Searle/Pinker: BBS Call for Commentators

[Stevan Harnad]

Below are the abstracts of two forthcoming target articles [Searle on
consciousness, Pinker & Bloom on language] that are about to be
circulated for commentary by Behavioral and Brain Sciences (BBS), an
international, interdisciplinary journal that provides Open Peer
Commentary on important and controversial current research in the
biobehavioral and cognitive sciences. Commentators must be current BBS
Associates or nominated by a current BBS Associate. To be considered as
a commentator on one of these articles (please specify which), or to
suggest other appropriate commentators, or for information about how to
become a BBS Associate, please send email to:

harnad at clarity.princeton.edu  or harnad at pucc.bitnet        or write to:
BBS, 20 Nassau Street, #240, Princeton NJ 08542  [tel: 609-921-7771]
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(1) Searle:         Consciousness & Explanation
(2) Pinker & Bloom: Language Evolution
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(1) CONSCIOUSNESS, EXPLANATORY INVERSION AND COGNITIVE SCIENCE

               by John R. Searle
	       Department of Philosophy
	       University of Californai
	       Berkeley CA

Cognitive science typically postulates unconscious mental phenomena,
computational or otherwise, to explain cognitive capacities. The mental
phenomena in question are supposed to be inaccessible in principle to
consciousness. I try to show that this is a mistake, because all
unconscious intentionality must be accessible in principle to
consciousness; we have no notion of intrinsic intentionality except in
terms of its accessibility to consciousness. I call this claim the
Connection Principle. The argument for it proceeds in six steps. The
essential point is that intrinsic intentionality has aspectual shape:
our mental representations represent the world under specific aspects,
and these aspectual features are essential to a mental state's being
the state that it is.

Once we recognize the Connection Principle, we see that it is necessary
to perform an inversion on the explanatory models of cognitive science,
an inversion analogous to the one evolutionary biology imposes on
pre-Darwinian animistic modes of explanation. In place of the original
intentionalistic explanations we have a combination of hardware and
functional explanations. This radically alters the structure of
explanation, because instead of a mental representation (such as a
rule) causing the pattern of behavior it represents (such as rule
governed behavior), there is a neurophysiological cause of a pattern
(such as a pattern of behavior), and the pattern plays a functional
role in the life of the organism. What we mistakenly thought were
descriptions of underlying mental principles in, for example, theories
of vision and language, were in fact descriptions of functional aspects
of systems, which will have to be explained by underlying
neurophysiological mechanisms. In such cases what looks like
mentalistic psychology is sometimes better construed as speculative
neurophysiology. The moral is that the big mistake in cognitive science
is not the overestimation of the computer metaphor (though that is
indeed a mistake) but the neglect of consciousness.
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(2)         NATURAL LANGUAGE AND NATURAL SELECTION

                    Steven Pinker
		       and
                    Paul Bloom
           Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences
           Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Many have argued that the evolution of the human language faculty
cannot be explained by Darwinian natural selection. Chomsky and Gould
have suggested that language may have evolved as the byproduct of
selection for other abilities or as a consequence of unknown laws of
growth and form. Others have argued that a biological specialization
for grammar is incompatible with Darwinian theory: Grammar shows no
genetic variation, could not exist in any intermediate forms, confers
no selective advantage, and would require more time and genomic space
to evolve than is available. We show that these arguments depend on
inaccurate assumptions about biology or language or both. Evolutionary
theory offers a clear criterion for attributing a trait to natural
selection: complex design for a function with no alternative processes
to explain the complexity. Human language meets this criterion: Grammar
is a complex mechanism tailored to the transmission of propositional
structures through a serial interface. Autonomous and arbitrary
grammatical phenomena have been offered as counterexamples to the claim
that language is an adaptation, but this reasoning is unsound:
Communication protocols depend on arbitrary conventions that are
adaptive as long as they are shared. Consequently, the child's
acquisition of language should differ systematically from language
evolution in the species; attempts to make analogies between them are
misleading. Reviewing other arguments and data, we conclude that there
is every reason to believe that a specialization for grammar evolved by
a conventional neo-Darwinian process.

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