From: altar@beaufort.sfu.ca (Ted Wayn Altar)
Subject: Plant Pain 2
Organization: Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, B.C., Canada
Date: Fri, 18 Dec 1992 16:57:45 GMT



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!"  :-)


                                          ted


  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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