[lit-ideas] Re: H. P. Grice And D. F. Pears On Self-Deception
- From: "Donal McEvoy" <dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> (Redacted sender "donalmcevoyuk" for DMARC)
- To: "lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 27 Oct 2016 17:00:10 +0000 (UTC)
The argument that advantageous mutations would get 'blended out' before they
could overrun the gene-pool (an argument to which Darwin had no adequate
answer)"
Perhaps, opaquely, he was never asked the question.>
Though I am not certain, I have a vague recollection that Darwin well knew of
this argument and its force - it became a gap in his account that needed to be
plugged in due course, even though, in fact, the plug had been already largely
supplied by Mendel (of whose work Darwin was unaware). It may even be - from
vague recollection - that Darwin mistakenly watered-down his 'natural
selection' to accomodate such arguments.
If this detail matters enough we could look into it.
I don't know JLS' source for his assertion that Darwin was never asked the
question - an assertion that strictly should be based on knowing everything
Darwin was asked (and I somehow doubt JLS has this level of knowledge).
DL
From: "dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Sent: Thursday, 27 October 2016, 15:42
Subject: [lit-ideas] H. P. Grice And D. F. Pears On Self-Deception
On a different thread, entitled, "Those 'little white lies' are blacker than
one thinks," McEvoy refers (alla Kripke) to Grice and Pears. McEvoy will say he
is NOT referring, or has NOT referred to Grice and Pears ("bad start"), but of
course, under a transparent (not opaque) reading, his claim may invite a
Griceist to take McEvoy's remarks alla Grice and his pupil D. F. Pears, of
Oxford (both).
McEvoy starts with one of Grice's favourite words ('it's so
implicature-laden!'), 'if', or the horseshoe:
"IF we concede the authors [of the New York Times essay and its source] are
right and there is a "neural mechanism" that facilitates dishonesty, a question
arises [as to] whether this "neural mechanism" has been selected for by
'natural selection' because it is adaptive."
There's a lot of logical implications in this double conditional claim. The
first "if" is easy enough to tackle. The 'because' is less so. "Because" is NOT
'if', but 'because' usually gets used in things like
i. P
-----
Therefore C
where P and C stand for premise and conclusion, and this in turn is read as
taking the "if P, C" as tautological.
McEvoy goes on:
"A groundbreaking (if flawed and uneven [view]) on this topic has been [put
forward] by a leading naturalist and thinker about 'natural selection', Robert
Trivers."
The name reminds me of Pamela Travers, the author (never 'authoress') of "Mary
Poppins. I suppose "Trivers," like "Travers," is Cornish in nature.
"Part of [Trivers's] view is to explain how deception and self-deception can be
both adaptive and maladaptive (they will endure, and perhaps proliferate,
provided the adaptive aspects are 'selected for' more than the maladaptive are
'selected against')."
I think I like that. It applies to anything. E.g. the children writing a letter
for a nanny:
"She must be kind, she must be witty,
very sweet and fairly pretty."
--- Letters to nannies written by children can be adaptive and maladaptive. In
general, they are maladaptive, except in Travers's wild imagination.
McEvoy:
"One thing to be said about some of these scientists [mentioned by the New York
Times piece] is that they try to face up to the difficulties within their
theoretical framework - contrary to the picture of scientists as
routine-puzzle-solving adherents of a paradigm until sociological factors cause
a permanent 'paradigm-shift' etc., many scientists try to test the 'paradigm'
or theoretical framework to destruction."
Oddly, 'paradigm,' as Kuhn notes, was used by Plato, and they were
_destruction-proof_, I think Plato's term was. They belong in what Grice calls
the 'topos ouranos,' or celestial realm. This is the first use of 'paradigm'. I
think Albrittton wrote on that. Kuhn later adopted a more social view of
paradigms. But "paradeigmata," in Ancient Greek (of the pedigree variety used
by Plato) does mean something that is immune to destruction. Cfr. the dialogue:
ii. Socrates: You should see the paradigm of a horse.
Man in the Agora: Sorry, Soc. I can see a horse, but NOT the paradigm of a
horse.
Socrates: Then you have myopia.
McEvoy goes on:
"Of course, the shifting or overthrow of a large-scale theoretical framework
like 'natural selection' is not likely to happen by a single apparent
counter-instance - especially as the apparent counter-instances might be, with
effort, better explained as instances of the framework in action rather than
counter-instances. The argument that advantageous mutations would get 'blended
out' before they could overrun the gene-pool (an argument to which Darwin had
no adequate answer)"
Perhaps, opaquely, he was never asked the question. (McEvoy would take a
'transparent' view here, and argue that Darwin has to answer questions that
were not even posed to him, Darwin, that is, not McEvoy.
"was eventually answered by rediscovering the importance of Mendel's work and
showing that 'genes' work like particles in combination and do not blend. The
problem of explaining 'altruism' in terms of 'natural selection' has led to
much work showing how 'altrusistic' behaviour (like a parent sacrificing their
life to protect their offspring) can be 'selected for' if its pay-off in
ensuring the survival of similar 'genes' outweighs the loss of those genes
through the sacrifice - and it will only evolve if it is 'selected for' this
way and to the extent there is adequate pay-off."
This is vintage Grice. In his 1965 lectures on "Logic and Conversation" at
Oxford, qua university lecturer -- NOT the better known William James lectures
on the same topic given in the New World --, and where Grice introduced
'implicature', Grice also speaks of two principles:
-- THE PRINCIPLE OF CONVERSATIONAL SELF-INTEREST
-- THE PRINCIPLE OF CONVERSATIONAL BENEVOLENCE
aka altruism. For some reason, when he took the plane and went to Harvard, he
changed all that for a more Kantian ('and funnier,' he thought) paradigm where
things are ordered according to four categories:
QVALITAS
QVANTITAS
RELATIO
MODVS
It's the qualitas that refers to things like self-interest and benevolence.
A: How does this look?
B: Oh, it's a beautiful dress, darling! (+> implicature: I like it. Real
motivation behind the conversational move: "I rather tell her the dress suits
her or else we'll be late for the baseball game").
This leads Grice to formulate one single maxim:
iii. Try to make one conversational move that is true.
under which he poses two sub-maxims
iv. Do not say what you believe to be false.
and
v. Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence for.
This is Kantian in origin, and in his Stanford Immanuel Kant lectures, Grice
did not miss the opportunity to laugh at Kantian laughable account of 'lying'.
McEvoy goes on:
"For Trivers 'lying' should be seen along a spectrum that extends into both the
deception of others and self-deception:"
This was D. F. Pears's genial improvement on Grice. In Pears's "Motivated
irrationality," he criticizes Freud for his simplistic account of
self-deception. Irrationality CAN be motivated, and self-deception is such one
instance. (Pears had put forward similar arguments in his Duckworth compilation
of essays "Essays in the philosophical psychology".
McEvoy:
"an immediate puzzle is that self-deception would seem to imply a cognitive
deficit, and it might be hard to see how this deficit could be 'selected for'
rather than 'selected against' - a possible answer is that it is 'selected for'
because it lessens the cognitive burden otherwise involved in deceiving others
and makes such deception more effective, and where deceiving others can of
course be to an individual's advantage and thus 'selected for'."
Another puzzle with self-deception is Cartesian:
vi. I think; therefore, I am.
How can you self-deceive yourself about that? Never mind burden!
McEvoy: "In the early and perhaps best part of the [essay that develops his
theory], Trivers outline how deception is rife in nature - from the virus that
deceives the body that it is a friendly organism to butterflies that imitate
the colours of poisonous species to deter predators. What happens in nature is
a kind of arms-race between 'strategies' of deception and counter-deception."
Oddly, the opposite applies to Grice. In "Method in philosophical psychology",
he says that pirots (which karulise elastically) have an embedded "immanuel",
or manual along Kantian lines, and self-deception is an anti-commandment. Cfr.
Grice on the ten commandments, and the one that goes, "Thou shalt not lie". For
Grice, the justification of anti-deception is psychological:
For any proposition, p, such as "It is raining," the assumption is that the
utterer BELIEVES that it is raining (unless you are G. E. Moore, "It is
raining, but I don't believe it"). And further, that you BELIEVE that you
BELIEVE that it is raining. And so ad infinitum. Your co-pirot trusts you, and
this is the basis of morality (vide Grice's pupil essay, Warnock's "The
foundations of morality", Clarendon -- for a similar account of mutual trust,
and cooperation in evolutionary terms).
McEvoy goes on:
"This provides a wider framework for understanding human 'lying' in terms of
our capacity for deception and self-deception and one that moves beyond the
idea we should see 'lying' as simply a transgression against a moral imperative
- the high capacity for deception and self-deception is linked to our being
highly social animals."
Griceian problems arise here: his festschrift is entitled, "Philosophical
grounds of rationality: intentions, categories, ends." Homo sapiens is a highly
social animal, but Homo sapiens is a RATIONAL, intention-driven, goal-driven,
highly social animal. The plover that screams when a predator is FAR from the
nest to let the predator THINK that he is CLOSE to the nest does not quite
compare to a Homo sapiens's lie, in that there's no INTENTION in the plover.
While Grice grants that rationality is grounded on pre-rational states, there
is a bit of leap, which he thought he found ("the missing link -- found by
Grice").
McEvoy:
"It may well be that this framework helps us better understand why we should
take a firm stand against deception and even self-deception, to the point of
frowning on 'little white lies' - not only because of the 'slippery slope' but
because the slope leads to disasters like unsafe space shuttles, crashed
aeroplanes and ill-judged foreign wars. There are other problems here too,
given that self-deception means the untruthful may be blind to their untruth -
for example, being in a position of power seems to increase tendencies of
self-deception (as well as power-seeking being a trait of narcissists in the
first place). In some ways we should be surprised the world is not in a worse
state than it is - but that may be largely because counter-deception is very
adaptive also."
Well, self-deception, D. F. Pears links to akrasia, or weakness of the will. In
fact, in his John Locke Lecture, Grice suggests that philosophers have been TOO
focused on what he calls 'practical akrasia' ("I see the evil, but I choose
it"). There's also theoretical akrasia, as in Moore ("I know it is raining, but
I won't believe it").
For the record, I append* (below) the New York Times for further Griceian
glosses, or not!
---- BEGIN CITED ESSAY:
"People who tell small, self-serving lies are likely to progress to bigger
falsehoods, and over time, the brain appears to adapt to the dishonesty,
according to a new study. The finding, the researchers said, provides evidence
for the “slippery slope” sometimes described by wayward politicians, corrupt
financiers, unfaithful spouses and others in explaining their misconduct. “They
usually tell a story where they started small and got larger and larger, and
then they suddenly found themselves committing quite severe acts,” said Tali
Sharot, an associate professor of cognitive neuroscience at University College
London. She was a senior author of the study, published on Monday in the
journal Nature Neuroscience. Everyone lies once in a while, if only to make a
friend feel better (“That dress looks great on you!”) or explain why an email
went unanswered (“I never got it!”). Some people, of course, lie more than
others. But dishonesty has been difficult to study."
And for Grice, honesty is still the best policy.
"Using brain scanners in a lab, researchers have sometimes instructed subjects
to lie in order to see what their brains were doing. Dr. Sharot and her
colleagues devised a situation that offered participants the chance to lie of
their own free will, and gave them an incentive to do so. A functional MRI
scanning device monitored brain activity, with the researchers concentrating on
the amygdala, an area associated with emotional response. Participants in the
study were asked to advise a partner in another room about how many pennies
were in a jar. When the subjects believed that lying about the amount of money
was to their benefit, they were more inclined to dishonesty and their lies
escalated over time. As lying increased, the response in the amygdala
decreased. And the size of the decline from one trial to another predicted how
much bigger a subject’s next lie would be. These findings suggested that the
negative emotional signals initially associated with lying decrease as the
brain becomes desensitized, Dr. Sharot said. “Think about it like perfume,” she
said. “You buy a new perfume, and it smells strongly. A few days later, it
smells less. And a month later, you don’t smell it at all.” Functional imaging
is a blunt instrument, and the meaning of fluctuations in brain activity is
often difficult to interpret. Dr. Sharot agreed that the study could not
determine exactly what type of response the decreased activity in the amygdala
represented. “We know for sure it’s related to lying,” she said. “Whether it’s
their negative emotional reaction, that’s only speculation, based on the parts
of the brain we looked at.” But the researchers included numerous checks on the
study’s results and replicated some parts of it before publication. The
research was led by Neil Garrett, a doctoral student at University College
London at the time."
Trust this not to be at Grice's alma mater, but Popper's institution (UCL is
part of the bigger institution where Popper taught).
"Dan Ariely of Duke University and Stephanie C. Lazzaro of University College
London were also authors of the report. Christian Ruff, a professor of decision
neuroscience at the University of Zurich, noted that in previous research, it
had been “really, really difficult to characterize the neural processes that
underlie purposeful lying.” The new study, he said, provided one way of doing
that, and showed the importance of considering the emotional component of
dishonesty. Amitai Shenhav, a psychologist at Brown University who has studied
moral decision-making, also praised the study, calling it “nicely executed.” He
said the findings were “suggestive of a slippery slope.” But he added that it
was still not entirely clear what was driving people down that slope. For
example, Dr. Shenhav said, it could be that the act of lying by itself
increased the propensity for acting dishonestly, “like gradually pushing our
foot off a brake.” Or that the subjects, who were not punished in any way for
their dishonesty, concluded that lying in that environment was not so bad. “We
need to be cautious when generalizing to real-world dishonesty that is
typically associated with threats of reprimand” or damage to someone’s
reputation, he said. In the study, the subjects — 80 adults, most of them
university students — were asked to help the unseen partner guess the number of
pennies in the jar. The partner, the subject was told, would then tell the
researchers the guess. (The partner was in reality a confederate of the
scientists.) In some cases, the subjects were given an incentive to lie: They
were told that they would be paid more if their partners overestimated the
money in the jar, and that the higher the overestimation, the more they would
be paid. Their partners’ payments, however, would depend on how accurate the
estimates were. In other cases, the participants were told that both they and
their partners would be paid more for overestimating the number of pennies;
still others were told that their payments depended on the accuracy of the
estimates, while their partners would be paid more for overestimating. Dr.
Garrett said he hoped that the study could be repeated in other, more realistic
settings, and that another study could be done to look at what might stop
people from escalating their dishonesty. “How do you stop it? How do you
prevent it?” he asked. But Dr. Ruff said that if the findings from this study
held up, the message seemed clear.""“The implication is that we should watch
out that we don’t tolerate lies, in order to prevent people from lying when it
really matters,” he said."
-- END OF QUOTED ESSAY
Implicating that that was the IMPLICATURE, rather -- 'implication' is
old-fashioned! :)
Oddly, for Grice, Moore's paradox does not come out as an implicature:
vii. It is raining, but I don't believe.
Grice: "I would not like to say that that the utterer believes that p is an
implicature of his having utterered "p". Rather, this is part of the conceptual
analysis of the indicative mode, a mode by which utterers EXPRESS their
beliefs, rather than IMPLICATE them." (Grice is contrasting his views with P.
H. Nowell-Smith's "Ethics", where "I believe that p" is regarded as a
contextual 'implication' yielded by one's uttering of "p".)
Cheers,
Speranza
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