Re: [Wittrs] The anatomy of intentional action

  • From: kirby urner <kirby.urner@xxxxxxxxx>
  • To: wittrs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Sun, 26 Jun 2011 13:45:10 -0700

On Sun, Jun 26, 2011 at 10:22 AM, Wittr2Feed <
wittrs2feed@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

>
> ... now this is rather interesting:
> blog post:
>
> http://philosopherinthemirror.wordpress.com/2011/06/24/the-anatomy-of-intentional-action/
>
> article:
> http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1468-0017.2011.01421.x/pdf
>
>
>
I thought the last paragraph was interesting, in that the researchers
impute some unconscious or hidden mechanism to their human
subjects, given the subjects don't provide explanations that explain
the numbers as well as the researchers could.

The subjects are presumed to be explaining their answers based on
"introspection", an hypothesis that is not separately tested and
is more grammatical than empirical to begin with (a Wittgensteinian
angle).

Quoting:

Why are people so introspectively inaccurate in
this case? The fact is that our introspective
powers frequently prove to be limited, and we
often have little access to the unconscious and
automatic processes that shape our decisions
and judgments.

What if we said "only a few of the subjects actually bothered to
introspect in any way"?  Is that a valid move in their language
game?  What if one of the subjects is a psychologist and has
done a lot of reading of articles like this.  He's not introspecting,
he's remembering what he's read.

My own take on the matter is cognitive dissonance is set
up by the story itself, as we have a CEO who sees
environmental impact and profits as independent variables,
and who seems to buy off on an underling's quasi-
inarticulate proposal with incurious indifference.

The story does not describe a intelligent business related
interaction so much as a puppet show between idiots,
and this predisposes the listeners, Central Park sophisticates
in many cases, to feel vindictive towards such characters,
rather than any empathy.

These people in the story seem unlikable, because (a) they're
probably making way more money than they deserve and
(b) the boss is out to lunch, thinking environment and profit
can be that disconnected ("is he mentally ill?").  Doesn't he
know about customer loyalty and the fact that if word gets
out about this conversation he's risking financial ruin?  Why
did he let this anecdote be circulated?  Aren't these
psychologists behaving in a libelous fashion?

So when it comes time to render a judgment, the boss is
summarily dismissed as a "bad guy".  Even if the environment
was helped, the boss is a jerk at best, has no business being
in business most likely.

The underling sounds like a sycophant or preys on the boss's
ignorance.  The boss is like the pointy haired one in 'Dilbert'
and in fact the story sounds like it's straight out of a comic
book, but then it's being pandered to the public by
psychologists, so the real clowning is in their going off
and huddling over the data and making up these wild theories
about some introspectable mechanism, a cog works, like a
"mental factory".

That's what cognitive psychologists are often like:  heads
full of images of "mental machinery", projected against a
cultural canvas, a stamp of ethnicity (tells us little about
the mind in general, a lot about their quaint little beliefs).

Kirby
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