Intelligence PIC DDI 2011
Intelligence PIC
Intelligence PIC 1
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Defining intelligence negates agency and muddles language.
Knappett & Malafouris 8 (Carl Knappett - Associate Professor of Art History @ University of Toronto, Lambros Malafouris - Balzan Post-Doctoral Research Fellow in Cognitive Archaeology @ University of Cambridge, "Material Agency: Towards a Non-Anthropocentric Approach" pages 98-100)
In this view, intelligence is a quality or a quantity of the things in question. It is this (whatever this might be) that produces an outcome. Accordingly, this view might lead one to suggest that 'more things' in 'the right amalgam' might produce a 'righter', 'bigger', 'more intelligent' outcome. As it happens, this is more or less what Ed Hutchins claimed in his curious book, Cognition in the Wild (1995). There he argues that the ways a mix of artefacts gets used as an assembly to allow large boats to be navigates in tight harbors makes the captain of the boat (or more particularly the pilot of the same) intelligent; here 'intelligence' is like a calculation. The problem we have with this is that this is not how one uses the term intelligent. That an amalgam of person and machines might allow the person to achieve something intelligently is a claim that is reasonable. But to claim that the things and the person make intelligence is, in our view, wrong. This seems merely semantic, but it is consequential, we would argue. Consider: one might say a pilot who fails to get his or her boat in to harbor fails because of his or her tools fails. But this is not the same as scything that the pilot is unintelligent. Nor is it the same as saying that the tools (any individual one or them as a whole) are unintelligent. All it is saying is that the pilot failed in their job for a known reason - a tool or a set of tools did not work. Of course, a situation where a tool fails might lead one to condemn that tool so that thereafter it is not used or, if it is, only circumspectly. Condemnation is important, it hardly needs any saying. But at no point would on be saying when no one condemns a tool one was doing so because 'it' was unintelligent or even because it was part of an 'intelligent system'. Its condemnation has to do with the effect it did not do what it was (is) supposed to. By contrast, when would it be that one would say of a pilot that he or she was unintelligent? Not when the tools let them down, we have seen. But one would say so in the following sorts of situation: When a pilot failed to take notice of the fact that a tool was not working and did not devise work arounds or some other form of ameliorating action (like choosing not to go to that harbour). In this sense, a pilot's intelligence is held to account not for the actions of artefacts, whatever their agency, but because of his or her actions. In this view, intelligence is not a quality in a thing or a set of processes; nor is it a quality of agency. It is a question of moral culpability for persons. The term intelligence is, then, a moral term. Following Wittgenstein, we take the term to describe or label normative judgements: judgements about whether something has ben done well, badly, thoughtfully, or negligently. The term implies too that some one is accountable for the behavior. Intelligence is thus never an abstract concept - neither a label for an abstract thing nor a term applicable to empirical objects other than human - it is a term only applicable for human doings (though of course, these doings often entail the use of artefacts). Now, what has this got to do with agency? How did we get here, only a page or two from the outset of this chapter? We are discussing this now since we think that missappropriating what agency might mean and relatedly, the concept of intelligence, as bound up with the analytic purchase of the term agency, can lead to distraction and muddle in the ultimate tool we have at hand: namely language. Thus, when we say muddle and distraction, we do not mean that we say this as our view; we are not saying this as if it were our opinion; ours is simply a view amongst many. We are saying this in reference to how it is that when one stretches the limits and properties of language one can, sometimes, get wayward. Language is a tool of sorts but has to be used appropriately, we are saying; it is very easy, indeed, a chronic feature of words that they can be used in ways that misleads. And this is what we think is happening in the word agency gets used, most especially when it is used in connection with the word intelligence. When agency is used as a label to indication something about the relationship between human 'doings' and the 'things that people use', it seems to us that muddles occur and what is meant, ordinarily, gets confused. Does this matter? Well, not because on wants to honour language; but only because one wants traction and direction on one's own thoughts. There are a number of ways that one can lose such traction and direction. The most important one, at least the one we want to focus on in framing our chapter, is through making the workings of the mind (or at least perceptions as to what the workings of the mind might be), come to be far too important in the analysis of the relationship between things and people. We want to suggest that this is consequential for psychology (cognitive or otherwise), sociology, archaeology and design, to name but a few disciplines. It seems to us that when distracted by having the 'mind' as the focus, disciplines that ought to be concerned with other matters start looking at methods for circumscribing the functioning of the brain. For archaeologists, this means that the artefacts they retrieve become indicators of the physiological state of mind of ancient man for example; for contemporary cognitive scientists, human action in everyday contexts become a measure of how the brain processes information. We need to make it clear that there is nothing wrong with looking for these matters in themselves: they are perfectly legitimate tasks. But it is a concern when this distracts from what might be more insightful concerns. At its worse, it can lead science to discern what can only be described as truisms: that electronic calculators are tools of the mind is one such claim, for example (though as
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it happens this is not one that has been made, as far as one knows, but it suffices to illustrate the species of claim we have in mind). At best it leads away from a concern with discerning what is pertinent to understanding the contexts in question. Thus, to get a perspicacious understanding of how ships' pilots do their job, one would do well to put aside concern with how the brain works and look instead at the social and cultural systems that have produced pilots, ships, harbours and navies. One should look at the institutional histories of these 'social institutions'; at the social processes, that is, the training of pilots and so on; in sum, one should only focus on doings and not mental operations. Of course, this is what makes Hutchins' book so curious: he says that one should look at doings to understand them the mind at work and thus his book leads one away from cognitive sciences as practiced before that book's publication. But what we are saying is that one ought to take that book more seriously than Hutchins does himself and abandon a concern with mental categories and cognitive machinery altogether. Do not worry about the mind at all, we are saying, just focus on the doings if you really want to get to grips with pilots.
Intellegence elites create vulnerability to “inferiors”
Dombrowski 97(Daniel A. Dombrowski, Professor of Philosophy at Seattle University. He is the author of seventeen books and over a hundred articles in scholarly journals in philosophy, theology, classics, and literature, “Babies and Beasts: The Argument from Marginal Cases”, 1997, Google Books, 96)
There are sentient beings all around us, and to assume that the intelligence of some of them, however intelligence may be defined, licencenses abuse of animals also makes it possible for any intellectual elite (God, the angels, extraterrestrials, or the Nazis by self-proclamation) “to treat the rest of us like trash.” The AMC makes it apparent that if we are willing to mistreat animals, we should also be willing to mistreat the severely retarded. Frey comes close to adopting this view when he claims that the marginal cases do not really have rights, but we act as if they do because we are squeamish about abusing them. Clark notes, however, that some of us are reminded of our own condition by animals and are squeamish about abusing them as well: But suppose we id not feel squeamish about tormenting, say, microcephalics or brain-damaged orphans? A good many people, indeed, probably do not. And many more, if they thought that some advantage could safely be won for the rest of us by torturing such defective humans [would do so].... I see no reason to suppose that squeamishness on its own is much of a barrier against the exploitation of the human weak... Secretely, I suggest, we know that we ought to care for the subnormal precisely because they are subnormal: they are weak, defenceless, at our mercy. They can be hurt, injured, frustrated. We ought to consider their wishes and feelings, not because we will be hurt if we don’t, but because they will be hurt. And the same goes for those creatures like them who are for our kind though not of our species... The descent of our potential victims has nothing directly to do with their susceptibility to injury.29
Intelligenceism creates social discrimination and enables slaughter to the “inferior”
Dombrowski 97(Daniel A. Dombrowski, Professor of Philosophy at Seattle University. He is the author of seventeen books and over a hundred articles in scholarly journals in philosophy, theology, classics, and literature, “Babies and Beasts: The Argument from Marginal Cases”, 1997, Google Books, 132-133)
(I) An argument from behaviour supports the attribution of mental states to animals because these attributions play a role in the explanation of animal behavior. In fact, the attribution of complex mental states to animals offers the simplest theory regarding the causal origin of complex nonhuman behavior, in that the structures that would be required to produce these behaviours without conscious mental states would demand much more than those involve in the mental states themselves. (2) An argument from evolution supports the attribution of complex mental states, because they would confer a selective advantage to higher mammals in the process of speciation. (3) An argument from neurology uses anatomy to support the attribution of mental states to animals, as in the repeated citation in this book of preferences, pleasures, and pains in animals on the basis of their central nervous systems. This argument from neurology is quite different from an argument from analogy whereby introspectively discovered facts about our own mental states are assumed to exist in animals as well. (4) An argument from other minds tries to reduce to absurdity skepticism regarding animal minds.43 That is, Carruthers’s doubts about animal sentience should also give rise to doubts about human sentience. All four of thse arguments help to support the case for the AMC in making more plausible the claim that the higher animals are as mentally sophisticated or more so than marginal human beings. If, with Richard Sorabji and against R. G. Frey, we can assume that the point to the AMC is to make us recoil in horror at eating or painfully experimenting on the severely retarded and to think again about animals, then the argument looks much stronger than Leahy or Carruthers indicates.44 The defender of the AMC must be
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careful at this point, however. By concentrating too much on the complexity of mental states in animals, one might be tempted by what Colin McGinn calls “intelligenceism.” This would consist in a pernicious form of social discrimination whereby inferiority of intelligence makes a being amenable to slaughter or electrical shock treatments for scientific purposes. The obvious consequence of this view is that infants, mentally backward adults, and the senile would lose significantly. In fact, if intelligenceism were adopted, it might make sense to raise genetically engineered “simple” humans for experimental or culinary purposes. Hence, the purpose of attributing complex mental states to animals is not to establish the case that being intelligent is what gives one the right not to be abused. Rather, it is merely to show that animals have mental lives that are complex enough to have preferences, pleasures, pains, memories, an expectations.45
Intelligence is a product of hegemony - it is a form of securing and limiting rights through status of intelligence
Davis 01(Bill Davis, Briefing Attorney, Supreme Court of Texas. J.D. Harvard Law School, 2000; A.B.
in English, Princeton University, 1997, “Rebuilding the Wall”, 2001, page 224)
By referencing the Nazis and imagining an invasion of aliens with intelligence clearly superior to that of humans, Clark reveals two problems with basing rights on intelligence or its byproducts. First, intelligence may be defined by the hegemony. If the Nazis believe they are intellectually superior to non-Nazis, and intelligence is accepted as a reasonable yardstick for measuring the significance of various lives, then Nazis are justified in preferring themselves over all non-Nazis. Second (and more threatening because of its objectivity), retaining the intelligence yardstick would mean that, if a group of concededly highly intelligent aliens were to alight on earth, rational individuals would— when faced with the choice—choose to save the more intelligent alien over the less intelligent, though otherwise equally situated, human. This second idea is more threatening than the first because it highlights the exclusionary power of using intelligence to distinguish among different beings. That is, while many animal rights advocates view intelligence as a trait that, when recognized in non-humans, can only lead to the granting of rights to a greater pool of living things, Clark reveals that reliance on intelligence can just as easily function in the other direction. It can take rights away from those who once enjoyed them or, at least, devalue those rights by comparing them to ones that creatures of greater intelligence should, under the theory that intelligence is relevant to the question of rights, enjoy. Viewed in this light, intelligence-based speciesism—or, as Colin McGinn terms it more succinctly, “intelligenceism”—is a significant threat to the recognition of nonhuman animals rights. This is true largely because intelligenceism is deeply and perhaps unwittingly embedded in the arguments of many people whose express goal is to secure rights for those animals.14 Singer, with the preference he gives to “beings with a future,” is intelligenceist.15 So are Leslie Pickering Francis and Richard Norman, who claim that the “developed mental lives” of chimpanzees, rhesus monkeys, dolphins and other human-like nonhuman animals entitle these creatures to greater respect;16 and Carl Cohen, who thinks that animals can have no rights because they lack the intelligence-based capacity for free moral judgment;17 and Carol Hoff, who believes that a nonhuman animal (presumably even an eagle) stricken by blindness suffers less than a human with the same affliction;18 and Richard Epstein, who denies nonhuman animals rights because “they do not have the higher capacity for language and thought that characterizes human beings as a species;”19 and Steven Wise, who writes that “[n]onhuman animals who lack minds are little more than animate versions of ‘the MIT 3’ [an ”artificially-intelligent“ computer] . . . and their entitlement to legal rights should be seriously doubted;”20 and Ren´e Descartes, who reasoned that nonhuman animals’ inability to use human speech reinforces the propriety of our denying them rights.21