From: abulsari@abo.fi (Abhay Bulsari VT)
Subject: More on absurdity of the plant pain myth
Organization: Abo Akademi University
Date: Sat, 29 Aug 1992 06:23:59 GMT

This is originally 
from: altar@beaufort.sfu.ca (Ted Wayn Altar)
and saved and forwarded by Siva Prasad to me.
This text is valuable for newcomers.

          THE FALLACIES BEHIND THE PLANT PAIN ARGUMENT
 
~~ Many are destined to reason wrongly, others, not to reason at all; and
~~ others, to persecute those who do reason. (Voltaire)
 
 How, then, could anybody seriously entertain this humbug of plant pain?  Is it
 not remarkable that the most persistent and articulate of the anti-AR would
 forward such contentious and prima facie absurd claims.  But I guess it is not
 so remarkable if we keep in mind their dogged intent to debunk the claims of
 animal rights, seemingly no matter at what cost to good sense, rationality, or
 even established scientific fact.  Since, as we have seen, many would claim to
 be avowed ethical subjectivists, at least when it is convenient to do so, I
 guess we should not be surprised that rationality and intellect is merely made
 sullied handmaidens for advancing their quest to discredit the case for animal
 rights.
 
 What follows, dear reader, are five of the common flaws of reason masquerading
 as arguments on behalf of plant rights.
 
 1. Error #1: THE ARGUMENTUM AD IGNORANTIUM
 
 In the name of open-mindedness, we are asked to take seriously the claim of
 plant pain because the disbelievers and the incredulous simply cannot prove
 that plants have no felt pain, or that our knowledge of such things as with
 many other things, is simply incomplete and uncertain.  For instance, it has
 been said that:
 
 "The simple fact that "cruelty" cannot be DIS-proved introduces reasonable 
  doubt into this argument."
 
 Here we have the presumption of innocence found in a court of law being
 inappropriately transferred to how scientific theories are to be established
 or seriously entertained.  Normally, we would argue on BEHALF of a scientific
 theory by presenting evidence for it, not by pointing to our current lack of
 evidence unless one is arguing AGAINST a theory.  The plant pain promoters
 would turn the logic of scientific justification on its head.
 
 Now, in a general or ultimate sense it is TRIVIALLY TRUE that there is no
 final "proof" against such wild notions, but then there is also no ultimate
 proof against unicorns or ghosts.  It is a well known INFORMAL FALLACY to
 conclude from a lack of disproof for something's existence that it therefore
 exists or must be taken as a serious possibility for existence.  That is to
 say, it is simply false to argue that a proposition is true simply on the
 basis that it has not been proved false.  The idea here is to try to persuade
 people of a proposition which avails itself of facts and reasons the falsity
 or inadequacy of which is not readily discerned.
 
 This flawed logic is technically referred to by logicians as the "ARGUMENTUM
 AD IGNORANTIUM" (argument from ignorance).  This is a logically invalid
 argument, one that would exploit our common ignorance of things.  Now, you
 might ask, why shouldn't we permit speculative theories to enter into our
 foundation of ethics. Consider, however, the following example:
 
 "no breath of scandal has ever touched the mayor, therefore she is MUST be
 incorruptibly honest".
 
 Maybe she is and maybe she is not, but our ignorance does not establish the
 truth or falsity of the conclusion that she is incorruptibly honesty.  It is
 simply unfair to employ our ignorance as the sole basis of support for some
 social/public concern.
 
 Similarly, what we DO KNOW about how animals experience pain and suffering is
 of relevance for a system of public ethics.  What we do know about plants is
 that they DO NOT HAVE a nervous system nor a structure at the cellular level
 designed to process information in a manner that would conceivably enable a
 conscious suffering of pain or discomfort.  What we do NOT YET KNOW about the
 workings of plants, of how consciousness in general is enabled, or of how the
 universe as a whole works, is simply not relevant.  It is one thing to plea
 for open-mindedness, it is quite another to promote intellectual promiscuity
 under the same banner. 
 
 2. Error #2:  EQUIVOCATION OF TERMS TO BOOTLEG A FALSE CONCLUSION
 
 To understand this very slippery and flawed reasoning that logicians refer to
 as the informal fallacy of EQUIVOCATION, consider the following example:
 
 "The end of a thing is its perfection;
  death is the end of life;
  hence, death is the perfection of life"
 
 Note the two senses of the word "end" and how the last part of the sentence
 confuses them.  The word "end" may mean either "goal" or "last event".  Both
 meanings are legitimate, but to confuse the two in an argument is a fallacy. 
 In the example above we have two legitimate premises but a false conclusion
 that does not follow from the premises, unless we remove the equivocation and
 rewrite, say, the first premise as:
 
 "The LAST EVENT of a thing is its perfection".
 
 But such a premise is patently false.
 
 This is exactly the kind of flawed argumentation that is occurring with our
 promoters of plant pain.  For instance, the term "sentient" is deemed
 applicable to plants given ONE of its meanings to simply be the
 "responsiveness to sensory stimuli". After arguing further that what plants do
 at a molecular level can be deemed a "sensory response", even thought they do
 not possess specialized organizations of tissue called sense organs (see error
 #3 below), they would then have us accept the designation that plants are
 "sentient".
 
 Let us, for the sake of argument, accept their twisted meaning of the term of
 "sentient" to simply mean a functional reaction on a biochemical or cellular
 level to noxious or warning stimuli.  In this sense, they will argue that a
 plant can be said to be "sentient".  But at a different juncture they would
 then have us conclude that because plants are indeed "sentient" they also
 "feel" tissue injury or assault as "unpleasant"!  What the wily plant pain
 promoters have done is simply bootleg a false conclusion by switching between
 two quite difference meanings of the word "sentient".  Permit me to lay it
 out:
 
 Premise    1:  Plants are responsive to "sense" impressions
 Premise    2:  As defined in the dictionary, anything responsive to sense 
 	        impressions are sentient
 Conclusion 1:  Plants are sentient
 
 Note that premise 1 employs the word "sense" in a very restrictive manner to
 mean, for the plant pain promoters, "reactions to certain stimuli".  Now, for
 them to jump from this minimal and idiosyncratic usage of "sentient" to the
 issue of plant pain, our wily abusers of ordinary language IMPLICITLY are
 forwarding something like the following argument.
 
 Conclusion 1:  Plants are sentient
 Premise    3:  Sentient beings are conscious of sense impressions
 Conclusion 2:  Plants are conscious of sense impressions
 Premise    4:  To be conscious of a noxious stimuli is felt as unpleasant
 Conclusion 3:  Noxious stimuli to plants is unpleasant
 
 From unpleasant we then arrive at plant pain.  Of course, our plant promoters
 will protest that they never said that plants have "consciousness" or "feel"
 pain, but only that they respond in a manner similar to how we respond to
 pain.  Well, if that be truly the only claim and no more, then there is simply
 no relevance whatsoever of such an idiosyncratic notion plant "pain" to the
 real ethical issue of animals suffering from felt pain. If it is not
 irrelevant, then we have either one of 2 results:
 
 1. Equivocating on usage of "sentient" to bootleg a false conclusion. 
    This is a logical, not a semantic, fallacy.
 2. Redefining what ordinary people mean by pain and suffering so that these
    terms no longer refer to a conscious awareness of pain/suffering.  Now we 
    have the error of irrelevant re-definition. This brings us to the next 
    error of reasoning.

 3. Error #3:  LOGOMACHY OR "LET'S PLAY RE-DEFINITION"
 
 For most people, "sentient" designates the capacity to feel. That is, it would
 refer to a mental state, not a mere set of behaviours.  The Oxford English
 Dictionary list 3 core meanings, of which the plant pain promoters will
 selectively choose only one, it being the most minimal definition, namely:
 
 "def 2:  Phys.  Of organs or tissues: responsive to sensory stimuli."
 
 Of course, they do not look any further.  If they were, they might be
 surprised to discover that the word "sensory" refers to the organs of "sense"
 or belonging to "sensation"  In turn, the words "sense" and "sensation" refers
 to the organs or mental states of perception, of psychical affection, of
 consciousness, etc.  Indeed, it is designated right at the beginning that
 "sensation" is "now commonly the subjective element in the operation of the
 senses; psychical feeling" (OED).  The meanings that predominate refer to
 mental states, and as we have noted, all mental states are marked by
 consciousness.  Yet, our plant pain promoters ignore these obvious conventions
 of ordinary word meanings and would legislate their own.  And what motivates
 this re-definition of our terms?  Certainly, not to promote clarity or
 scientific accuracy.  If plants have "pain" but no consciousness then what are
 we to make of such muddy oxymorons as that of an "unconscious pain" or an
 "unfelt pain"?
 
 If our promoters of plant pain weren't so blunt serious, this might all be
 very funny.  Indeed, good puns and amusing gaffs result from an incongruous
 and inapposite word usage.  For example, someone once stole the seats from all
 the toilets in a Canadian RCMP station.  The official press release by the
 Mounties said that they still had nothing to go on.  Methinks our pain
 promoters also have nothing to go on.
 
 4. Error #4: REMOTE PARALLELS DO NOT MAKE FOR IDENTITIES
 
 Now, we have been entertained by our plant pain promoters of some interesting
 facts like that of oak trees diverting some of its activity to an increase
 production of tannic acid in respond to, say, a Gypsy moth invasion.  We are
 informed that:
 
 "There IS a parallel here, and the relative complexity of the sensory and
 interpretive mechanisms is irrelevant."
 
 The cruel fact remains, however, that PARALLELS DO NOT MAKE FOR IDENTITIES. 
 Indeed, how something is achieved is just as important as what is being
 achieved in order to properly attribute there to be identity.  For animals,
 conscious motivation to avoid pain figures very large in how they would avoid
 or mitigate pain.  Pain is not something that is unfelt. It makes no sense to
 speak of "unfelt, unconscious pain", yet our plant pain promoters will insist
 upon there being a morally relevant parallel.
 
 To illustrate this point about identity, please permit me to work from a
 different and more familiar example.  Now, it has been argued that computers
 "think" as evidence by their capacity to manipulate symbols.  What shall we
 make of this?.
 
 Searle's (1980) well-known Chinese room argument, however, at least makes
 clear that computers as syntactic engines are not "understanders" of language
 even if they should one day be successful at translating from Chinese to
 English back to Chinese.  The subjective life and mind accompanying a person's
 performances would seem to involve more than the computer's superior
 efficiency at manipulating data according to sequences of algorithm-governed
 operations.  To even here speak of "rule- governed operations" is misleading
 since it suggests we can talk of these machines under the description of them
 "following rules".  Shanker (1987) makes the case that this violates our
 logical grammar of rule-following being a normative rather a mechanical action
 and that it is an action predicated on some necessary minimal "understanding"
 of the rule.  Due to the literal ascription implied by this trope about
 computers, we are lapsing into the same kind of conceptual confusion that
 would occur if we were to literally ascribe to the members of a meeting that
 they were following Robert's rules of order even though they were ignorant of,
 or did not understand the rules.  If we were to say such a thing, it would
 only be FIGURATIVE for simply saying that the members just happen to be
 inadvertently or unknowingly abiding by Robert's rules.  Notwithstanding the
 generosities of idealization and wishful rhetoric, the computer analogue still
 remains a metaphor and one that too often invites a misleading
 anthropomorphism (Dreyfus, 1987).
 
 Indeed, as the problems of the computer metaphor are becoming more widely
 appreciated and, as Michie (1982) notes, the former heuristic value of the
 metaphor is being replaced by more exact and fruitful formalizations and
 mathematics, the metaphor is beginning to become less frequent in the
 scientific prose of AI science itself.  While anthropomorphic speculation
 inaugurated both the animal and computer models, it is a circumspect
 anthropomorphism tempered with naturalism that now appears to be the most
 fruitful approach for the understanding of animals (Griffin, 1981), but it is
 an "objectivist", or more precisely an electrical-mechanical and
 symbolic-mathematical prose, that is more fitting for AI.  With respect to
 plants, the language of mental states is simply addleheaded and daft.
 
 5.  Error #5:  OVER-INTERPRETATION OF ESTABLISHED FACTS
 
 Now, we have been told that "there IS some evidence which shows that plants
 are "sentient", in the broad sense of the word." Hmm., more likely the narrow
 and twisted sense of the word.  But again, all we have is simply the
 interesting but morally irrelevant facts about plants reacting to certain
 noxious stimuli, or to the signalling molecules of other plants under attack. 
 We are then asked about how this might be different from our own sense of
 smell.  They would ask, "is this not equivalent to plant sensation or of a
 plant sensing its environment?"  By now, we should be able to readily reply
 that such usage simply stretches our ordinary definitions of the word "sense". 
 Mere behavioural reactions and avoidance to certain stimuli is insufficient
 for the attributions of mental states like that of perceptions and knowing
 sensation.  Again, we have either an equivocation of usage to bootleg false
 conclusion, or we simply have a re-defninition of our ordinary meanings to
 something idiosyncratic and  morally irrelevant.  HOW the plants do what they
 do is just as important as the function of what those reactions subserve.
 
 Here is an example of over-interpretation that was due to this error of only
 observing the end result and not the means.  It was once thought that army
 ants were comprised of a strategic military column marching through the forest
 with direction, purpose and foresight.  Well, it turns out that these ants
 simply follow the smell of the ants in front, and in turn the leading ants
 simply, in a somewhat random manner, lurch or are, pushed forward.  If these
 ants were to be placed on a flat surface and the leading ants were to make a
 circle back to the rump end of the column, the marching column of ants would
 simply go around and around until they died.  Where is the intentional
 purpose, planning and foresight?  There is no scouting ahead of the terrain,
 no deliberative leadership, just a very simply mechanism that under normal
 conditions in the uneven terrain of the forest works very effectively to keep
 the ants ever moving forward in search new food supplies.  The key point is
 that for many centuries people over-interpreted what was going on simply
 because they only observed the overt functional behaviours and not the means
 and enabling conditions for those behaviours.
 
 6.  THE BELIEF IN NON-EXISTENT PAINS.  :-)
 
 Patient reader, permit me to finish with one last observation. Hypochondriacs
 are, as you know, people who believe in pains that simply don't exist.  This
 much they have in common with our plant pain promoters.  Of course,
 hypochondriacs also are easily persuaded that they must themselves have what
 even the most superficial description of an illness would describe.  I'll
 leave it to the reader to decide if this parallel also applies to our plant
 pain promoters.  Now, there is the amusing story of one such person who after
 hearing a lecture on diseases of the kidney, immediately phoned his doctor. 
 The good doctor patiently explained that in that particular disease there were
 no pains or discomfort of any kind, whereupon our hypochondriac gasped, "I
 knew it, my symptoms exactly!"  :-)
 
 REFERENCES
 
 Dreyfus, Hubert L. (1987).  Misrepresenting human intelligence. In Rainer Born
 (Ed.), Artificial intelligence: The case against.  London: Croom Helm.
 Griffin, Donald R. (1981).  The question of animal awareness: Evolutionary
 continuity of mental experience (2nd ed.). California: William Kaufmann. 
 Another good book that I would highly recommend. 
 Michie, Donald (1982).  Machine intelligence and related topics. London:
 Gordon & Breach Science Publishers. 
 Searle, J. (1980).  Minds, brains, and programs.  Behavioral and Brain
 Sciences, 3, 417-457. 
 Shanker, S. G. (1987).  The decline and fall of the mechanist metaphor.  In
 Rainer Born (Ed.), Artificial intelligence: The case against.  London: Croom
 Helm. 
 Taylor, Charles (1964).  The explanation of behaviour.  London: Routledge &
 Kegan Paul.
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