When I last spoke ofCondillac, I mentioned that he was interested of the phenomenon of
feral children, that is, children that grew up in savage conditions,
without any contact to humans, and therefore did not have any
possibility to learn language – he especially mentions a case of a
child being raised by bears in Lithuania. Obviously such a child
cannot have all the mental capacities of a child raised in civilised
surroundings, but Condillac emphasises more what the child can do –
e.g. distinguish herself from her surroundings, make generalisations
and simple logical deductions etc.
A natural
problematic is then how much of conceptual infrastructure a conscious
being would have, if its mental capacities were diminished from those
of an average human being. Condillac proposes an interesting thought
experiment to this effect: let us consider a living statue that would
otherwise resemble a human being, but would have only one sense, say,
smell, and see what concepts this person could have.
It seems rather
arbitrary why Condillac would have picked up smell as the starting
point, but apparently Buffon considered it to be actually a sort of
primary sense with animals. Indeed, we could well imagine an organism
(probably living in water) that would only react to the presence of
some harmful chemical by running away and to the presence of
beneficial chemical by moving towards the supposed source of the
chemical.
Condillac supposes
that even an entity with such meager sensory input would have all
sorts of ideas. He would notice that odours change, he could
recognise some odours as resembling previous odours and he might
classify odours into e.g pleasant, neutral and disagreeable.
Furthermore, he could think of himself as the subject of the changing
pattern of odours and he could associate pleasantness of the odours
with his own well-being. Of course, in all of this Condillac supposes,
just like in his first work, that no new mental capacities are
required for passing from mere sensation to memory, intellect etc.
What is more
interesting is the set of ideas that the odour-limited human being
would not have. Clearly with mere smells there is no sense of space,
but Condillac notes that temporal consciousness would also be
deficient, because one couldn't make realiabe measurements of the
passing of odours. Furthermore, the Condillacian statue would not
have any notion of things separate from himself, as she would have no
idea that odours were something else than just ever changing part of
her own mental life.
Condillac then
considers what would happen if the sense of smell would be changed to
taste or hearing – nothing much is the expected conclusion. Even a
combination of two or all of these three senses would not change the
situation much. At most, the statue could make comparisons between
the sensations of different sense and would then note that e.g.
odours are somehow different from sounds. We might then also in a
sense measure the progress of sensations of one sense by comparing it
with the progress of sensations on another sense, thus making the
notion of time more concrete.
Rather unexpectedly,
the case of vision is not that different, says Condillac. True, a
statue with nothing but vision would have an idea of two-dimensional
space, but it could not have any notion of three-dimensional space nor
of any bodies independent of the statue. One might object to
Condillac that while a field of vision truly is two-dimensional,
movement and ensuing changes in visual images would make the statue
able to conceive three-dimensionality. Indeed, this is what
philosophers like Descartes had assumed – we could geometrically
count e.g. the distance of ourselves from an object just from its
shape and apparent size, when looked at different angles.
Condillac is here
following Berkeleyan criticism of the traditional Cartesian theory of
vision: without the help of other senses, constantly changing visual
images would appear incomprehensible. It is only by associating
different groups of variable visual images to different tactile
sensations that we can truly see e.g. a rose as an object independent
of ourselves. The addition of touch thus perfects the human statue at
least to a level of a feral child.
One might wonder,
which side of the debate is more correct. Certainly the theory of
Cartesians cannot be true in the sense that we would consciously make
difficult calculations in order to make sense of our visual field.
Still, we might suppose human beings have an automatic and
instinctual ”program” that would calculate the results without
any need of actual calculation. A more convincing argument against
Cartesians would be that movement in a computer-generated virtual space does feel a bit weird, possibly because the tactual
sensations do not correspond with what we see.
So much for
Condillac, next time I shall turn my attention to an English
philosopher.
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