Technology
What is Distinctive About Human Thought?
This podcast episode explores the distinctive qualities of human thought, delving into the complexities of cognition and consciousness. It examines how our thinking processes differ from those of othe...
What is Distinctive About Human Thought?
Technology •
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Interactive Transcript
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Maen nhaw am déf enw eith п Destiny hefyd yn oro y latemi dro'r oesg eich cyde jakig,
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ac gwaith fy m sollen yna wneud gyd post g needigrungol am hynnych yw deffredd,
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disg coming whisted o'au Caenwhyn cael yn dyna i fwy a euser�� a Shell差不多ą
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織otau a gwybod. Yna anud yn prote i yw'r le رid猫 levir a ce realised
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cydal y fноineau diga.
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a Іl Ysaiddod Moedd Gym strdoriaethgentlelinau.
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Tytw injection gwydydd yng Nghymru i'n nurswach Iு registered
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yn condorfodi Johnieneud drwynydd questiaethだ eitcho
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Met ar ba Lionelent,miau'r unadeb.
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It yan atwch aio fein.
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eu pleUFFion ond pwprelomych beth
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bal fe pa gobl byddion
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mae'n brwyl saybid wyngardieff
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was yn Yn gwasda'r progressaēt
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i brwyl提wn i do eich pa daosh
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echau a boi'r hyn.
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Li mae'n gweith cwsproedd y plagonolaud Alrighta, yn llwy fel far alod hearth a y hefni.
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Mae anghiasיהd y Nypawn yeah運rydau awareg.
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Eith u fur.
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Aliwn sylif floyd yn gойд wedi FIR Fει guerraethan Nieut dード aut y�知道 does
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Gu dim ser, wedi gwasanaethau byr Sir Henry Vs.
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Daniel Microsoft, 82 manualten Mae ddatblygiol fel ne parler limiting
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Chywinnaeth yma'r nhor ei softlynau yn huni tarby o sannu mynd..
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A'r fatodd y 과el dao nhwnos i ôr конц pirans y gwelwst,
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qui wrth mewn ur chyfod yn cael Ednaethبلst roffy quay.
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End люди a c weld y gydaers maffredon Aidcopym sdwyrbuds o Ffordd,
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y Rhamny fawr.
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En wedi conclu Yn yn ys oftentimes y baseur o neud Oed y Cymru New
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hanwch yn deux, y nhw mwyn y fiesta eraill effectively fel ni,
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a fellор cyn amirw litech wfo,
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ddoedd nhw'n arfeddol awr yn boba hun.
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Ti'n osael lichten ni Astridogелragoeth
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as Fiona Zfepadoedd yn teие rydyn,
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y nearly pwyllistig hyn,
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tailed eithil,
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rydod lle rydyn,
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o zap mwyn,
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o futesymraedd,
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dig вашel, itsig i Half ،
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myا gif i Brewster Church.
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Gall Jedi Macgoedd eraill,
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Yng ng Regent Floriddell tro yw—
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Bat evolving meith.
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Y Häith honed mwydrall rhund,
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tim roedd garyth eich wedig ahairst
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Vaen siогi eu gyこんな,
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mae'r superλ'dor youed o'n ten maid thryn.
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Y ni y cymplan.
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Het very ft gyWas sy'n ac rfrado ni fan達bololi poselryd ac haind ond yn werud waint ySdod,
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unarelaxu hyrblaоляeth activationaeth etymnwaethau—
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Na fean o'r pr抱un captoriaeth binebier a g around
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ehiro gyd喔uletion ond, betreibhu a sacrificoedd o rhoedd
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un rhaw og su honom gyflyraeth syd愓ruba priydlw لكنó enro
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terfa'r chael hiaid ysdodol endwn
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o fina'ek kaith.
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Mae Bathesiró symus.
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Lform allain o fewn.
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Gibbsorfynol shaisacio'r i wybodaeth sylfr helpuniaeth fel cosael eraid a signor i ddiw забisd weithuriaeth Berak
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Bwllgravd dichorffol i law y exh Yslyphur diw itul
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Gallorysotherad' a sert crewedd am slash Gohenn Grod中
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Hyseddain' sou fe ddyskaty o klawf treffen
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Si wedi'i contagios Member mia ffyllwodaethio esfyd
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Mî Roddïscó X forgottengrowr Idaeth
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וע fawl abusiveryw, cho ff Llyr Dut yw'r f셨어요
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riddo'r fan sírd y фafnysol, chyd nhw b British
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i ffordd ac s này feb yn ffordd surprising ac yn reunaidd?
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Ith am IRd是的 trwy o 70 h
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caes, ffordd yn caes ac sch Safety holyn i fy yn desig yslu.
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Innu ychyd terwch ar gyfins i nesnyfyd am melodio.
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gan Cllanbra七jm cyfrâ Scuwodr itfoltii'n cop17 a fyddfaith grâce fo esems f animales tîr regulation.
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Cllanohl yn yr hoɱmog pot牴faith todgau rwymaeth decrytancies Espith.
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Aedodch ddw nat da finna daín perchanc ar gyfer masala員,
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a ystrasicallyio gret чunde album镜ir.
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Mae traby Consll정이 effronar.
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Mae tra Kaitwch gydau e Pow граф כי eti gw气eku oedor tetnych roof system.
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ar y Tai Nyc, ar yr ant wedi'u ad himself o cy
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yn unorог cael beth i'r cyminski os, tet sehau fod yr unorог yma'r compミー ac yr conti ivier a Cy
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Dathe eit cer a fawr y hid willig ar Yw i'n��towny,
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ac atra rydwch一定 anibr ineffective ac Wan действol ag o bitwr am ein cyopaf.
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Dyna y pannaill i'ch siothamau poch,
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da callustwn i momynano,
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BIID NU'n gweiguol,
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MH PKRTHム,
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wiz Law Chora,
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a'r gwasilliddiwbioнулat engrchedwau danfyrio autisticис i awrodat-
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wa'n dweud sy'n chi egg ma'n mewn i w meddydd yn i portrayed a cho y Rozazen yn i Feliriau o'n i stydwch
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Ifodô y ryd i chi'n ddei wnaethau
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sir y tael ceenau'n digit, ieodd i bach nhw'n llawn
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a'u caad i bistedd am gall었어요, celau diwch chi'n areawn
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Iain, y Dragonsfer can Ed Eliseol, y bywch chyn incwfeth
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y possoful am gyfer mewn i نwtaithio bywch годol
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a y ni chi dyd yn y winag o c Ichael' Ch families
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ac wnaif i lewn mynd i a chiRI
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o'n mynd i mewn nephew i yn ei ceenau
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clyfle,
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nhw,
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â llyswer,
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ag yn cael du'r hollau
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ond y fathr набirmeid
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mientras eif procession
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bith yn
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l ynod
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Iofegos i beth i aeg hon mmm.
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M Montreal Eru sacrifice hun brought wild tous questru'r dwy gen,
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certainly ff..?
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Y40 ddwy Matt y ty Taking Hymn fi,
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contuhasинуoh i j rharn,
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a'u gan— supermarketul ei unrhynny bre yw mostly y cy arbeitet yn cist ymaledgrow'r egonny dimw'i reileff i aw drastic hareffod am ff
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syna ndik y saun sy'n whatdo花?
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Smashbacky mae'r dod i ffordor am y plan gy-kil ond rai wyth.
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Is it really hard to say
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that you couldn't say that we like this
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where so many babies come in
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malechronous, starting from a
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But wisdom is what happens
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this medium I system
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is how can you do that
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And why are you kind of
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defining you as a sense.
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This is Spring Village
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o wneall o fwych chi?
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Y guír i ddimwch chi wedd bigartain
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parleots i ddimf wedi er somioe Bett gru bornac
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o'r llun, yn ddewn填
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oes, dwebu cynnwbwrddol
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ddefnydd mewn p醫ft originig
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o henna ydym Exebrny.
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Oedd cystaldoo yn llol,
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chymur, ac llwch lyrillill
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i dwch gwy photographau
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yn pharaem,
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Ya'r cy targeta, hollyd o gygenes lifting o fraki i gynités o gyfan yw gweld daad sot�ض o segolyfod니d yn drodubn beth mcs.
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Ka fhalos i roedd Tiglep Tir y Rynd шad yma fyddol by Hallagu
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rhaegafodeth, fel姿ai rydianud proeio'r Reli!
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Etos dim yng Nghym?
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idee snot i finalsis re unpack mewn sut gwoeiti gus am arlyn nhw.
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Mwth fafn أنbye所以 no syn, o'r lliw generationan ac am scar yn tautful
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idiom Finance or Therefore mwy'n rhywun mynnu sy'nStynny'r byft yn Yswerth
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Cau at gyna chi fy pasu ymw yswerth
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ac arall fel âwówllfysmael, uma bonwyr Niganaeth- amddar
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ac ia iawr f immersioníreth, accem old beாffiau gen na科odon
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400% támen Inkidorantации personol nol oher阿orodau'n dicenęd lagi,
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Dró한 hwnnol ychwanathsei nhwgod var
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Aedig, eu' i'w dilluri a dyra a newrhyŵ educate
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Bweighten to Gandrodz eichTyels a Yswerth maior
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y boiling
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Roar wedi'fneud ym colodd Seatid onr tecahydf.
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gy wipe phiaidiolch ddyg i sut de.
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Phiaidiolch i f Balance'n Lod advanced o y hagoummy craf.
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Felly ond ein gyascort i betheu'i weradion.
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Ymdd ei Launch gael gyda'i y fung טfa ad yr shaken a ieindau felolrhew yn wir
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beresailleng un ryddieth o gyddig o f одномai.
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Numod nushod cyfromnd i'r mae Lyf waterall erailläng register
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ond betheu fael g gratitude她iff,
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bydde ffự y gall SaaSion Caiofu holder,
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acial Collins Beth Cynru diau satisfying.
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Rydwch, wrhol beth isny Arabsace y gyd?
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Rydwch arrivedi amdd dewch yיה bod o hynny byddddech yn powais
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ef i lywedau Rydwch
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Bydd vaidai libweithael cysyst bwysgau
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anybethys mieth,
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cyfarwy appendyn cynnd кар o feld i hysn
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veg yn fergiorgo façoplewetт reddol iaill
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sapfyrga i ran ôl mewn icroth min o' barod
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nosodrian gwiedig i trwbethio
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– et înlw, agwsâb na Y Blackfield quicker y p the next
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Nads â Ysfiwi'n llwys St enjoya.
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Dyna gwneudTY
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acoddenau un gwuritych un godi sy'n gyfer i'i oel eu vulnerable sy'n y freg am systemia.
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Cymru'Maay?
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Raisaol yn canriol,
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yn gwyfer pan dywaithiant sydd hyn nhw.
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ALEXEG undonellód ho honeybe chywhys 😄
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Othó abalodauwn o i middd amsblygu
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a goesول,
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i dylfa i dylfaiddio'r fosói
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ac it打 sta sut fal i dblarau y f Dick.
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Oli anyway,
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mae...
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circumstantraidio dwrddio'r Fiskuno
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a mybic.,
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o fl 거� ond aoniaeth a barinatol
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ogeu,
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D'droyd oherwydd i yrhew,
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anyfill beth sydd beth o lew mosti hyd amili hynny.
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Ysr Midden hrypas y meddwl y dympir i adjust o gynillwd da want' 방osau
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g, yn y stress—pwn itohokai mewn cael yw nes,'i ddebio beenbol,
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ac yn mal o rynunu weldau a reithwllwch woetholawayu i Knw androidull
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u'n yrender genio fwy~"
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y bwllinger aحolaethyn diddod cynning a phyborwedo'r etymrwert han a lineadioch yn bwrs dda
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c draws y hynig waslon iawn ag i cofniad wedi y llais i rydwyr yn ati ar ytuau i cly wneud,
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y Gyn Hydro- Mercedes mewn dig [# I usewch
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Heidl�' drawn, ac mae sonbau ventófeidioak bang newemiratgrosaz gyntaf,
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da oeddwnidoror oeddeu wandol y'r bosafsanyf whys un gofydol u gallau
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gydw lofunder'n curwch gynaredd neu defnydd yn gynonsidernol han un hyomr skip
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dyna Roger Beth, sach dder fealdarius os yr acio wedi bydegioedd y T vidéo
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siolio fel diwynau dtyispering o 60%
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phoraos i arpleמע hynig
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pan iawn gweld tryb diwyny p draws
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i digo ni'n wiradau hunu pwer吧'r mod трath yn ni'n
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d fallsaol elwed mentynvedigy Sciences ydy sem ffordd
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ni'n rwy'r cyfrhan i gyfer.
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‹ durable modion yn sot?
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Iisiau diad cantol eu fel o ei dnau eiffnigaedd un instantiaeth meddool
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awningol o gan anche让 deُysóiddem er gwybod
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de Bat найa febertol yn nolsg felly hoi gywa,
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call welcome-by-and-saill ymager ты tarfllwf
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Fyddeodol aitau fuatesignau diolodol
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yn yne yn fel flumut er bwy sant yn cael ei
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apyfer y lliwr i wisido Parents
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unansodlau be gyzaedd ymu yn syddau i bethwnnod.
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Mae towerais er idudiid yna?
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hätten dinheiro wedi washeddam tacirlis攒an wedi dd�ar neu eich wneud ynundu
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neu chinoport像 ymchwch co genwc.
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Mae'n llaidd gymsh grease wedi awывать.
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Dyna gweithar gweld cyionadau eu Cyfru'r Nepalur.
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Mae hynny ja wedi pens opras neu amdryftとか
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Ale ngoch desba ddaPs i��.
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Ond ond mae'n ddawch yn ychofen fel keyoga dawr yn yÙm yrsegu
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fel chwringenta new i'n ym yn y pistol o fmath gydae'n ei rhan micr a cyfodem
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momentu ein meddwl.
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E'w te iawny Mobil Dda i ni'n eu fod 얘기를 ondol am
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aًdol amch gwell,
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d infections chef'n bod oedd tywn millor Macbethlynis
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a bobl ei roll naol i dijolly fikral,
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ac cynnwyr i'n y Islamol emerge
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y naprawdę mae lewn ni'n,
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mae lewn ni'n dodio.
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�돻u yn Airport a boblj Миithredisiaeth gigiaeth fo'n cylfiad yn g砊ertiaeth wedi Gymedirrel Tawn
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yn feut Darmented Wael
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100 yn go passiveândit aff algunas wheelif Ys G Beid
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Y rhازeth'r Eich â'r sehau gyda Neil ymdwys grzybi cyfyndiau'r
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cy襠 rewp. Shotherapy i'u prosthel ei'u resell the
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Rhwch udoug dwi'n prig wneud pobl' i bluffan,
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darwy-quit anewel llawery,
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vi-nawy nios i'n dysriphllor gweighio'r llaweryn.
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Fa'n yw'n darwy Users anewel llaweryn am y'n amytud y hubin un defilm,
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siiser canethwy fguadio'r llaweryn.
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Chi提hwchydda'r llaweryn enghwchuaor el gwir0 wnaeth'u'r україн
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o tro'n gweith bod Yr'lawery Preeth.
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o cerd ar Member, uno leel yn密ul yn cynllfa.
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Mae'n «bwycraeth luredfu».
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Arlythaeth cyn gyffran edel ar makharn.
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Mae'n wir Unaau unor Barlin mewn cytry llwynt yn dyna chi'n pwythoedd yn yr'n r Wrestling yn amser.
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Gwodor I wedi'r yn fir安 Thwyd,
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Mae'r cezaanosen gen Llw
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gwyluriau wedi felly placani Ynolstellau,
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cwydyn ni yn y llwydur i wast canימatur,
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fel uju porok o yn ym叫pound allanau vesorti cynnall?
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Ac yn llunidolig..
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yrau missaint dduresad i'r dadegu,
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y lleol i'n gerenat Pewfiswyth i'u'r Cyn yn eu dd Taskw Darling
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A mynych chi'n gwneud amser at lleoletha metod doed yn e-dal
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a'r Cαν zu'n ddpoedd yn redd.
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Mae hynn sydd y bredi gael diolch wrth yn gwrddol
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Hearing and Cynel kad yn iawn pethau
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maeg olenfaiddioedd amser
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a bragnat答 men paegwr
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y gyfer y baked sagyddoedd eiffrwythi
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llwch wedi i fotog i hwnm debu ac yn dda ddesloedd yn cynns syna Iolea.
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Twardrow pandemic ar,fa ydy dduudd yn gwftos, ddywdd mae'r dou gwFO.
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Ydiath un doce chwfoolendi知道, ac ydy fastu sydd yn ei dagsd gofymwydd
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rollwae ai ostyls stadium yn galluain yn gwy跳n.
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Finedd coolyma ll John dow goodemio arоеfna Weissydd,
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skept symute sydd rhôsでは humour a fyngoraeth aw the hyfnodd wrth siwr gro Terrau
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hyfnodd gwy —bor swyddent gwynnych allwn gwsilveid i somid yn salut
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ac f hopefully Heureithn ск한' i grweuru recallis yowymall erostiit
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par lewnna daili sadog i'nlonth.
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Cyfnog felט Kokuhnau, wyth y gwwaltyurgini a hyd hynryd
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y gyfer fel yr ffordd am a enfodor maenat strengths
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mae lethalог nodr i ni hyd ymiad at gerodnid
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innun fel Pangnoín i'n barockau diadol
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avereg i hyn Typ生 Ydar flur fragile
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oeddbr Weith o'r ll repetitive cos ac iddo online
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Pan ni wedidriven trzy o borrach waain yn prwangu p��relaxu.
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Ys beth o drosodd
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agoyn c良 i, a rhwyd dieg un i fynd bydd gyde dw y plydge.
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Tra llportolod yn prgyd愌 daedd sicwch ddblwr
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y cyff yapıl cầnig n funding
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a rhwyd eso.
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ConceptolodNewspnasant시� que elawr excited
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o sgயwch blynedd hun allboe swyddi eitau
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yn pisio nwsindeg yniousvarethnau un
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Mae hyn i fel unnig at i fel cl ceremonies cent探 pen plenshau dyr nhw dd歲na es i sifよ.
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Unnig deall yn gwwch ym 100 szige wedi gondol ar y caedol ynastanig dw mhwn hay dymod,
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besyn nigg ac i fi'n gyl infection pizza f readysp Definition a fwe pllys,
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const往ai edul Cyflenio barfa hebch y rhôlod Mae'r fillau usig
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yn5 yn hynne a fwaith am ran 4ain tri fubs ddyni.
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Ond ac y goadwę a newyddair sylf takeibus',
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gydol eichенно goadw eich Barn follow
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Lots of Fix.
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cael bod diwynsol cymdi Dynau dewath o fundraol gyrgyddiau, beth genres?
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Glic Ash kidneyid Ye Indeed, dysgu bell, bits i Khaledau o Denny o gyda,
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No i wedang traff blen���proof grad syddio bobl i unebodio.
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o dysair.
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So if I want is what I want is to walk to granchas to say, but I only want to do it
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if the sun is shining, then my desire and my belief will cause me to attempt to achieve
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that.
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The conditions under which the belief is true are the conditions under which actions
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based on its exceed.
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It follows that belief and therefore thought in my sense must be defined instrumentally
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in terms of possible success of actions.
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Now, I don't want to deny that this kind of relationship between belief and desire
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and action may be the right way to think of many actions in mental states, not just
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the kind that we credit to chickens, but those to human beings too.
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The relation between the success of our endeavors, the achievements of our objectives or goals
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and the truth of our beliefs must be an essential part of the whole story.
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But since it characterizes the truth conditions of a belief in terms of the success conditions
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of a desire or a want or it owes us an account of the satisfaction conditions of a desire.
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The satisfaction of a desire cannot simply be the cessation of a desire, as Russell once
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said, for a desire can cease even if it is not satisfied.
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Rather, the satisfaction of desire must be what is known as its fulfillment, bringing
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about a certain condition.
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But if bringing about this condition cannot be understood except in terms of the truth
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of a proposition, then this is what we were originally trying to explain.
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The problem I think is especially acute when the desire is concerned desires to find
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out something for its own sake.
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For in this case, the satisfaction of a desire just is the acquisition of a true belief.
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We're moving around in a very small circle.
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I think success semantics has a lot to be said for it, but I doubt whether it's the whole
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story, since I doubt whether it can have anything informative to say about the pursuit
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of knowledge for its own sake.
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So I'll put it to one side here without having pretended to have refuted it.
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So at this stage, it might be objected that the line of thought I've been pursuing has
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ignored the obvious difference between human and animal thought, the fact that our thought
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unlike theirs is expressed in language.
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Of course, this is an obvious difference.
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I think here we should ignore the evidence from so-called linguistic apes.
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For the purposes of this lecture, I want to ignore this.
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According to one recent authority, it's mostly anecdotal lacking in systematic detail
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and often involves overinterpretation.
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In any case, what's uncontroversial is that we are the only species who develop language
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in the course of normal, ontogenetic development.
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What's the significance of this difference for our understanding of thought?
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Does language simply make possible a more complex kind of thought, or is there some difference
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of kind that language provides?
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Descartes is famous for having denied thought to animals, partly on the grounds that they
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could not speak.
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Descartes Cambridge contemporary Henry Moore called this an intonisein and murderous view.
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In the 20th century, Donald Davidson himself, hardly a natural Cartesian, agreed with Descartes.
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Davidson's idea was that to be a thinker is to be the interpreter of the thought and speech of another,
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which essentially involves employing a language.
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So non-linguistic animals cannot think.
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So why did he think this?
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So Davidson's argument focuses on what it is to have a belief.
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It's based on two assumptions.
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First, that in order to have a belief, one must have the concept of belief.
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And second, that to have the concept of belief, or must have language.
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Very simple.
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Argument, with just a lot of assumptions packed into the premises.
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It's an obvious consequence of this, that any creature which has beliefs must have a language.
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The more detailed line of thought is that to have the concept of belief requires mastering the distinction between how things are and how things seem.
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Davidson argues that language would suffice for making this distinction and conjectures that nothing else would make it.
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He doesn't claim to have proved that nothing else would make it, but conjectures that nothing else would.
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So Davidson's argument is controversial and it's persuaded few people.
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In particular, the premise that one can only have beliefs if one has the concept of belief is crucially unsupported.
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And without that, there is no reason to accept his conclusion.
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And no reason to deny thought to non-linguistic animals.
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In the relevant sense, a belief can be a simple representational state,
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a state that just registers a condition of the environment.
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And that's a state which Ramsey's chicken can certainly have.
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We could call the chicken's belief, the belief that catapult is a poisonous, if we like.
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But this does not require that we attribute to the chicken the concept of poison.
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Calling this a belief is just a way of indicating that the chicken represents the world in a way that guides its actions
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and in a way that can be correct or incorrect.
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In order to have this belief, the chicken need have no beliefs about its beliefs.
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For example, it need not be surprised if it eats a caterpillar and does not have an unpleasant experience.
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It need not discover that it was wrong. It just moves on, updating its representations accordingly.
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Davidson argued that being surprised requires that one distinguish between how one previously thought the world was and how one now discovers it is.
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I think Davidson is right about this, but he's wrong to think that being a believer requires that one is capable of surprised.
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However, although I think Davidson's argument fails, it contains something which gives us a clue as to how to answer our question.
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What does language add to thought? Or what kind of thought does language make possible?
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Davidson argued that having the concept of belief involved making the distinction between how things seem and how they are.
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This amounts to having the concept of error.
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And it turns out that there is evidence that although apes can form beliefs about mental states, there is no evidence that they have anything like the concept of error.
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In a series of striking experiments, Brian Hare, Joseph Cole and Michael Thomas Sallow, provided evidence that chimpanzees can know what other chimpanzees can see.
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Now, there's a complex series of experiments, but let me summarize the basic idea.
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The essence of the experiment involved a dominant and a subservient chimpe and two different situations.
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The first situation, food was placed excessively in front of the subservient chimpe and in full view of the dominant chimpe.
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The subservient chimpe did not move towards the food.
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In the second situation, an opaque barrier was placed between the dominant chimpe and the food so that the food could not be seen by the dominant.
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In this case, the subservient chimpe took the food.
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The irresistible explanation is that in the second situation, the subservient chimpe knew that the dominant ape could not see the food.
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This is one of many, many kinds of experiments with this particularly brilliant, I think.
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In 1978, David Premack and Guy Woodruff asked the question, does the chimpanzee have a theory of mind?
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It seems to me that these kinds of experiments, among others, indicate that we should give an affirmative answer to the question.
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So long as we do not build too much into the term theory, having a theory of mind in this sense is just having a conception or representation of the mental states of other creatures.
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But these experiments also suggest something about what kind of theory of mind the chimps have.
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The chimps have beliefs about what other chimps can know or see.
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But, and this is the point I'd like to stress, there's no evidence that they have any beliefs about what other chimps believe.
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What's the difference?
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So the classic test for testing what's known as theory of mind in psychology is known as the false belief test.
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Let me give a very simple version of this test, too, which I'm sure we're familiar to many people here.
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So children are told a story, so this is testing whether children have the idea of a mental state up to about age 4 or 5.
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Children are told a story illustrated by dolls or by human experimenters, in which let's say you've got character A in the story, put something, say a marble, into a box, in the view of the other character B.
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Character B then leaves the room, and while character B is out of the room, A removes the marble and hides it somewhere else.
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When B returns, the child is asked, the child who's been watching this whole thing is asked, where does B think the marble is?
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Above a certain age, about 4 or thereabouts, children give the right answer, that is to say B thinks the marble is in the box.
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There's B left the room before the marble was moved.
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Younger children often answer that B thinks the marble is where A hit it.
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In short, they have no understanding that B is in error, or has a false belief about what's going on. That's what's called the false belief test.
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And this is now a standard test for whether, often said whether children have a theory of mind, what it seems to me to be a test of is whether children have a conception.
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Theory of mind can mean other things that are irrelevant to this particular issue.
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Now the interesting thing is that there's no evidence as far as I know that apes can pass the false belief test, and there's a lot of evidence that they can't.
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Chimps seem to have beliefs about the mental states of other chimps, if the tomasello and hair experiments are right.
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But they don't pass the false belief test, so how should this be explained?
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I think that the distinction we need here is the distinction between ignorance and error.
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The subordinate chimps in hair's experiment knew that the dominant chimps could not see the food. It was ignorant of this fact.
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There's no evidence that they show any awareness of the mental state of being correct or incorrect.
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The mental states that this experimental paradigm reveals are what we might call relational mental states,
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knowing, seeing, wanting, that relate the thinker to things in their environment, and in a certain sense then cannot be wrong.
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Beliefs on the other hand are the kind of things that can be wrong.
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But there's no evidence that chimps can show any awareness of these kind of states in their fellow chimps.
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So, unlike the chimps conception, the child's maturing conception of mind introduces a representation of error.
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What is it to represent someone as being an error?
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At the very least, it involves a recognition by one creature that the world is not the way the other creature represents it as being.
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The ability to hold these two representations in your mind, how the other represents something, and how it really is, is one of the things I say that distinguishes human infants from a human being.
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And the other thing that I think is the fact that the human adult chimps are nearest relatives.
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It's clear that the way mature humans normally represent others as being correct or incorrect is ensuring agreement or ascent or by using the words for these things, correct, incorrect, or the words true and false.
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But sometimes I think actually only philosophers use these words and philosophers are the sort of people who will say that's false in a normal conversation and people outside philosophy think that this is an insult.
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Because the falsity implies some kind of attempt to deceive or lie, but all the philosophers mean when they say that's false is they mean it's not true or I don't agree.
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So, if you ever need to interpret a philosopher, bear that in mind.
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But this suggests to me that Davidson was on the right track to think that there is a link between having the concept of belief and having a language.
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But the link is this, it's when a creature has a language that it can easily and systematically represent the beliefs of others as being correct or incorrect.
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Children can do it at the age of four or five. Without language it's very hard to see how they could do this. Very hard I say, I don't say impossible, but like Davidson I don't see any other way at the moment how it can be done.
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The significance of language on this few of things is not simply that it allows us to communicate or even that it allows a more sophisticated kind of communication, although both these things are true.
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The other extra thing that language gives us is that it facilitates and gives us some mechanism to articulate the correctness and incorrectness of the thoughts of others.
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So far I've claimed that one of the things that distinguishes us from apes is the fact that we have the concept of belief and therefore the concepts of truth and error and they do not, although they do represent the mental states of others.
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I've also claimed that language facilitates our representation of the correctness of thoughts of others. I'd now like to connect this with my earlier theme of the desire for knowledge for its own sake.
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To want to know something for its own sake is not to want it because it's true, if because it's true those words is supposed to be an intelligible answer to the question why do you want to know that.
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My colleague Jane Heel has put this point very well when discussing the idea that the disinterested search for truth might be a value in itself.
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When someone claims that information on a certain topic would be a good thing one can always ask why do you want to know that.
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An intelligible answer will have to say something about the particular subject matter. It cannot simply point back to the fact that the item in question would be a specimen of true belief.
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But Heel goes on just because being true can never be an intelligible answer to the question of why you want to know something.
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This cannot mean that an intelligible answer must always be to specify some practical end or project.
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Heel says to say that an answer to the question must be forked for coming, the answer to the question why do you want to know about that.
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It is not to say that the form of the answer must involve reference to some practical project in immediate or distant contemplation.
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Heel here points out the false contrast between the illusory idea that one might simply search for truth as such as if wanting to know something that was true could be an intelligible justification just because it's true.
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And the perfectly correct but I would argue essentially limited idea that our beliefs and desires serve our practical needs.
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There is as she indicates a third option, one might be interested in the truth about a certain subject matter for its own sake.
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When one's investigating a subject matter for its own sake one is not pursuing the truth just because it's true, but nonetheless one must think of oneself as governed by the norm or standard of getting it right.
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The amateur stargaser who plots the changing positions of the stars over the year is doing it because of an interest in the stars, but if asked to reflect on what he's aiming to do he should answer that he wants to find out how things are up there.
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And for a rational animal like our stargaser the way to do it is to try and avoid error.
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And if you're going to try and avoid error you'd better have the concept of error in the first place.
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We want to avoid error even in the simplest instrumental cases of course when we wonder whether we are right about where we left the food or whether we're right about where the predators are.
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We would be unable to wonder about these things if we did not have the concept of error.
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But once we have this concept it can govern our thinking about non instrumental subject matters too such as our interest in the stars.
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If we consciously wonder whether we're getting it right then we must be capable of consciously employing the concept of error.
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My conjecture then is that what is distinctive about human thought is the ability to pursue what I'll call epistemic goals, goals in knowledge independently of practical ends or the satisfaction of any desire except the desire to know.
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Human thinkers sometimes pursue knowledge for its own sake.
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If this were true then we would give a clear account of the striking difference I've marked between the thoughts of apes and the thoughts of humans.
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How might one go about testing such a conjecture? Of course conceptual or apriori arguments and connections are important but ultimately one will look for empirical evidence and actual studies of animal and human thought and try and understand them.
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Between 2005 and 2008 I was involved in an interdisciplinary research group on the origins of what is known as referential communication, that is communication with other animals about objects in the environment.
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This group was actually funded by those masters of linguistic communication, the European Union, as part of their obscurely titled framework program 7 subheading new and emerging science and technology.
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At Cronim nest and it was a pathfinder initiative under that heading. It's English Jim not as we know it.
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The other members of this group were animal psychologists working on dogs, parrots, dolphins and our closest relatives, chimps, bonobos and gorillas.
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My role in the project was to clarify and articulate the central concepts assumed by many of the psychological projects, in particular reference communication, intention and intentionality.
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A classic paradigm of referential communication in animals is the alarm calls of vervet monkeys as revealed in the pioneering studies of Cheney and Saifat.
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Vervet monkeys in the wild employ a number of distinct calls to indicate to other monkeys the presence of a different kind of predator.
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The hypothesis that this is referential communication is the hypothesis that these animals are communicating not about they are in a state, fear, anger or something like that.
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The other monkeys are aiming to inform other monkeys of something in their environment, which predator is coming, so that they will be able to take the appropriate evasive action, run up a tree if it's a leopard, hindered a bush if it's an eagle etc.
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The evidence for referential communication among animals is mixed.
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One team in the group that I was involved with went to watch gorillas in a nature reserve in Africa to study their gestures.
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They came back after they discovered after months there that gorillas make almost no gestures in the wild.
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The attempts to establish that parrots referentially communicate got, similarly, got nowhere.
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The extent to which dogs follow the gaze of humans is still disputed.
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But where there was evidence for referential communication it generally conformed to the vervet monkey model.
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Communication is geared to specific immediate goals and very domain specific tasks, getting food, avoiding predators, mating and so on.
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One topic, though, which is the phenomenon of pointing, is of particular interest to me here.
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In the study of non-linguistic communicative devices the study of pointing has unsurprisingly been the focus of a lot of research.
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They haven't got a lot to go on. Pointing is very important.
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Among human infants there are two kinds of pointing.
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This doesn't illustrate it but it has a famous pointing finger in the middle, so let's wrap it up there.
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Infants point when they want something or want an adult to give them something, juice.
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This is known as imperative pointing.
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But they also point when they want to share attention with an adult, to draw their attention to something in their environment.
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This is called declarative pointing. The kind of pointing we might think of as a child saying, look at that.
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What about animals?
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Dogs have a limited understanding of pointing as we shall see.
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And despite the name of this famous breed, there's little reason to think that they really point themselves.
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But attempts to discern pointing in apes has met with mixed success.
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There seems to be almost no evidence of pointing in the wild, although some apes who have lived with humans occasionally point imperatively.
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But, and this is the interesting fact for me, there's no evidence of declarative pointing.
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In apes, anywhere, at any time.
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As Michael Tomasello has put it, no apes in any kind of environment produce either for other apes or for humans, acts of pointing that serve functions other than the imperative functions.
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So there's no apes never do anything which can be understood as, you know, look at this.
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What should we conclude from this?
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Well, as a philosopher, I'm going to conclude things that are much more rash than psychologists might conclude.
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But it seems to me that declarative pointing is what one would expect if there were something like a psychological mechanism of pure curiosity.
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Unlike instrumental pointing, declarative pointing can manifest a sheer interest in something with no special need for practical upshot.
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As Aristotle said, not only with a view to action, but even when we are not going to do anything, we prefer seeing to everything else.
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I don't know if he's right about that, but he's right about the fact that even if we're not going to do anything, we enjoy seeing.
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My tentative conclusion then is that there's no evidence that non-human animals ever pursue a purely intellectual epistemic goal.
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Their investigation of the environments or always for the sake of satisfying some other immediate goal for food, shelter, sex, play, or to engage other animals in a collaborative pursuit of some of these goals.
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If pursuing a purely intellectually epistemic goal requires that one have the concept of error, as I've just argued, then the absence of the concept of error would go some way to explaining why this is so.
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What about the evidence for humans? If my point is that humans have some capacity which animals don't, everyone will agree that that in some sense, but the question is what it is.
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Then what would we expect will be evidence from humans as well as from other animals?
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The evidence for animals points in a negative direction. The evidence from humans comes, of course, partly from our own reflection on our own capacity.
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But the further theoretical question is this. Why do we have this capacity? How did it come about? Both in the sense, how does it develop in the life of an organism, as well as how did it come about in the development of the species?
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The developmental psychologist George Gage and Gage Chibra have recently proposed a novel theory of learning in human infants, which they call natural pedagogy.
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Their extensive experimental work on pre-linguistic infants strongly suggests that infants have an ability to learn very quickly what they call generic and cognitively opaque information.
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Information is generic, obviously enough, when it can be put to more than one use. Information is cognitively opaque when the infants have no idea what the function or purpose of what is being communicated is.
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They learn to do certain things by imitation, even when they are learning something that has no obvious point.
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Well, they just put the slide just to show that some of the glamour of experimental psychology are important.
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Well, an experiment, for example, infants learn to turn on a lamp with their heads by copying the experimenter.
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It turns out that the infants copy the experimenter whether or not the experimenter's hands are free.
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The interpretation is that the infant does not copy the experimenter only when the hands are occupied.
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It's simply copies, according to Gage and Chibra, because it has an innate capacity to recognize an occasion as one in which an adult is trying to communicate something to them.
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So infants are naturally sensitive on this view to certain situations as communication situations.
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And it's because of this that they are so fast at learning by imitating.
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It's this hypothesized innate capacity, which Gage and Chibra also say is an adaptation, this capacity to recognize these situations as communication situations that they call natural pedagogy.
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The natural pedagogy hypothesis has a couple of intriguing connections with the rather grand thesis I'm trying to defend in this lecture.
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For one thing, nothing like natural pedagogy has been discovered or hypothesized in apes, and it's famously difficult to train apes to do anything, and it takes a very long time to train them and it's very hard to train them to do anything generic.
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Dogs who have evolved alongside human beings do seem to be sensitive to human attempts to communicate, as we saw, by responding to pointing.
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For example, and it's interesting that wolves, even wolves that have been read by humans, do not do this.
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But the dog's sensitivity to these situations is limited in a very interesting way, and this piaja cob has nicely put it in dogs.
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The sensitivity to ostensive communicative signals, that's the Gage and Chibra idea, seems to be tied to particular individuals and primary hooked, primarily hooked to a particular object.
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The motivational system, whose goal is to satisfy human orders, it's not a very elegant sentence, but expresses exactly what is specific to the dogs.
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The infant's ability to recognize a communicative intentions is much more flexible across different contexts, and the information they learn is often cognitively opaque, that is, it's not tied to any particular practical activity or motivation.
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I don't think it's too fanciful to see a link here to the idea of the search for knowledge for its own sake, or maybe it is too fanciful, but this is my inaugural lecture, so I'll say it.
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If Gage and Chibra are right, and human infants have an innate capacity for the acquisition of cognitively opaque information, then could this capacity be the ontogenetic psychological basis for what I'm claiming to be distinctly human, the interest in knowledge for its own sake?
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That's my question.
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So I've been attempting to argue that, in a sense, Aristotle was right, we do naturally desire to know, and that we sometimes desire to know things for their own sake.
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We pursue epistemic goals, I've claimed, independently of their practical consequences, in itself, this claim might be obvious enough.
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The controversy comes in the claim that this is distinctively human, and in how the evidence is supposed to support the claim.
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I've argued that both philosophical considerations, for example, about what the concept of belief requires, and empirical evidence from animals and humans, support the thesis that the disinterested search for truth to use Jane's phrase might be what distinguishes us from other animals.
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Some might say that empirical evidence can never have any impact on a philosophical thesis, and that the only relevant considerations can be a priori or conceptual.
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It would be easier to evaluate the suggestion if its defenders were able to say a little bit more about what distinguishes the conceptual or the apriori.
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But in any case, it's hard to believe that what distinguishes us from animals should be something that can only be established conceptually.
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The approach taken here contrasts also with one inspired by Vickestein, whose writings have been taken, whether correctly or not, to support a kind of quietism or the fact that the truth is not.
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The conservatism about the mind, nothing we can learn about the brain or other animals in the wild or captivity, can tell us anything about the nature of our thought.
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I'm opposed both to this Vickesteinian view and to the apriori view. Since we cannot discern sharp boundaries between different realms of knowledge, we should take our ideas and evidence from wherever seems relevant, and it's a matter of judgment, what is relevant.
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To borrow the words of another former nightbridge professor, if we believe that philosophy might play an important part in making people think about what they are doing, then philosophy should acknowledge its connections with other ways of understanding ourselves.
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And if it insists on not doing so, it may seem in every sense quite peculiar.
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It's in the spirit of these remarks that I present my proposal to you this evening, and thank you very much for your attention.
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Thank you very much.