1_9788419632142

AnimAls, HumAns, And KAnt

PHILOSOPHY SERIES “CARTOGRAFÍAS FILOSÓFICAS”

Editorial Director:

Pedro Jesús Teruel

Universitat de València

Scientific Board:

Ana Andaluz

Universitat Pontificia de Salamanca

Jesús Conill

Universitat de València

Adela Cortina

Universitat de València

Óscar Cubo

Universitat de València

Alba Jiménez

Universidad Complutense de Madrid

Manuel Jiménez Redondo

Universitat de València

Claudio La Rocca

Università Degli Studi di Genova

Rogelio Rovira

Universidad Complutense de Madrid

Margit Ruffing

Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz

Nuria Sánchez Madrid

Universidad Complutense de Madrid

Sergio Sevilla

Universitat de València

Salvi Turró

Universitat de Barcelona

Violetta Waibel

Universität Wien

Coordinator and Translator:

Jesús Valdés

Translator and Proofreader

AnimAls, HumAns, And KAnt

Copyright ® 2023

All rights reserved. This book may not, in whole or in part, be reproduced or transmitted by any electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying, magnetic recording, or any information storage device or retrieval system without the prior written consent of the authors and publishers.

In case of errata or updates, Tirant Humanidades will publish the relevant correction on the website www.tirant.com.

© TIRANT HUMANIDADES

PUBLISHER: TIRANT HUMANIDADES

C/ Artes Gráficas, 14 - 46010 - Valencia

TELFS.: 96/361 00 48 - 50

FAX: 96/369 41 51

Email: tlb@tirant.com

www.tirant.com

Online bookshop: www.tirant.es

ISBN: 978-84-19632-14-2

LAYOUT DESIGN: Innovatext

Cover image: Hill and Ploughed Field near Dresden by Caspar David Friedrich, oil on canvas, painted around 1824-25 and kept in the Kunsthalle in Hamburg. Image published under licence from Wikimedia Commons

If you have any complaints or suggestions, please email us: atencioncliente@tirant.com. If your suggestion is not dealt with to your satisfaction, please read our Complaints Procedure at www.tirant.net/index.php/index.php/empresa/politicas-de-empresa

Corporate social responsibility: http://www.tirant.net/Docs/RSCTirant.pdf

P resent Ation

“Cartografías filosóficas” was born in 2022 as a philosophical collection of Tirant lo Blanch. It includes works related to the history of philosophy and its problems; it pays special attention to the conceptual networks of modernity and of contemporary times, as well as to classical German philosophy. It is the editorial body of the research group “KantValència”, based in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Valencia.

Original manuscripts may be sent to:

Pedro Jesús Teruel

Universitat de València

Departament de filosofia

Avinguda Blasco Ibáñez, 30. 46010 València pedro.teruel@uv.es

Grupo de investigación “Kant-València”

Webpage: https://kantvalencia.blogs.uv.es

Contact: kantvalencia@uv.es

This is a dual-track inquiry. On one hand I offer a tripartite conceptual framework that can apply to three central areas in the philosophy of mind: perception, action and emotion. On the other hand, in separate chapters, I propose some re-evaluations of Immanuel Kant’s eighteenthcentury philosophy in the light of this. Anyone allergic to entangling with his difficult but rewarding thought could read only Chapters 1, 4, 6, and 8, which are Kant-free. But I cannot recommend the reverse selection, for my musings about him depend on those chapters.

I come not to praise Kant (his genius does not need my praise), nor to bury him under another layer of historical scholarship, but to ask what adaptations of his views advance our understanding of human nature. Kant-scholars should be forewarned: my attitude to Kant is more reconstructive than reproductive, more Strawsonian than Allisonian — though I guess without the insight or industry of either.

One main stimulus for this inquiry is Tyler Burge’s magisterial survey of the philosophy and psychology of perception, in which he remarks:

The threefold distinction between sensory discrimination (or functioning information registration) … perception and propositional thought … is foreign to most philosophical systems. This criticism applies both to twentieth-century philosophy and to earlier philosophy. Kant is a major exception. He distinguished sensation, intuitions, and concepts. (2010), 431

In Part One I apply these distinctions to perception, including perception of spatial and temporal relations. In Part Two I suggest analogical applications of this threefold distinction to action and emotion. However, Part Two is sketchier than my treatment of perception, a topic which has occupied me for many years — see my (1995), (1998a), (1998b), (2000), (2018a) and (2018b). Perhaps others can take the suggestions in Part Two forward, uncovering further complications.

I have tried to write in a clear and vivid style, employing a variety of real-life examples in the effort to keep philosophical theorizing anchored to the realities of life. Much academic philosophy has become specialized, and inaccessible to those who not familiar with the constantly-updating literature: witness the virtuoso displays of conceptual ingenuity and scholarly industry in the professional journals However, I believe there is still a place for philosophy as a humane discipline discussing issues of central importance to human life in a way that is intelligible to anyone with enough interest to follow serious arguments. And there is a use for overviews, since professional competition encourages people to stay inside specialized boxes. I am writing at a middling sort of level, at risk of falling between the two stools of academic rigour or wider intelligibility. As successful examples I think of the work of Thomas Nagel and Roger Scruton — but to invite comparison with those masters is to invite ridicule.

This is not weapons-grade Kant scholarship, armoured with knowledge of every word he ever wrote (and many more that he didn’t — all those student lecture-notes), encyclopaedic familiarity with the secondary literature, and an ingenious explanation of every quirk of the master’s fluid terminology. What I offer is a ninefold story of three levels within each of perception, action and emotion, with some selective dives into Kant’s amazingly comprehensive oeuvre.

My discussion strays a little over the borderlines between philosophy and psychology, cognitive science, and ethology, and I make no apology for that. Many philosophers seem loathe to get their hands dirty with empirical matters, but others have dipped into the relevant sciences — Kitcher (1990), Brook (1994), Hurley (1998), Bird (2006, pp.130–5), and most especially Burge (2010). I cannot emulate the interdisciplinary range of the latter, but I suggest how Kant’s emphasis on rationality in human nature can be illuminated by approaching it ‘from below’, from various animal natures.

In his Critique of Pure Reason of 1781 (to my mind, the greatest philosophical work of all time, though not perfect) Immanuel Kant drew a firm distinction between our mental faculties of sensibility and understanding, dealing respectively with perceptions and concepts. By this fundamental insight he made crucial philosophical progress over his empiricist and rationalist predecessors.1

I am going to argue that we need to make a further distinction, to recognize unconceptualized perceptions, as they occur in many animal species, in human infants, and in our adult awareness of nameless sounds, smells, tastes, pressures, and movements behind our backs. Throughout this work I will use the word ‘perception’ in its modern sense of sensory awareness of objects and states of affairs in the physical world distinct from the perceiver.2

I follow the lead of Tyler Burge in his comprehensive survey Origins of Objectivity of the philosophy and psychology of perception in animals and humans. His over-arching theme is to distinguish nonconceptual perceptual representation from mere sensory registration on one hand, and from conceptualized perceptual judgment on the other. He compliments Kant for making a threefold distinction between sensations, intuitions and concepts, which he suggests can be lined up with sensory registration, perception, and propositional thought. I will address these themes in Kant in Chapters 2–5; in this chapter I offer

1 Hume got half-way there when he distinguished ‘impressions’ and ‘ideas’ on the first page of his Treatise of Human Nature, but he spoilt the point by representing it as only a difference of degree of ‘force and liveliness’.

2 This is not the eighteenth-century usage of Hume and Kant, for whom all conscious mental states counted as ‘perceptions’.

a selective look at contemporary psychology and philosophy on these topics.

1.1 sensory registrAtion distinguisHed From PerCePtuAl rePresentAtion

Sensory registration without perception is exemplified in bacteria, amoebae, paramecia, worms, molluscs and clams: they respond differentially to certain aspects of their physical environment such as light, heat, or magnetic field.3 Their responses to such stimulations carry ‘information’ about what is affecting these creatures, but only in the sense of reliable statistical correlation. (Even some plants respond to certain stimuli: sunflowers follow the direction of the sun, and Venus Fly Traps enclose insects caught in their sticky fluid.) Molluscs close up whenever a shadow passes over them, as a defensive adaptation that reduces their chances of being eaten: they sensorily register the difference between light and shade, but they do not form any perceptual representations of the causes of shadows, they lack the neural apparatus to do that. A more surprising case of sensory registration is found in salmon, who navigate back from the far reaches of the ocean to the very rivers in which they were born, apparently guided by extremely dilute traces in the seawater. Impressive as this is, they do not have any perceptual representation of the chemistry of the water, or of the location of their home stream (though they do have some visual perception of their surroundings).4

There is some mere sensory registration in humans, such as blinking or flinching in response to flying objects or sudden loud noises, the instant withdrawal of a finger from a hot stove, and our instinctive revulsion from certain smells and tastes and from creatures with eight or more legs. Many insects emit chemicals called pheromones to communicate availability for mating. Humans have been known to resort to perfumes,

3 Burge (2010), 315–9.

4 Burge (2010), 425–6.

but whether we respond to natural pheromones (erotic or otherwise) is an empirical question.

Perception proper is more than sensory registration, it involves representations that distinguish and track certain objects or states of affairs, their properties, location, and movements. That implies perceptual constancies, i.e., capacities to represent items in the environment as the same, despite varying stimulations on the perceiver’s sense-organs. The term ‘representation’ has been promiscuously used (following Kant) to mean almost any kind of mental state or content, but to give explicit recognition to the natural kind perception. it is better not to talk of ‘representation’ at the level of mere sensory registration.5

Spatial perception is found in a wide variety of animals. Jumping spiders move in a tangle of twigs and vines to get into position to ambush their prey; their eight eyes obviously enable such precise navigation. Archer fish aim a gobbet of spit at insects sitting on leaves above the water, allowing for the refraction of light at the surface, thus they knock the prey off its perch to be gobbled up for lunch. Most mammals and birds perceive mates, rivals, offspring, prey or predators, tracking them through space and time through a variety of perspectives, distances, lighting, and motion.6

There is a very specialized kind of perception in indigo bunting, who use the stars to guide their annual migration. As nestlings they observe the night sky and identify the centre of rotation (the Pole Star), but if they are raised under the artificial sky of a planetarium they will fix on whatever centre of rotation they are exposed to, so that when autumn comes round, they will use that to direct their flightpath. This is an innate, species-specific learning and navigational device which applies only to the direction of migration. It involves perception rather than mere sensory registration, for they have to identify one specific visible feature of their environment. The psychologist Susan Carey presents this as an

5 Burge (2010), 292ff.

6 I will discuss spatial and temporal perception in more detail in Chapter 4.

example of what she calls ‘core cognition’, describing it as “conceptual, but not fully so”.7 I will address that issue in the next section.

Physiology investigates the bodily mechanisms that make perceptual representation possible. In creatures with nervous systems, information registered on the sensory surfaces is processed in subtle ways, and neuroscience discovers more and more about these inner processes, which happen automatically, performed by specialized subsystems rather than the whole animal, not usually under its awareness or control. Some mechanisms in the buntings’ eyes, brains and wing muscles must mediate between their vision of the stars and their direction of flight, involving some neural computation of angles.

In the case of vision, the most thoroughly studied of the senses, there are computational mechanisms by which the light striking the retinas are transformed into perceptual representations as of objects of certain sizes and shapes and orientations. The patterns of incoming light are structured in two dimensions (the curvature of the retina not being functionally relevant). The retinal image is inverted, and there are two of them, yet we do not see things upside down or doubled. We do not see retinal images at all (unless we are optometrists.) The slight differences between the two images enable us to see spatial depth and the distances of nearby objects. This is the evolutionary explanation for the existence of two eyes in most creatures, perception of the proximity of prey and predators being crucial for survival. But there is no conscious computation of angles and lengths (even by those who have learnt some geometry); systems in our brain do that for us by transformations of physical properties of the retinal input.8 This neural processing cannot become conscious or be controlled at will, but its functioning is shown by the persistence of visual illusions such as the Muller-Lyer and Escher’s paradoxical drawings even when one knows they are illusions.

Like other animals, humans have more senses than vision: touch is especially crucial to our awareness of the material world, though too

7 Carey (2011), 15–16.

8 Marr (1982) was a pioneering work in this field.