[lit-ideas] Fooling Trivers
- From: Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Thu, 13 Mar 2014 20:57:54 -0400 (EDT)
Fool's gold
Trivers fooled.
Trivers wrote an essay:
Fooling yourself the better to fool others.
Some variants include:
Trivers fools himself (or 'his-self', in the dialect of Nottinghamshire,
which sounds more logical to me than the Queen's English).
Trivers is fooling himself the better -- to fool others (than Trivers)
and so on.
Trivers should distinguish between Trivers' fooling Trivers (the better)
and Trivers fooling others.
----
In a message dated 3/13/2014 6:09:57 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time,
donalmcevoyuk@xxxxxxxxxxx writes:
"Trivers references neither DF Pears nor KR Popper, neither Wittgenstein
nor Whitehead."
Good. I should see WHO he references, though.
(As St. Augustine wrote -- "Confessions" -- "life is in the referencing").
McEvoy goes on:
"[Trivers] deals with – even disposes of – any so-called philosophical
objection to the notion of self-deception, as follows [p.8]: “What exactly is
self-deception?"
I love the 'exactly'.
As opposed, alla Williamson: what is, fuzzily, self-deception?
(Williamson, "Vagueness", Cambridge Studies in Philosophy).
McEvoy goes on quoting Trivers:
"Some philosophers have imagined that self-deception is a contradiction in
terms, impossible at the outset. How can the self deceive the self?"
McEvoy disagrees with this, and I too. Although I do find it something
inadequate about the self deceiving the self. Grice wrote about 'the self' in
1941: "Personal Identity"
"I fell from the stairs".
-- i.e. my body.
"I am remembering a nice memory" (i.e. my mind).
He prefers to speak of the analysis of "I" rather than of the analysis of
'the self', but most philosophers disagree.
McEvoy goes on quoting from Trivers:
"Does that require that the self knows what it does not know (p/~p)?"
I wonder if the "/" is meant to signify 'incompatibility'.
Surely
p v ~p
is analytic and a tautology. And
p & ~p
is analytic and a contradiction.
The qualification with "K" ('know') can only complicate things, as we
(Omar K., Donal McEvoy and Speranza) know, since we don't know what 'know' is,
unless we are Gettier. It can't just be justified true belief. But
supposing Trivers does think that to know is to believe, in a justified and
true
way. Then he is referring to
Trivers believes (in a justified and true way) that p.
and
Trivers believes that non-p.
Or something.
I would think there are easier ways to deal with 'self-deception'. We do
need a ground to reality:
p -- it is raining.
If Trivers believes that it is raining, that's fine.
If it is raining and Trivers believes that it is not raining, he is
deceived (by the circumstances, or the weather).
If he thinks that it is raining and tells Trivers that it is not raining,
Trivers is deceiving Trivers.
Since
Trivers = Trivers
the above may account for 'self-deception'. Or not.
McEvoy goes on to quote from Trivers:
"This contradiction is easily side-stepped by defining the self as the
conscious mind, so that self-deception occurs when the conscious mind is kept
in the dark."
This seems to be D. F. Pears' point, who studied the contradictions of the
Freudian slips of Freud's tongue. Pears's book is entitled, "Motivated
irrationality". For there is a motivation for the 'super-ego' as it were to
deceive the 'ego' about what the 'id' thinks or feels. Or something.
McEvoy continues to quote from Trivers:
"True and false information may be simultaneously stored, only with the
truth stored in the unconscious mind and the falsehood in the conscious."
Well, while McEvoy may disagree with this, I, with Grice, don't think that
false 'information' is information at all (The oddity of: "Columbus was
informed by the Queen of Spain that the earth was flat, and thus, that his
campaign would lead to a certain death, when reaching the precipice of the
end of the earth").
McEvoy goes on to quote from Trivers:
"Sometimes this involves activities of the conscious mind itself, such as
active memory suppression,"
I'm glad Trivers focuses on memory or chooses the dimension of memory
since for most philosophers (notably Locke, Grice, and QUINTON), it is memory
that defines personhood -- or the self, or the "I".
McEvoy continues to quote from Trivers:
"but usually the processes themselves are unconscious yet act to bias what
we are conscious of….So the key to defining self-deception is that true
information is preferentially excluded from consciousness and, if held at
all, is held in varying degrees of consciousness."
This sounds like Cyber-speak and I should elaborate -- at some other time!
Of course, it is part of the analysis of what it means to say:
Trivers is fooling Trivers.
I.e.
Trivers is fooling himself.
Note that the point of his essay is to provide steps to 'fool yourself the
better', which implicates that there are DEGREES of 'self-fooling'.
McEvoy comments:
"while I agree “self-deception” is a valid enough notion rather than a
logically incoherent one, I do not agree that we should identify the self
with “the conscious mind” (even if “the conscious mind” is vital for full
selfhood, we need not posit an identity)."
Good. And I can see that McEvoy's views here are informed by Popper and
Eccles, rather than Grice or Quinton (Grice's and Quinton's essays were
brilliantly edited by J. Perry in "Personal Identity", along with classic
excerpts by Locke and Reid).
McEvoy goes on:
"More generally, we may need many distinct, complex models of the ways “
self-deception” works – models that are alert to the truth that we can (at
present) only make primitive guesses as to how different facets of the
conscious mind interact with different facets of the unconscious mind, though
we
may guess these inter-relations are highly complex (after all, even a
mental state that is not one of “self-deception” is the product of highly
complex processes)."
Too true.
And the complexities are increased when we play with the 1st and 3rd
person perspectives. For one thing is for Trivers to provide an analysis of
his
self-fooling.
"I know I am fooling myself when I say that p".
And another thing is to take a 3rd person behaviouristic perspective from
which we can see and understand the ways in which Trivers fools himself --
and how.
I would grant that there are degrees:
Trivers fools himself badly.
Trivers is now fooling himself in a better way.
---- This should lead us to "Trivers fools himself the better".
---
Never find fooling others -- no big philosophical question there.
McEvoy continues:
"The basic model of self-deception may be that (somehow) the mind tends to
accept some falsehood in preference to “the truth” – but detailed
explanation for this may involve myriad factors."
Indeed. Sort of G. E. Moore's paradox -- as he says to himself, or thinks
to himself, as I prefer:
"It is raining, but I don't believe it".
-----
McEvoy goes on:
"There may be cases where “self-deception” involves dismissing “the truth”
, others where “the truth” is simply ignored, others where “the truth”
is suppressed, others where “the truth” is missed – and different
admixtures of conscious and unconscious mental states may be involved in
various
cases."
Too true. But in all cases we seem to need something like an anchorage to
reality. What we with Grice may call 'p', it is raining.
The truth is that it is raining.
It is true that it is raining.
Trivers may fail to believe that it is raining. This may NOT necessarily
count as fooling himself.
But it MAY.
Without an appeal to a level of reality independent from the agent's
conceptions (thoughts, beliefs and desires), it's difficult how to
conceptualise
things.
Trivers thinks he doesn't like peaches and cream.
But he does.
He is fooling himself.
Here the appeal to belief is less evident. It's more like an appeal to
desire.
Hence the psi-operator that Grice uses, since deception (and
self-deception) can apply to cases of belief AND desire.
But in the case of self-deception about a desire, it's an intrusive BELIEF
that gets in the way -- a false belief, maybe.
Trivers desires peaches and cream.
Trivers thinks he doesn't desire peaches and cream.
In this case, the 'p' is: "Trivere desires peaches and cream".
It may be best to represent desires as that-clauses.
Trivers desires that he should go to lecture at Oxford.
But he believes he does not desire this. Trivers is fooling himself.
Trivers thinks that by fooling the better, he can fool others. For if he
convinces himself that while he desires that he lectures at Oxford, he does
not believe he desire this, he may end up believing that he does not desire
it, and end up not desiring it.
This is something like anti-akrasia, practical.
Akrasia is usually taken in a practical way, as sort of self-deception
about one's desires. Exactly Trivers's point about Davidson, say, and his idea
that weakness of the will is NOT possible (but cfr. Grice's reply,
"Davidson on weakness of the will").
McEvoy goes on:
"It perhaps helps here to see that “the truth” is seldom or never
manifest: so our critical stance (or lack of) towards “the truth” may be
indispensable to whether we recognise “the truth”. It helps to accept that what
is
“the truth” may diverge from what is “useful” or convenient given our
aims and preferences and values, and so our commitment to such aims etc. (i.e.
our ‘biases’) may distort cognition as regards “the truth”."
I agree. This is a bit like Moore's naturalistic fallacy, only different.
For after all pragmatists worth quoting would define, as per matter of
stipulation:
the useful =df the true
cfr. The Taming of the True
From a pragmatist conception of truth, self-deception is no big deal. It's
only for a realist alla Aristotle or Grice that it is. And while truth may
not always be manifested, that was what it was for the Greeks.
If there was one word that Grice revered was 'alethic', coined by Von
Wright. The realm of the alethic is the realm of the true. And for the Greeks,
'alethic' was a negative word, formed from 'a-' and 'lethic': what is true
is what is re- or de-vealed.
As it were.
McEvoy goes on:
"It helps to see that we are prone to believe what, at some level, it suits
us to believe (unless we critically guard against this proclivity, as
science seeks to do [Trivers rightly remarks that scientific method may be
regarded as a set of anti-“self-deception” strategies])"
Well, then perhaps he should read some Lakatos, for Lakatos's contribution
to the philosophy of science is that scientists can be the most
self-deceived. There are research programmes, and protective belts that
indicate what
should count as evidence. Lakatos, quoting from Henson, would speak of
'theory-laden observation'. So, it may well be that a quantum-theorist who is
getting his PhD degree from Princeton HAS to believe certain things or
pretend to believe them if he wants to be counted among the illuminati. Or not.
------
It was different perhaps with Socrates. When he said,
"I know I don't know diddle"
he couldn't be self-deceiving, could he?
----
McEvoy goes on:
"and this means we are prone to underplay the counter-evidence to what it
suits us to believe: hence ‘confirmation bias’ and a host of other
uncritical tendencies." ... "Including that building block of ‘inductive’
make-believe: the idea that a positive instance is (inductive and positive)
supporting evidence – an idea that needs to be replaced with the critical view
that a positive instance is at best an example where the theory in question
has passed a test, and what we must consider is whether the theory passes the
most severe tests we can devise – which even then does not prove it true)."
Well, there are myriad ways in which we can say that a social Darwinist
self-deceives or fools himself.
In matters of political 'science', so-called, where values are so blatantly
displayed, it may be even trickier to get this level of reality -- 'p' it
is raining -- the FACTS -- such as those who disagree with them are fooling
themselves. Or their selves, as they prefer to say in Nottinghamshire.
Or something like that.
I should check who Trivers does reference. I'm trusting they are not all
FOOLS!
Cheers,
Speranza
-- References: Hobbes on the idols of the market place, and the fool's
wisdom.
KEYWORD: deceit, self-deception, and Trivers fooling Trivers (the better to
fool Trivers, again, or under different circumstances)
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