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JOSÉ LUIS BERMÚDEZ

Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 2003, cloth £25.00 /
US$35.00

ISBN: 0 19 515969 1

Peter Carruthers

Thinking without Words is about the extent to which infants and

non-human animals are capable of thought. As one might expect
from an author whose previous book presupposed that there can
be no conceptual thinking without language (The Paradox of Self-
Consciousness, MIT 1998), the approach taken here is an
extremely cautious one. Bermúdez argues that some animals are
capable of something like thought, and that such animals are at
best capable of a kind of ‘proto-rationality’ significantly unlike
human rationality. (Even the sort of intentional content that animal
thoughts are said to have – individuated via a form of ‘success
semantics’ – is claimed to differ from the kind of content that human
thoughts possess.)

Roughly the first half of the book is devoted to convincing us

that there really are such phenomena as non-linguistic forms of
thinking, construed realistically to involve discrete causally-effective
structured content-bearing states. Bermúdez shows how
attributions of such thoughts to animals and infants are warranted
by the evidence, works out in some detail what such attributions
might require, and replies to a range of possible objections to the
idea. This half of the book is for the most part successful, and

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deserves to be widely read, especially within Oxford-influenced /

Wittgenstein-influenced circles, where it is taken for granted that
thought has some sort of important intrinsic connection with natural
language.

The second half of the book is devoted to tracing the limits of

languageless thought. This is much less convincing. Bermúdez, like
a number of others who write on this topic, assumes that genuine
thought requires instrumental rationality. And he likewise assumes
that behaviors that don’t manifest this sort of causal thinking will
either be innate fixed action schemata or the product of some sort
of associative conditioning. Both assumptions are deeply flawed,
however, as I shall now briefly try to show. (For further elaboration,
see my article ‘On being simple minded’, American Philosophical
Quarterly, 2004; see also the references contained therein for many
of the facts that follow.)

The basic point is that Bermúdez ignores the cognitive

processes that are responsible for spatial navigation (at least in this
context he does – he actually does consider navigation data when
discussing how one might distinguish between different modes of
presentation amongst non-linguistic thoughts). These navigational
processes are widely distributed throughout the animal kingdom –
from ants and bees through to birds and mammals – and involve a
number of distinct kinds of non-associative learning mechanism.
Many animals use the sun, or the polarization of the sun’s light in
the sky, to calculate a compass orientation. This means that they
have to be capable of learning the solar ephemeris – the arc that
the sun makes through the sky at a given latitude and time of year
– in order that they should compute the direction of South, given
the sun’s position in the sky and the time of day.

Many animals use dead reckoning, integrating measures of

distance traveled in each direction with the angle of each of their
turns in order to calculate the distance and direction of home. The
Tunisian desert ant, for example, can travel as much as a hundred
meters across a featureless desert, zigzag back and forth in a
highly complex path in search of food, crossing terrain never before
traveled, and then turn and head in a straight line back to its nest

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when it finds a food item, being accurate to within centimeters.

Then when it returns to that same cache of food, it doesn’t need to
traverse its original route, but heads straight for it.

This is plainly an example of learning, not any sort of fixed action

pattern – the ant makes many unique forays, and has to figure out
where it is afresh on each occasion. And it plainly isn’t the result of
any sort of associative conditioning. Moreover, the learning
mechanism needed to do dead reckoning would obviously need to
be different from the mechanism that learns the solar ephemeris
and uses that information to figure out the direction of South
(although the former mechanism presupposes the latter one – the
Tunisian ant, too, uses the sun to calculate directions of travel,
which are taken as inputs to the dead reckoning process).

Many other animals (including all birds and mammals, and

perhaps even bees) can construct a cognitive map of their
environment, on which the relative positions of a range of salient
landmarks are represented. (Note that the representational vehicles
of mental maps need not be at all map-like. They might consist of
sentences specifying, in respect of each landmark, the distance
and direction of some of the other landmarks, together with an
inference mechanism that can compute novel spatial relationships
from such information.) When navigating to a target on the map –
such as a food cache, or home base – the animal does so by
identifying one or more landmarks, and calculating from that the
direction in which it needs to travel.

These forms of navigation can serve to ground a simple

kind of belief / desire psychology. For in each case, we have a
range of structured belief states capable of interacting with a range
of different goal-states (for example, to forage, or to return home) in
such a way as to determine behaviors that may well be unique in
the life of the animal. And moreover, they involve what seem to be
genuine forms of decision-making – as when, for example, an
animal makes a choice between two potential foraging sites on the
grounds of the distance that would need to be traveled from its
current location.

Bermúdez insists, in contrast, that the minimal requirement

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of genuine decision-making is that ‘the selection of a particular

course of action from the contrast space of alternative possible
courses of action should be made on consequence-sensitive
grounds’ (p.124). By this criterion rats engage in genuine decision-
making, since their behavior has been shown to be sensitive to the
causal efficacy of their own actions; as do tool-using ravens, apes,
and hominids. But vast swathes of animal behavior will not count as
resulting from genuine decision-making, on this account.

Reflection on the navigation cases shows, however, that

Bermúdez’s criterion is unmotivated and unnecessarily restrictive.
Why must we say that a bird choosing between two potential food
caches that are represented in distinct locations on its mental map,
for example, isn’t taking a genuine decision, merely on the grounds
that the causality of the bird’s own behavior isn’t explicitly
represented? For humans, too, in such circumstances won’t
explicitly represent the causality of their own actions, either. When I
am thirsty, realize that there is cold beer in the fridge, and walk to
the appropriate location, it seems unlikely that my decision is taken
on consequence-sensitive grounds. Rather, I just put my goal
together with information about the location of something that would
satisfy that goal, and then implement an action-schema (walking to
the fridge) that is guided in its execution by the location information.
I don’t need to think of walking as something that will cause the
satisfaction of my goal. Likewise, then, with the bird: the fact that it
doesn’t explicitly represent the causal properties of flight need not
prevent it from counting as having engaged in genuine decision-
making.

When it comes to characterizing the sort of rationality of

which non-linguistic creatures are capable, Bermúdez diagnoses
two ways in which the rationality of animals falls short of our own –
hence only counting as a form of ‘proto-rationality’ or ‘proto-logic’.
One is that they don’t engage in calculations of maximum expected
utility (p.138). The other is that they don’t engage in reflection on
what outcomes would satisfy their desires, together with the
likelihood that the different courses of action have of generating
those outcomes (p.148). But as regards the first, there is now an

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extensive body of literature demonstrating that humans don’t

engage in calculations of maximum utility, either, but rather deploy
a range of simpler decision-making heuristics. (See, e.g., G.
Gigerenzer and P. Todd, Simple Heuristics that Make us Smart,
OUP 1999.) And as regards the second, Bermúdez mistakes the
basic form of the practical reasoning syllogism, which isn’t (as he
alleges) a meta-representational one.

One basic kind of practical reasoning syllogism can be

represented thus: DES [P], BEL [if I do Q then P], so INTEND [I do
Q]. Here the operators ‘DES’, ‘BEL’ and ‘INTEND’ are meant to
designate the first-order attitudes of desire, belief and intention that
figure in the episode of practical reasoning. They are not supposed
to be second-order representations of these states figuring within
the content of the agent’s reasoning process. The only contents
that so figure are P, I do Q, and the conditional, if I do Q then P.
While humans can engage in meta-representational forms of
practical reasoning – thinking, not just about items wanted and how
to get them, but also about our own desires themselves and how
reliable our beliefs are – there is no reason to believe that this is
required for practical reasoning as such, nor for thinking that all or
most of our practical reasoning takes such a form.

In the final two chapters of the book Bermúdez argues that

all higher-order, meta-representational, thinking depends upon
language. But he moves illicitly from a claim that many of us might
grant – namely, that a certain sort of ‘reflexive thinking’ involves
language (viz., conscious thinking where our thoughts are
themselves immediately available to further thought) – to the claim
that all higher-order thought involves language. From the fact that
some of our conscious thinking has natural language vehicles, it
doesn’t follow that our basic capacity to attribute thoughts to others
or to ourselves is similarly dependent upon language. And indeed,
there is direct evidence from some cases of aphasia that a capacity
for higher-order thought can survive the destruction of the language
faculty.

In sum, the evidence actually shows (contra Bermúdez) that

attitudes of belief and desire, together with the most fundamental

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forms of inference and practical reasoning, are well neigh

ubiquitous throughout the animal kingdom. While there are, no
doubt, some fancy forms of cognition that are unique to humans,
and that depend upon language, neither thinking nor higher-order
thinking is one of them, and neither is decision making.

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