IDH   23901
INSTITUTO DE HUMANIDADES
Unidad Ejecutora - UE
congresos y reuniones científicas
Título:
Cartographic systems and non linguistic inference
Autor/es:
AGUILERA MARIELA
Lugar:
Colorado
Reunión:
Encuentro; 38-Meeting of the Society of Philosophy and Psychology; 2012
Institución organizadora:
Society of Philosophy and Psychology & University of Colorado at Boulder
Resumen:
Considering some observational and experimental research on animal cognition, cognitive ethologists and comparative psychologists often assume that non human animals are capable of making inferences. But a wide philosophical tradition has supposed that the capability to making inferences requires some kind of language. Analytic philosophy has supposed that the capability to reasoning and making inferences depends on linguistic competence (Bermúdez, 2010; 2003; Davidson, 1999; Davidson, 1982). Similarly, from a psychologist tradition, other philosophers as well have argued that inferential processes involve a language of thought, that is, an inner system of representational vehicles with linguistic form (Fodor, 2008). These assumptions are related to the idea that any other kind of non linguistic vehicle is incapable of supporting inferential transitions between contents (Heck Jr., 2007). Nevertheless, against these assumptions and from a philosophical perspective, I claim that inferential abilities do not necessarily require a language. In contrast, certain cartographic systems could be used to explain some forms of inferences (Camp, 2007; Rescorla, 2009; 2009b). First, maps are representations which have a constitutive structure. Second, maps can be decomposed in basic components which can be recombined according to systematic principles, which are syntactic and semantic heterogeneous. Finally, maps have true conditions. However, there are important difference between maps and linguistic representations. While linguistic systems can have logical form, maps cannot. In particular, maps do not have quantificational elements neither have logical connectives; so maps cannot decompose as well as predicate calculus. Since I assume that representational vehicles causally determine the range of contents and the way contents can be recombined by a creature, while linguistic vehicles can have contents with a propositional structure, in contrast, maps have what I call cartographic content. While linguistic inferential abilities are domain general and context free and allow promiscuous combinations, in contrast, considering map’s relations between vehicle and content, cartographic contents and abilities are domain specific and are –what I call– context dependent and have deep combinatorial restrictions. Domain specificity implies that the ability to represent transitive inference in one context, such as social context, is not necessarily extensive to other domains, such as symbolic domain. Context dependence imposes restriction at the range of contents an animal can represent and reason about: tree maps can represent inferencial transitions between social hierarchies but are inappropriate to represent spatial relations between entities. Combinatorial restrictions means that the creature cannot combine information of different domains in order to reason about different ranges of objects: that is, maps are not able to combine concepts related to a specific domain with concepts used to classify other domains. Despite the differences with linguistic systems, maps as well as sentences are capable of warranting rational relations between contents they represent. Moreover, maps are appropriated to explain some features of animal inference which cannot be explained in terms of the language of though hypothesis.