I read Sellars' 'Some Reflection on Language Games' recently and am trying to work out some of its concepts. As always seems to be the case, there are connections between this philosophical essay and a discussion on another thread 'Knowing How v. Knowing That' where it was asserted that, e.g., circus bears learn to ride bicycles through stimulus and response, whereas people learn such things by utilizing instructions, rules, etc..
The problem laid out by Sellars in the essay is essentially this:
We learn to play the 'game' of language by being given rules to obey - instructions.
To obey a rule presupposes knowing the language in which that rule is communicated - a meta-language to the language we are learning. But then, how do we learn this metalanguage? By metalanguage 'B,' - and how do learn 'B'? - by metalanguage 'C', etc..
Since such a theory of language learning involves an infinite regress of learning metalanguages, there must be something else involved besides obeying rules.
So, there is an initial learning process much like the cycling bear, where humans learn 'from scratch' so to speak. They 'follow' (rather than 'obey') the rules of the game without knowing the rules.
We see such behavior in, for instance, honey bees. They engage in very elaborate behavior that fits into an overall structure. Every action of the bee seems to be a move in the game - to conform to the overall structure as worked out by evolution. However, every step the bee makes is not 'obeying a rule,' but simply 'performing' as a part in an overall system.
It seems as though the bee is 'intending' this, or doing such and such 'for a purpose' - all these intentional words make sense in our meta-description of the bees' activities, although we know that bees don't really 'intend' things - right?
So, is this a valid argument also for the proposition that human 'intentional states' (beliefs, desires, feelings) are nothing but linguistic fictions and that all of our activities, at bottom, are just layer upon layer of stimulus/response patterns like the cycling bear or dancing bee? What does that say about our ideas of consciousness?
Early humans used the same hand axes for millions of years with astoundingly little change or improvement. Is this because they were stuck in an initial position of pattern following? Did they have beliefs and desires? Another way to put it, did human progress come about mainly because of the evolution of the brain, or was there a huge leap accomplished upon the invention of language?