Sociobiology and the Preemption of Social Science by Alexander Rosenberg

Author:Alexander Rosenberg
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press

6

Human Kind and Biological Kinds

Many philosophers have maintained that mental predicates are connected by their meanings with the particular appearance and, indeed, physiognomy of human beings, of members of the species Homo sapiens. The peculiar non-scientific behaviorism of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s treatment of the use of mental terms is the most influential example of this attachment philosophers find between thinking and being a human being. In his exposition of Wittgenstein’s aphoristic expression of this view, Norman Malcolm has written, “Since it has nothing like a human face and body, it makes no sense to say of a tree, or an electronic computer, that it is looking or pointing or fetching something (of course one could always invent a sense for such expressions).… Things which do not have the human form, or anything like it, not merely do not but cannot satisfy the criteria for thinking. I am trying to bring out part of what Wittgenstein meant when he said, ‘we only say of a human being, and what is like one that it thinks,’ and ‘The human body is the best picture of the human soul.’”1 It is in general hard to understand the views of those who would deny mental states to computers whose behavioral repertoires are identical, under stringent conditions of duplication, to those of human beings, except by attributing to such writers the view that at least some conscious states are either definitionally, or at least empirically, inexplicably limited to members of the species Homo sapiens, and perhaps to some specially trained members of closely related primate species.2 Even the proponents of machine consciousness seem to accept this doctrine, to the extent that they recommend redefinition of mental predicates in the face of their successes in simulation. Insofar as no simulation or duplication of human behavior by a machine can logically oblige us to accord the machine mental states of the kind we accord ourselves, the meanings of the terms employed to pick out these states must be given in some species-specific manner. To the extent that the question of whether machines can be accorded these states remains intelligibly open, then no matter how idle for practical purposes the question may ultimately become, the definitions of these states must make appeal to the assumption that the states are at least paradigmatically or exclusively states of men, women, children and a few well-trained chimpanzees. Even if we eventually accord mental states to computers, or to apparently sentient nonterrestrial creatures, it will be on the basis of an analogical argument from our own cases. They will be accorded states of desire and beliefs, and their actions will ordinarily be explained by the citation of a general statement like L only because of the similarity of their behavior to that of the “benchmark” behavior of Homo sapiens. Of course we can and do accord nonhuman systems purposive or teleological states independent of any analogical appeal to our own behavior and its determinants. But consciousness involves more than mere teleology, or else

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