This paper is concerned with the problem of whether non-language-using creatures literally
have beliefs, rather than with the question as to whether it is predictively useful to
ascribe beliefs to them. The answer to this latter question is plainly in the affirmative.
The issue of belief-attribution to dumb animals is a narrow form of a more general
problem, the problem of whether dumb animals can literally be credited with thoughts.
Still, it is reasonable to focus on the case of belief since it lies, as it were, at the
centre of the cognitive domain. The attribution of any intentional state, such as desire,
regret, hope and so on, to a creature presupposes the attribution of belief to that
creature.
I
Like many other philosophers, I will kick off with a brief discussion of
Descartes’ views which many find wildly implausible. Descartes believed that dumb
animals could not be credited with beliefs because he thought they were mindless machines:
dumb animals behave as if they feel fear, as if they believe various things, etc., but the
truth is that all of the cases where we are inclined to ascribe psychological states to
them, can be redescribed solely in terms of internal physiological processes set in motion
by mechanical causation. Why not follow the Churchlands in the case of belief-attribution
to human beings? Descartes’ reason would be that we humans are the possessors of
immaterial minds whose essential property is thought; and, no mind, no thought.
However, the rejection of substantial dualism as a philosophy of mind would still leave
Descartes with a claim which a materialist could accept. In a letter to Henry More,
Descartes urges that
. . . the word is the sole sign and the only certain mark of the presence of
thought hidden and wrapped up in the body; now all men, the most stupid and the most
foolish, those even who are deprived of the organs of speech make use of signs, whereas
the brutes never do anything of the kind; which may be taken for the true distinction
between man and brute.(1)
But Descartes’ reasoning here is unconvincing. Verbs of propositional attitude
such as the verb ‘to believe’ are logically intensional in the sense that
they generate referentially-opaque occurrences of singular terms and extensionally-opaque
occurrences of predicates, in sentences which can occupy the gap in (e.g.) the sentence
frame: NP + VPA + that + ( ). I (wholly unoriginally) believe that mental states such as
belief are described by sentences which are logically intensional. (2)
Consider the following case. I enter my dark house at night. My dog Fido rushes towards me
growling. I turn on the light and Fido’s growls turn to whimpers of (joy?). The most natural
way of describing this state of affairs is to say that Fido behaved aggressively towards
me initially because he did not realise that I was identical with his master and friend. I
say that this is the most natural way of describing what is going on here, and it is open
for a defender of Descartes to respond by pointing out that, although our descriptions
of Fido’s behaviour are intensional, we are not bound to employ them. But this
response leans on the ontology of substantial dualism without illuminating the connections
between mind and language.
II
The strongest argument in support of the claim that dumb animals should literally be
credited with beliefs then is that we rationalise their behaviour by the ascription to
them of beliefs and desires bounded by various rationality constraints. Intentionalist
explanations fare better as predictors of animal behaviour than alternative explanatory
models such as operant conditioning. This is an empirical claim, which can of course be
denied. Some psychologists, for instance, Skinner, have even denied that the explanation
of human action is ineliminably intentionalist. (3) Few
analytic philosophers, however, take this very seriously. (4)
However, that we do attribute beliefs and desires to non-language-using creatures does not
come close to clinching the case for animal belief. Dennett has argued that intentional
explanation is a better predictor of the moves of a chess-playing computer than
explanation from either the design or the physical stance. (5)
We may, then, ascribe beliefs and desires to dumb animals with equanimity because, by
symmetry with the chess-playing computer, our ascriptions are purely instrumental. A
possible response here is to ask why, in that case, we should be realist in our
ascriptions of beliefs and desires to ourselves? This returns us to the connection between
language and belief. Following Donald Davidson, I will argue that languageless creatures
cannot have beliefs (which is not to deny that they are the possessors of
information-processing sub-doxastic states).
III
Consider the following principle: A creature can properly have the belief that P
attributed to it, only if it possesses those concepts mastery of which are required in
order to have the belief that P. This principle could be tightened in various ways,
but it does not obviously beg a central question, since it does not define possession of a
concept in terms of grasping the actual and possible extension of a certain predicate in a
language. The principle is plausible in its application to human beings: I cannot believe
that a certain object is a bone unless I have the concept of ‘bone’ under which
the object in question is subsumed. However, given that I possess the concept, I might
well misapply it. Suppose someone leaves a bone-shaped bit of plastic on my lawn. On
noticing it, I come to believe that the object is a bone. Fido (remember him?) rushes up
to the bit of plastic, takes a bite, drops it and retires. I inspect it, notice that it is
plastic and my belief that the object is a bone is cancelled.
Did Fido and I share the original belief that there was a bone on the lawn? No, because
my false belief made sense against a background of true beliefs. (6)
This network of associated beliefs locates the point in semantic space at which the belief
that the object is a bone lies. Fido cannot believe anything about the concept
‘Plastic’, nor about the concept ‘Calcium’, and so on. The suggestion
then is that we need a language which fixes a network between concepts (nodes in the
network), and provides for connections (of a deductive and inductive kind) between the
nodes. How could a dumb animal have the belief that there is a bone on the lawn given that
it lacks a language? And when Fido bit the phoney bone, did he come to believe that it was
not made of calcium?
This line of thought has been criticised on two fronts. The first is that humans employ
concepts intelligently without being able to relate them to related concepts in the
network. (7) However, we need not suppose that a
language-speaker knows all the properties of bones; and it would be idle to speculate on
just how many properties of a bone the speaker of a language would need to know in order
to have the concept of a bone. But clearly, for communication about bones between two or
more speakers of a language to be possible, they must have some common knowledge about
bones. The second is to argue that dumb animals possess only simple and not complex
concepts. (8) But, rather than go into this objection, here,
I will turn to Davidson’s argument against the possibility of animal belief. In my
opinion, Davidson’s work provides the most sophisticated account to date of the
relation between belief and language.
IV
First, I shall outline briefly Davidson’s argument. (9)
Second, I shall mention two objections to it, and, finally, in V, I will try to defend it.
I am not certain whether my defence provides independent argumentation for the two
premises in Davidson’s argument, or merely complements or rearranges his own
thinking; but whichever is the case, I believe that there is here a powerful line of
thought against the possibility of dumb animals being able to have beliefs.
Davidson’s argument9 that dumb animals lack thought rests upon two premises. The
first is that, if a creature x has the concept of belief, then it is a language user:
(a) CB (x) --> LU (x)
The second is that, if x has beliefs, then it possesses the concept of belief:
(b) B (x) --> CB (x).
Clearly, a valid consequence of (a) and (b) is:
(c) 7LU (x) --> 7B (x).
Davidson defends (a) by reference to his account of radical interpretation. (10)
In order to translate the language of a newly-discovered people, we consider the set of
ordered pairs whose first member is an uninterpreted utterance of the language, and whose
second member is the set of circumstances in which the utterance is usually made. This
provides us with an evidential base for a theory of meaning for the language under
investigation. But Davidson argues that the pairing of utterances with publically
observable goings-on requires that we ascribe beliefs to members of the speech community.
There is an apparent difficulty here, because it would seem that, in order to get at the
meanings of the utterances of members of the community, we must attribute to them certain
beliefs, and, in order to know what they believe, we must have succeeded in interpreting
their utterances.
Davidson argues incisively that the only way out of this circle is to hold belief
constant, and solve for meaning. Now this is the crudest summary of Davidson’s views,
but it does bring out the crucial point that, on this account, a translator of
language L must have beliefs about the beliefs of the speakers of L. And to have beliefs
about beliefs is to possess the concept of belief.
The trouble is that this argument appears to support not (a), but (a*):
(a*) LU (x) --> CB (x)
And, although this converse entailment is plausible, (c) does not follow from (a*) and
(b). (11)
Davidson’s support for (b) is so short that it can be quoted in full:
Can a creature have a belief if it does not have the concept of belief? It seems
to me that it cannot, and for this reason. Someone cannot have a belief unless he
understands the possibility of being mistaken, and this requires grasping the contrast
between truth and error — true belief and false belief. But this contrast, I have
argued, can emerge only in the context of interpretation, which alone forces us to the
idea of an objective public truth. (12)
On the face of it, this line of thought seems to me to be resistible. Let us grant that
dumb animals do not grasp the contrast between truth and error. Why does a dumb animal
need to recognise that it has beliefs which may turn out to be false (i.e. to possess the
concept of belief), in order to have beliefs? Otherwise expressed, why must a creature
which may be credited with beliefs have the capacity to monitor reflexively its system of
beliefs, when changes in the external world causally cancel, modify or create new
"beliefs" without reflection?
V
In the last section of the paper I will sketch arguments in support of (a) and (b)
above.
(a) Suppose CB (x). Then:
(i) x knows that beliefs aim at truth.
(ii) If x knows that beliefs aim at truth then x knows the difference between true
belief and false belief, and hence the difference between truth and falsity.
(iii) x must be able to tell the difference between changes in belief and changes in
the external world, for, without this capacity, x could not form the conception of an
objective world; and, without this conception, there could be no difference between truth
and falsity for x.
(iv) A language L enables x to distinguish changes in belief from changes in the world.
The that-clauses in L, which fix the contents of x’s beliefs, have (relatively)
stable meanings, which enable x to determine the congruence or lack of congruence between
x’s own beliefs and the beliefs of others, on the one hand, and the world itself, on
the other.
In summary, a creature which possesses the concept of belief can distinguish between
true and false belief. This requirement in turn rests upon a capacity to distinguish
changes in the world from changes in mind. Language-learning, which is community-based,
provides for the fixation of belief. (Here, what is crucial, is learning and training,
features which are conspicuously lacking in the signalling systems of dumb animals).
Turning to (b), let us suppose B (x): then x must possess those concepts necessary to
sustain x’s beliefs (see above). Concepts are one and all counterfactual. I
wish to deny that there are any simple ostensive concepts. (13)
The argument is as follows. Suppose that there were a possible world in which everything
which was red was round and vice versa. Then, although the actual extensions of
‘red’ and ‘round’ would be co-extensive, they would still be different
concepts. This is what Peirce meant when he said that our concepts (intellectual
conceptions) relate to what might be, rather than to what merely is. (14)
So if a creature is to have the belief that there is a bone in front of it, it must
possess the concept of a bone. And if it possesses this concept, it knows not only the actual
extension of ‘bone’, but also which possible objects fall within its
extension or are excluded from it. If a creature failed to be able to distinguish the
actual from the possible extension of a concept, or to be able to think about what
properties an object would need in order to fall under a concept, then, whatever might be
said about the creature, it would not be a creature which possessed our concepts.
So it could not share our beliefs.
What is it to reason counterfactually? Many of our beliefs are explicitly
counterfactual in nature; and our arts and sciences would be unimaginable without
counterfactual thought. But it will not do to say that dumb animals possess merely
ostensive beliefs, whereas we language-users are capable of counterfactual beliefs, since
we have just noticed that the attribution of any concept to a creature x implicates that
creature in a capacity for counterfactual thought.
An answer due to Ramsey is this: to determine whether a counterfactual belief of the
form if A were to be the case then B would be the case is true, add A to
your existing belief set C. If C thereby becomes inconsistent, minimally
revise C in order to accommodate A consistently. Finally, verify that B is
a (semantic) consequence of C. (15)
Ramsey’s answer, which seems to me to be along the right lines, requires that a
creature which possesses beliefs possesses the concept of truth (in terms of which
consistency and inconsistency are defined); and if a creature possesses the concept of
truth, then it possesses the concept of belief. I side with Donald Davidson in concluding
that dumb animals lack beliefs.
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