Language & Species

Derek Bickerton

5 annotations • data

First annotation on Mar 21st, 2026.

13

Information is, in Gregory Bateson's term, 'a difference that makes a difference'—news of some change in some dimension of the environment that has a potential effect, life-threatening or life-enhancing, on some particular creature. But of course, the fact that some such change takes place does not mean that the information will automatically be transmitted. The creature concerned has to be able to gather the information. That means that it must have some mechanism capable of representing the information through some particular pattern of neural impulses. Moreover, the creature is unlikely to be able to gather the information unless it has some capacity to react appropriately to that information.
No creature, including ourselves, receives from its senses more than a selection from the range of information that is potentially available. Creatures get the senses they need for the behaviors they are capable of. If they cease to need them they lose them, as cave-dwelling species lose sight and as the primates, culminating in us, have been losing smell. It follows that what is presented to any species, not excluding our own, by its senses is not 'reality' but a species-specific view of reality—not 'what is out there', but what it is useful for the species to know about what is out there.
Creatures best conserve energy by hunting when hungry and resting when replete. If they snatched at all prey with automatic reflexes, the only lasting result would be indigestion. Accordingly, information from different sources has to be collated. Nervous systems translate both internal and external states into quantitative terms, represented by variations in the firing rates of the relevant neurons. Messages from other cells may cause them to fire faster than, or slower than, their normal 'resting' rate. These variations form, as it were, an abstract schema that represents what is happening elsewhere, both inside and outside the creature. The intermediate neuron(s) that merge these two sources will determine the creature's behavior in accordance with the following equations: + 'belly full' – 'prey present' = 'no action' – 'belly full' – 'prey present' = 'no action' + 'belly full' + 'prey present' = 'no action' – 'belly full' + 'prey present' = 'action'

17

In a fascinating study, Mary Hesse showed that there have only ever been two ways of explaining why things are attracted to one another: a force that works without contact, or structural properties of space
Let us begin by examining some properties of the predicate 'is true'. Consider a proposition, such as (1), that relates to a factual event: 1. John arrived at 4:00 P.M. Some form of 'correspondence theory' would be quite adequate to deal with (1). We might say (1) is true just in case there is a person called John and that person arrived and the time at which he arrived was 4:00 P.M. These circumstances would be easy to determine by means of eyewitnesses, videotapes, footprints, fingerprints, and so forth. Now consider a proposition, such as (2), that relates to a quality: 2. John is brave. Although we might still like to say that we could test the truth of (2) against some empirical circumstance that it would 'correspond with', there is in fact no equivalent manner in which the truth or falsehood of (2) can be established. No matter what evidence is produced, it is always possible for someone to say 'That wasn't brave, that was reckless', or 'That's just what any normal person would have done', or 'Granted he was brave on that particular occasion, but as a rule John's not brave'. Verification of (2) is impossible outside of some subjective frame of reference that will assign arbitrary conditions for the state of being brave. Now consider a proposition that introduces the term true itself as a quality predicate: 3. John's theory of x is true. Proposition 3 differs markedly from both propositions 1 and 2. The truth of (1) and (2) is not affected if their predicates are ascribed to other subjects: Bill arrived at 4:00 P. M. does not falsify (1) and Bill is brave does not falsify (2). But consider (4) and (5): 4. Bill's theory of x is true. 5. Bill's theory of x is not the same as John's. Given (5), it cannot be the case that both (3) and (4) are true. Moreover, the truth of (3) cannot be established either in the way the truth of (1) is established or in the way the truth of (2) is established. The truth of (3) can perhaps be established only by social convention, so that (3) could be rewritten as 'John's theory of x is strongly believed in by a large majority of suitably qualified persons at time t and no theory accounting for the same data is so strongly believed in'.