deep-seated vein in the existing literature which says conspiracy theories are bunk, and we have a general case to be suspicious of them. Generalism about Conspiracy Theories Generalism about conspiracy theories (a tip of the hat to Joel Buenting and Jason Taylor for the terminology2), as I argue in "When inferring to a conspiracy theory might be the best explanation," is a problematic thesis.3 The Generalist-she who thinks conspiracy theories typically ought not be believed-ignores the very many particular reasons as to why individual conspiracy theories end up being the best explanation of some event. In philosophy, however, Particularism about belief in conspiracy theories is an increasingly common position. The Particularist rejects the idea that there is some case against belief in conspiracy theories generally. Instead, we can only pass judgement on individual conspiracy theories, assessing them purely on their respective evidential merits. "When inferring to a conspiracy theory might be the best explanation" is, then, simply one more argumentative strand in support of the conspira ... Sorry, agenda associated with particularist philosophers like Brian L. Keeley,4 Charles R. Pigden,5 and David Coady,6 all of whom have made substantial contributions to the nascent Philosophy of Conspiracy Theories). So, it was not surprising that Lee Basham-another notable particularist-would have things to say about my recent paper. In "The Need for Accountable Witnesses," Basham contrasts my attritive approach to dismantling the arguments of generalists with an alternative proposal, one which focuses on the critique of "primary information sources in our Western information hierarchies."7 Now, there is a tendency among generalists to claim if a conspiracy were going on we would know about it (presumably because conspiracies always leak), or that there are sufficient 1 Bronner et al. 2016. 2 Buenting and Taylor 2010. 3 Denith 2016. 4 Keeley 2007. 5 Pigden 2016. 6 Coady 2012. 7 Lee Basham 2016. M. Dentith 2 checks-and-balances in place to ensure that-by-and-large-those who hold power in Western societies will not get away with acting conspiratorially. Yet Basham challenges us to acknowledge the elephant in the room, a point which really should be basic to anyone's understanding of politics and business: conspiracies are everywhere, and not just that; they are normal. He points out that: If we start with personal experience, conspiracy explanations are natural, ordinary and often justified. We are a communication driven, highly social coordination-able species, imbued with the gift of tactical deception. We are also adept at intentionally coordinating this ability with others.8 Basham's argument is simple, yet like many a good philosophical argument, has a conclusion that many take as contrary: If conspiratorial activity is normal in everyday life, why would we think it is abnormal (and thus accusations thereof being deserving of ridicule) in corporate or political life? After all, we still live in largely hierarchical societies, where much information comes down from the top. If we acknowledge that those at the top act as conspiratorially as everyone else down the line, then we have the question of how we evaluate the claims which emanate from such information hierarchies. As Basham asks: Don't our political and economic elites retain these abilities? Why should we expect they neglect our well-developed human powers for cooperative deception when shaping the course of a polis? What is the reasoning, psychological, sociological, epistemic or otherwise, that indicates they would?9 That is to say, if we accept (and surely we do) that conspiratorial activity is not exactly rare, why are we so loathe to talk about it when it comes to government and corporate activity? The answer is, I think, a combination of the common wisdom (everything thinks this because everyone has been told to think this by people who already thought it in the past!), as well as a certain kind of Establishmentarian thinking (it's best people think of conspiracy theories derisively, because we don't really want people questioning the very underpinnings of our Western democracies). Yet Generalist has some strange fellow travellers. Take, for example, a piece by Andrew Sullivan in The New York Magazine, which effectively argues that democracy is ruining things for the political class who know what is best for us.10 Let's leave to one side the worry that history doesn't exactly show that this class really does act in the best interest of the polis, or the idea that even if the political class is an epistemic elite who knows best, surely we should still be asking "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes." No, let's just focus on the idea that this fosters belief in conspiracy theories, because it signals to the rest of us that we cannot be trusted to know our best interests, and sometimes people have to work in secret to save us 8 Basham 2016. 9 Basham 2016. 10 Sullivan 2016. 3 Vol. 5, no. 9 (2016): 1-5. http://wp.me/p1Bfg0-3ak from ourselves. Sullivan is not alone in thinking this way, either. Another example of such Establishmentarian thinking-leading to predictable and undemocratic consequences-is Cass Sunstein and Adrian Vermeule's "Conspiracy Theories: Causes and Cures."11 They argue the best way to cure society of conspiracy theories is to infiltrate conspiracy fora and conspire against the conspiracy theorists. Both Umberto Eco12 and Dom DeLillo13 wrote similar treatises, but they, at least, were being satirical. Democracy and Conspiracy What is interesting about the Sullivans, Sunsteins and Vermeules of this world is they recognise that conspiratorial activity is perfectly understandable in (and perhaps even necessary to the functioning of) a democracy. Sometimes governments need to keep secret what they are up to now to realise some future benefit. On occasion businesses need to deny some claim in order to investigate it more fully. And, yes, sometimes it is because governments and corporations get up to no good. Yet said theorists would like us to ignore that last possibility (or, at the very least, downplay it). It certainly does not help that these Sullivans, Sunsteins and Vermeules are political insiders, who charitably are defending a system which largely works (Churchill's quote about democracy being the worst form of Government, except for all the others comes to mind), or, less charitably, are telling us to blithely ignore clear and present threats in the very structure of our democracies.14 Now, the Sullivans, Sunsteins and Vermeules are right to be interested in conspiracy theories, because such theories present an interesting problem. On one hand, there are so many conspiracy theories that it is hard to know when-if ever-we should take any of them seriously, let alone expend resources in investigating them. On the other hand, if some claim about the existence of conspiracy, say, involving the members of an influential, public institution turned out to be true, then we would be obliged to take action. The existence of conspiracies don't just threaten our trust in the influential institutions that make up our societies, they can also pose a direct threat to members of the public. What we need, then, in Basham's words is: [A]n open-society epistemology and ethics of discourse so this network can be fairly rational and actually fearlessly illuminating, with the power of applying real accountability; the essence of particularism.15 Now, it is either by luck or conspiracy that I am in the process of working on this very issue. Over the next year I will be working on a project at the University of Bucharest entitled "The Ethics of Investigation: When are we obliged to take conspiracy theories seriously?" The motivation for this project is this: there have been cases historically where someone put forward a conspiracy theory which initially looked outrageous (and thus implausible) yet 11 Sunstein and Vermeule 2009. 12 Eco 2010. 13 DeLillo 1989. 14 Churchill 1947. 15 Basham 2016. M. Dentith 4 ought to have be treated seriously. For example, imagine you've heard stories that the police and upper echelons of government are protecting a group of high profile sexual offenders from investigation and prosecution. Such a conspiracy would seem unthinkable, because surely this kind of thing could not happen (because it is unthinkable), and if it had happened, it would have been revealed to the public by the authorities (because who could keep such unthinkable acts secret). Except it happened. As the Operation Yewtree investigation in the UK has shown, prominent Britons (and at least one Australian) in the Seventies and Eighties not only successfully predated on young men and women, but the attempts to expose this scandal were at best ignored, and at worse, covered up by influential members of British society. There are numerous other examples, like the Moscow Show Trials of the 1930s, the Gulf of Tonkin Incident in 1964, and, of course, Watergate (to name but a few). In each case someone (or some set of bodies) claimed "Conspiracy!" were charged with being conspiracy theorists, and only later vindicated for being right in the first place. The Challenge of Judgment Basham's challenge, then, can be answered in part with an analysis of how we appraise the utterances and claims that emanate from the influential institutions which make up the informational hierarchies in our societies. We need to ask: • When is it rational for citizens to trust officials? • What sort of political culture, and what kinds of social arrangements, would ensure that it is, on the whole, rational for citizens to trust politicians and others acting in a public capacity? • When is it rational for journalists and others to take conspiracy theories seriously, and even to investigate them? • Could it be rational to take a conspiracy theory seriously even when it is not rational to believe it? Each and every one of us has a limited set of hours in a day, some of which are taken up with the necessities of day-to-day living, and others of which we apportion according to our needs and desires. Questioning each and every piece of information we hear, whether it be from the government, the local business leader, or just the odd neighbours who live across the street, is both time consuming and arduous. What we need, then, is epistemic and ethical guidance on these issues. We need to know what we should be looking out for, and also who to trust. Not just with respect to what is said, or who said it, but also with respect to who can be reasonably relied upon to assess the claims that fall outside our epistemic remits. The risks are real. In an environment in which people take a dim view of conspiracy theories, conspiracies may multiply and prosper. Conversely, in an environment in which conspiracy theories are taken seriously and investigated by journalists, police and the like, conspiracies 5 Vol. 5, no. 9 (2016): 1-5. http://wp.me/p1Bfg0-3ak should be much more likely to fail. Thus, influential institutions, and the people who run them, are more likely to be trustworthy if they are not automatically trusted, but, rather, are subject to the vigilance of, say, an investigative press which does not think it a mark of intellectual sophistication to dismiss conspiracy theories out of hand, and a public who know not just when they are obliged to ask questions, but when they can expect others to do likewise. My response to Basham, then, is to accept his challenge to get my hands dirty (again), by exploring just what it means to explore the problems inherent with investigating conspiracy theories in the kinds of informational hierarchies we have in the West. He kindly calls my previous work "cutting edge"; I hope to keep that edge keen over the coming year. Contact details: email@example.com References Basham, Lee. "The Need for Accountable Witnesses: A Reply to Dentith." Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 5, no. 7 (2016): 6–13. Bronner, Gérald et al. "Luttons Efficacement Contre Les Théories du Complot." Le Monde, June 6th, 2016. Buenting, Joel, and Jason Taylor. "Conspiracy Theories and Fortuitous Data." Philosophy of the Social Sciences 40, no 4 (2010): 567–78. Churchill, Winston. Speech to the House of Commons. November 11th, 1947. Coady, David. What to Believe Now: Applying Epistemology to Contemporary Issues. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012. Dentith, Matthew "When Inferring to a Conspiracy Might be the Best Explanation." Social Epistemology (2016): 1-20. doi: 10.1080/02691728.2016.1172362. Keeley, Brian. L. "God as the Ultimate Conspiracy Theorist." Episteme 4, no. 2 (2007): 135– 49. Pigden, Charles R. "Are Conspiracy Theorists Epistemically Vicious?" in Companion to Applied Philosophy, forthcoming. Sullivan, Andrew. "Democracies End When They are too Democratic: And Right Now, America is a Breeding Ground for Tyranny." In New York Magazine, edited by Adam Moss, 2016. http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/04/america-tyrannydonald-trump.html. Sunstein, Cass R., and Adrian Vermeule. "Conspiracy Theories: Causes and Cures." Journal of Political Philosophy 17, no. 2 (2009): 202–27.