In a message dated 2/26/2016 5:57:36 P.M. Eastern Standard Time,
donalmcevoyuk@xxxxxxxxxxx writes:
It is not likely that the answer lies in some different grammatical
interpretation of what are, logically, identical problems in their logical
structure - and if you read Pinker you will see enough Wason Tests have been
done
to pretty much discount any idea that it is some subtle grammatical shift
of interpretation that explains the divergence.
It's interesting that Pinker does give room for this sort of Griceian
answer:
"Logical words [like Wason's "if"] in everyday languages like English are
ambiguous, often denoting several formal logical concepts."
Only that Grice has as a a conversational maxim, 'avoid ambiguity', and as
a methodology, "Do not multiply senses beyond necessity". His whole point
of the "Logic and Conversation" lectures is that 'if' is NOT ambiguous: just
the horseshoe.
It was odd when Chomsky quoted Grice in "Aspects of the theory of syntax"
regarding "and", and misquoting Grice as "A. P. Grice" into the bargain --
but that was 1966, one year prior to the Harvard lectures.
Having checked with Pinker, it's all about L. Cosmides and her PhD at
Harvard:
Deduction or Darwinian algorithms? An explanation of the "elusive" content
effect on the Wason selection task.
As Pinker puts it, guessing can't itself come from logic.
Generally, to paraphrase Pinker slightly, it comes from assuming that the
utterer is a Griceian cooperative conversational partner conveying relevant
information and not, say, a hostile lawyer or a tough-grading logic
professor trying to trip one up. (Grice taught logic, but he never tried to
trip
Strawson up).
Pinker should be more familiar with Grice's earlier "Logic and
Conversation" lectures given at OXFORD, not Harvard, where he speaks of
conversational
benevolence and conversational self-interest, since this may relate to
Cosmides's PhD dissertation.
Wason was showing that John Q. Public was, to paraphrase Pinker,
irrational, unscientific, prone to confirming his prejudices rather than
seeking
evidence that could falsify them.
What Cosmides did was discover that people get the answer right when the
'if' utterance is a contract, an exchange of benefits. Showing that the 'if'
utterance is false is equivalent to finding cheaters.
A contract has the form
i. If you take a benefit, you must meet a requirement.
What gave Cosmides the idea to look for this mental mechanism? It was the
evolutionary analysis of Griceian altruism, i.e. the best balance between
conversational benevolence and conversational self-interest.
To paraphrase Pinker, who knew Cosmides well, natural selection does not
select public-mindedness. A selfish mutant would quickly outreproduce its
altruistic competitors.
Any selfless behavior in the natural world needs a special explanation.
One explanation is reciprocation, as Grice would put it, plus helpfulness
(his Oxford term for what in Harvard he would term 'cooperation').
A creature can extend help in return for help expected in the future. But
favour-trading is always vulnerable to cheaters. For favour-trading to have
evolved, it must be accompanied by a cognitive apparatus that remembers who
has taken and that ensures that they give in return. The evolutionary
biologist Robert Trivers had already predicted that humans, the most
conspicuous altruists in the animal kingdom, should have evolved a
hypertrophied
cheater-detector algorithm. Cosmides appears to have found it.
We hope she doesn't lose it!
Cheers,
Speranza
REFERENCES
Grice, Aspects of Reason.
Pears, Motivated irrationality.
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