Grice was an evolutionist.
Perhaps he not always was. He _evolved_ into one. When? Well, more or less
by the time he delivered his lecture, "How pirots carulise elatically".
He took his pirots from Carnap. For Grice, a pirot is like a man (or a
parrot, only different). The study of pirots Grice calls pirotology. Pirots
evolve.
Pirots evolve to be rational. This does not mean that there are some
irrational pirots out there.
In a message dated 2/27/2016 2:37:40 A.M. Eastern Standard Time,
donalmcevoyuk@xxxxxxxxxxx writes:
"Cosmides does not understand Darwinism accurately from a Popperian pov:
which, to paraphrase, means Cosmides does not understand Darwinism
accurately. That is not to say that a Darwinian explanation cannot be given
along
the lines Cosmides' suggests, its just that Cosmides has a Lockeanised
version of Darwinism which is not a proper version of Darwinism at all."
Well, it may do to review how Leda Cosmides got attracted to the Wason AD47
test originally.
As Pinker notes, the Wason AD47 selection task was devised by Peter Wason
in 1966 and published by Penguin, which is coincidentally the press that's
publishing Pinker "How the mind works". Pinker's précis of the Wason test
leaves quite a bit to be desired since Pinker formulates the 'if' utterance (
the "rule", so miscalled, since rules are neither true nor false, whereas
'if' utterances are) in too specific terms, while Wason uses variables like
'vowel' and 'odd number' (cfr. Eco, "The Number Zero" -- implicature: Is
zero a number?)
Why did Wason do this? Well, he was a Londoner, and a Poppperian Londoner
at that.
Karl Popper had postulated that science is based on hypothetico-deductive
reasoning, in which the key step is the search for counter-examples, that
is, for evidence contradicting a given hypothesis.
As if Reichenbach utterered, "Eureka! All ravens are black". And his next
conversational move be, "Let's look for a white raven now, darling". (He is
speaking to his wife).
Wason wanted to explore the possibility that learning in ordinary life is
really science in embryo: the formation of hypotheses and the search for
evidence to contradict them.
The Wason AD47 selection test therefore evaluates Wason subjects' ability
to find facts that violate a hypothesis (formulated as an 'if' utterance),
specifically a conditional hypothesis of the form: if p, q, or as Grice
prefers p ⊃ q.
In Wason's test, 4 "facts" are presented in the form of cards.
Each card has one piece of information on one side, and another piece of
information on the other side.
The "conditional hypothesis" to be evaluated has to do with some sort of
relationship (not necessarily one of inferrability) between the information
on the two sides of the cards.
The Wason subject is shown the four cards with one side up and the other
side down.
The AD47 card selection task is to decide which cards should be turned
over to evaluate the 'if' utterance.
For example: the hypothesis might be
"Assume cards have a letter on one side and a number on the other. If a
card has D on one side, it must have 3 on the other side."
In thousands of replications over years, it's been shown that most of Wason
subjects are basically quite bad at this AD47 card selection task.
For unfamiliar relations -- like the first case -- less than a quarter of
the Wason subjects consistently give the correct answer.
The commonest responses are just the "p" card, or the "p" card combined
with the "q" card.
Few Wason subjects see the relevance of the not "q" card.
By the way, this suggests that scientific reasoning is not much like
reasoning in everyday life: the basic mode of scientific reasoning seems
completely alien to most people.
However, for some versions of Wason's task -- involving benefits -- people
are a lot better: up to 75% correct.
What's the difference between the first case, where people are really bad
at the task, and the second case, where people are pretty good at the task?
Several different sorts of answers come to mind.
Most of them were explored by psychologists over the couple of decades
since Wason first published.
The first problem is abstract, and one that interests Grice, while the
second one is concrete, and one that interests Griceians (as Elinor Ochs in
"The universality of conversational implicature" -- she went to Madagascar to
disprove
The first problem is unfamiliar, except if you are Grice or a Griceian,
while the second is "familiar", even if you are not.
In her PhD dissertation, Leda Cosmides suggests that neither of these --
'unfamiliar' v 'familiar' -- is the crucial difference (plus, Grice disliked
this broad use of 'family'; he was a Sicilian at heart).
Rather, Cosmides argues, the second allegedly 'familiar' case involves the
detection of "cheating" with respect to a social contract alla Locke, since
McEvoy was mentioning. Only Locke uses 'pact' and 'compact'.
Cosmides does a clever series of experiments, as psychologists are
supposed to do, to test these hypotheses (and several other hypotheses that she
found of interest, even Griceian interest).
In one set of experiments, for instance, Cosmides compares four conditions:
I) An "unfamiliar" situation presented as a "social contract" alla Locke.
II) An equally unfamiliar situation presented without the Lockeian
social-contract narrative
III) An abstract "rule" of the type that fascinates Grice -- only he calls
them 'rule' just to please Gentzen's natural deduction.
IV) a "familiar" situation presented _descriptively_.
An instance of (I):
For instance, a hypothesis about an 'unfamiliar; situation might be:
"If a man eats cassava root, he has a tattoo on his face."
An instance of (II)
The social-contract narrative about this situation is something like:
"Cassava root is a prized aphrodisiac.
Having a facial tattoo means one is married.
Unmarried men are not permitted to eat cassava root because it might lead
to licentious behaviour.
An instance of (III):
An abstract hypothesis is one like the case given earlier, involving
letters and numbers -- like Wason's original test, drawing, one can allege, on
Grice (or Strawson's Introduction to logical theory, published in the 1950s,
by London's Methuen, and held to be 'the vademecum' of logic for decades).
An instance of (IV):
A 'familiar' hypothesis is one like
"If one goes from Cambridge to Boston, one takes the subway."
Orders of presentation and so on are counterbalanced across subjects in the
usual way.
Cosmides' results for this experiment were:
Hypothesis type:
Unfamiliar-social contract/Unfamiliar descriptive/Abstract/Familiar
descriptive
Percent P¬-Q 75% -- 21% -- 25% -- 46%
Such results suggest that concreteness (vs. abstractness) in itself is no
help, _pace_ Grice.
'Familiarity' (as Sicilians use the term) is somewhat helpful.
But it is Lockeian social-contract narratives, even when their content is
'unfamiliar' and even 'bizarre' (Cosmides's use of this adjective might well
be influenced by Grice's use of it in "Method in philosophical psychology:
from the banal to the bizarre" that Ned Block was popularising) re a big
help.
In fact, Cosmides argues, the fact that a Lockeian social-contract
"reasoning" helps Wason subjects to get the logically correct answer in this
case
is completely accidental (where here she is relying on the Greek
philosopher Aristotle; she would, wouldn't she?)
Wason subjects are not reasoning logically at all, even if broadly we can
say that they are reasoning. Vide Grice on Aspects of reason, on 'alethic
reasoning'.
Rather Wason subjects are looking for a balance between a cost and a
benefits in a social exchange
("you give me X, I give you Y")
Or in the calculus of social status
("You're in social category X, so you're entitled to benefit Y").
Wason subjects especially sensitive to cheaters and poseurs: those who take
a benefit without paying the appropriate cost, or having the appropriate
status.
Sometimes this sensitivity to social cheating happens to correspond to
logical inference, but often it doesn't, as Grice and Strawson should BOTH
agree (as they don't on the interpretation of 'if', of much more philosophical
import!)
Several Wason selection experiments suggest this result.
One was done by Gigerenzer and Hug, and depends on a shift in perspective.
Subjects are given social-contract rules such as:
If an employee gets a pension, that employee must have worked for the firm
for at least 10 years.
However, some subjects were told a story in which they are the employer,
while others are told a story in which they are the employee.
In this case, what counts as cheating depends on one's perspective.
From the point of view of the employer, a pension is a cost, while a decade
or more of work is a benefit.
Fom the point of view of the employee, a pension is a benefit, while a
decade of work is a cost.
Thus the same event
"The employee gets a pension"
can be viewed as a cost or a benefit, depending on the perspective taken --
unlike in the event,
"Give us a kiss".
The definition of cheating is taking a benefit without paying the cost,
from both perspectives.
But *applying* this definition (something philosophers usually don't care
to do, and rightly so, else they would be mere psychologists) depends on
what is a cost and what is a benefit.
For an employer, cheating is when an employee gets a pension but has not
worked for at least a decade.
For an employee, cheating is when an employee has worked for a decade but
does not get a pension.
The schema for the experiment was as follows:
Example of a rule:
if an employee gets a pension (p), that employee must have worked at least
ten years (q).
pension no pension worked 12 years worked 8 years
P not P Q not Q
Results:
Perspective: Percent P & not-Q Percent not-P & Q
Employer
75%
0%
Employee
15%
65%
In other words, most Wason subjects are hypothesizing a sensible Lockeian
social contract that is not at all the same as what is actually stated --
the proposed "rule" in this case does not promise a pension to anyone, and
working to detect "cheating" based on the definition of costs and benefits
from the perspective they have been asked to take.
There is some operation of logic, but it is small: about 10-15%, Cosmides
surmised.
Cosmides argues that this kind of cheater-detection is something that Wason
people -- like other Wason primates -- are very good at.
And that we are good at it because it is important to us, not only
individually but also collectively ('cooperatively', here Cosmides might show
some
Griceian influence -- although she probably never heard of Grice's Oxford
lectures on Logic and conversation on conversational self-interest and
conversational benevolence) and historically.
It's important because the EVOLUTION (and this is where Cosmides and Grice
meet, only Grice calls evolution a methodological myth) of a stable
propensity for altruism requires high-accuracy detection and punishment of
cheaters.
In a society in which individuals are free to choose different strategies
about Griceian-type co-operation based on past experience, individuals who
ALWAYS co-operate will tend to be mercilessly fleeced.
On the other Griceian hand, individuals who never cooperate will tend to be
shunned (Grice's example in the Oxford lectures is a man who never helps a
stranger to enter a room by helping keep the door open).
Those who pursue a "tit for tat" strategy will do better than either.
However, this requires telling tits from tats, or tats from tits, as Geary
prefers.
Cosmides offers some psychological, not philosophical or conceptual,
arguments that the "learning" involved here has occured on an EVOLUTIONARY
time
scale, rather than (or at least in addition to) on the scale of each
individual "pirot"'s life.
What has evolved here, if Cosmides if right, is not a hoof or a horn or an
eyeball, but a complex and abstract behavioural propensity.
Nevertheless, it has arguably been shaped by selective forces as precisely
as physical characteristics of the phenotype have.
It is just harder to characterize, because we can only discover its
properties by doing experiments, rather than by simple dissection of physical
objects.
The term "evolutionary psychology", as used by Cosmides, and 'evoutionary'
simpliciter as used by Grice and Griceians, refers to the study of
adaptions like "cheater detection".
Cognitive or behavioral propensities rather than anatomical or
physiological ones are at play.
Of course all anatomical adaptations have cognitive and behavioral
correlates, and vice versa, as Darwin knew very well (cfr. the mammary glands
in
males).
It is an odd and interesting fact, then, that the cognitive and behavioural
side of evolution was increasingly neglected after about 1900, especially
with respect to humans.
The term "evolutionary psychology" was used by Cosmides and her
collaborators during the late 1980s, and has come into common use in parts of
Massachusetts.
During this same period, the outlook of some psychologists and
neuro-scientists has also been changed, to take a more evolutionary
perspective.
The consequence is partly just to ask certain questions.
What species characteristics might lie behind the way humans think, feel
and behave?
What were/are the selective pressures, and what cognitive and behavioural
structures did they operate on?
The result of asking these questions may also be a different set of ideas
about the phenomena to be explained -- about human nature itself.
Wason's research lead some psychologists to the conclusion that "The Wason
subjects do not naturally think like scientists -- most people are really
bad at simple logic. Perhaps this is because our minds work mainly by simple
association of positive instances."
The evolutionary-psychology reinterpretation is:
People are naturally good at detecting cheaters, because this is an
essential adaptation for the reciprocal altruism (of the type Grice was
emphasising since his 1965 Oxford lectures on "Logic and Conversation" focusing
on
conversational benevolence and conversational self-interest towards a
conceptual analysis of 'helpfulness') that is at the foundation of hominid
social
organization.
People are not nearly as good at general hypothesis testing, because there
has never been any similar selective urgency.
our ancestors did not compete for mates by solving physics problem sets.
But there may well be other adaptations for reasoning about other specific
sorts of things.
The study of the human mind has recently been moved into the natural
sciences through biology, computer science, and allied disciplines, and the
result has been the revelation of a wholly new and surprising picture of
so-called human nature.
Instead of the human mind being a blank slate governed by a few general
purpose principles of reasoning and learning, it is full of "reasoning
instincts" and "innate knowledge" (of the type Locke, but not Descartes,
rejected) -- that is, it resembles a network of dedicated computers each
specialized to solve a different type of problem, each running under its own
richly
coded, distinctly nonstandard ('deviant', as Haack would calll it) logic.
The programs that comprise the human mind or psychology (or brain) were
selected for not because of their generality, but because of their specialised
success in solving the actual array of problems that our ancestors faced
during their evolution, such as navigating the social world, reasoning about
macro-scopic rigid objects as tools, "computing" or perceiving beauty,
foraging, understanding the biological world, and so on.
This is a good example of what is sometimes called "mega-phone science,"
that is, scientific popularization by the methods of politics.
As usual with political sloganeering, there is some gross exaggeration.
For example, it is misleading to call this perspective a wholly new and
surprising picture of human nature.
The computer metaphors are recent, because computers are recent.
But such metaphors are not specific to this viewpoint.
The idea that the mind has been pre-programmed by past lives goes back at
least to Plato.
The "blank slate" metaphor for human learning was introduced in the 17th
century by Oxford philosopher John Locke (after whom the John Locke lectures
that Grice gave were instituted) precisely because the contrary view was
prevelent at the time.
19th century "faculty psychology", including phrenology, proposed an
explicit and detailed picture of a set of "reasoning instincts", along with
information about the location of each in the brain.
The idea of cognitive and behavioral adaptations, including for humans, is
most explicit in Darwin and Fitzpatrick (vide "Philsophising on the
Beagle").
More recent related ideas include (human) ethology; sociobiology; Fodor
(who quotes Grice) and his "modularity of mind;" Dawkin's "extended
phenotype."
Thus arguments on this issue have gone back and forth in western thought fo
r more than two millenia.
As usual with effective politics, there is also a truth behind the slogans.
In this case, the truth is that social science (and to a large extent
psychology, philosophy and the humanities) have been dominated during the 20th
century by various more or less extreme forms of the "blank slate" view.
Even in neuroscience and the more biological end of psychology, there has
been relatively little emphasis on an evolutionary perspective.
There will come a time when the subject matter of this evolutionary
psychology will be well known. The reason for its current position is that most
practitioners do not yet fully appreciate the insights offered by an
evolutionary perspective.
In part, this has to do with the very history of neuroscience and
psychology.
Both fields have been dominated by a belief that associationism is how we
learn and remember and that most brains can learn anything.
The past 100 years of research do not support this view.
To learn why, we must examine the current cognitive neuroscience enterprise
from an evolutionary perspective.
What are brains for, why were they built the way they are, and, in a
mechanistic sense, how should we view the relation between neuro-scientific
data
and behaviour?
We have shared these notes because they presents the basic Darwinian,
genetic and ethological foundations, and a careful survey of the range of human
cognitive and behavioral characteristics for which an evolutionary analysis
should be enlightening.
Yet both the basic ideas and the specific applications remain controversial
among scientists.
Admitedly, there is a growing consensus that the perspective is a valuable
one and that its applications will prove to be valid and scientifically
fruitful.
As Cosmides has pointed out in more measured and carefully reasoned work,
her viewpoint is strongly at variance with the viewpoint of most respectable
20th-century social scientists, and also most contemporary humanists.
She quote Emil Durkheim, writing in 1895:
Durkheim wrote:
"one would be strangely mistaken about our thought if he drew the
conclusion that sociology, according to us, must, or even can, make an
abstraction
of man and his faculties. It is clear that the general characteristics of
human nature participate in the work of elaboration from which social life
results. But they are not the cause of it, nor do they give it its special
form; they only make it possible. Collective representations, emotions, and
tendencies are caused not by certain states of the consciousness of
individuals but by the conditions in which the social group, in its totality,
is
placed. Such actions can, of course, materialize only if the individual
natures are not resistant to them; but these individual natures are merely the
indeterminate material that the social factor molds and transforms. Their
contribution consists exclusively in very general attitudes, in vague and
consequently plastic predispositions which, by themselves, if other agents did
not intervene, could not take on the definite and complex forms which
characterize social phenomena."
Cosmides refers to this as the "standard social science model," and sketch
its logic as follows:
Rapid historical change and spontaneous "cross-fostering experiments"
dispose of the racist notion that inter-group behavioural differences are
genetic.
Infants everywhere have the same developmental potential.
Although infants are everywhere the same, adults everywhere differ
profoundly in their behavioural and mental organization.
Therefore, "human nature" (the evolved structure of the human mind) cannot
be the cause of the mental organization of adult humans, their social
systems, their culture, etc.
Complexly organized adult behaviors are absent from infants.
Whatever "innate" (as Descartes and Chomksy in his "Cartesian linguistics"
has it) equipment infants are born with must therefore be viewed as highly
rudimentary -- an unorganized set of crude urges or drives, along with a
general ability to learn.
Infants must acquire adult mental organization from some external source in
the course of development.
The external source is obvious.
This organization is manifestly present in the behavior and the public
representations of other members of the local group.
Cultural phenomena are in no respect hereditary but are characteristically
and without exception acquired.
Undirected by culture patterns -- organized systems of significant symbols
-- man's behavior would be virtually ungovernable, a mere chaos of
pointless acts and exploding emotions, his experience virtually shapeless.
This establishes that the social world is the cause of the mental
organization of adults.
The cultural and social elements that mold the individual precede the
individual and are external to the individual.
The mind did not create these elements; these elements created the mind.
They are given, and the individual finds them already current in the
community when he is born.
The causal flow is overwhelmingly or entirely in one direction: the
individual is the acted upon and the socio-cultural world is the actor.
Therefore, what complexly organizes and richly shapes the substance of
human life -- what is interesting and distinctive and worthy of study -- is the
variable pool of stuff that is referred to as culture.
But what creates culture?
Culture is not created by the biological properties of individual humans
-- human nature.
Rather, culture is created by some set of emergent processes whose
determinants are realized at the group level.
The socio-cultural level is a distinct, autonomous and self-caused realm.
Culture is a thing "sui generis" which can be explained only in terms of
itself.
Omnis cultura ex cultura.
Alfred Kroeber noted that the only antecedents of historical phenomena are
historical phenomena.
Emil Durkheim similarly noted that the determining cause of a social fact
should be sought among the social facts preceding it and not among the
states of individual consciousness.
Geertz added that our ideas, our values, our acts, even our emotions, are,
like our nervous system itself, cultural products -- products manufactured,
indeed, out of tendencies, capacities, and dispositions with which we were
born, but manufactured nonetheless.
Therefore, this denies that "human nature" -- the evolved architecture of
the human mind -- can play any notable role as a generator of significant
organization in human life.
In so doing, it removes from the concept of human nature all substantive
content, and relegates the architecture of the human mind to the narrowly
delimited role of embodying the capacity for culture.
As Cosmides points out, the first thing to say is that arguments against
the racist anthropology of the late 19th century -- or of the Nazis in the
20th -- seem not only ethically but also scientifically correct.
During the 19th century, the nature and origins of the world's cultures
were increasingly interesting to Europeans.
Most investigations assumed a linear conception of history progress, with
human societies evolving from savagery through barbarism and finally to
civilization.
Many further assumed that different cultural patterns at a given stage
reflected racial as well as environmental and historical influences, and there
was a great deal of interest in national character.
The Darwinian concept of evolution, as well as Darwin's simultaneously
empirical and generalising perspective, fit well with this endeavor, and became
central to it as the century passed.
It's easy to caricature its practitioners as imperialist boors.
But in fact many of them were intelligent, observant and sensitive as well
as adventurous, and they often identified more strongly with the far-away
peoples they studied than with their own societies.
Wilhelm von Humboldt and Sir Richard Burton are good examples.
Nevertheless, some certainly were indeed imperialist boors, and there is a
web of connections between this work and Nazi pseudoscientific racism.
Many aspects of anthropology, developed around 1990 in an explicit
opposition to this tradition.
Thus Cosmides, in one way, is not really suggesting a totally new
perspective.
Rather, she is turning the clock back to 1900 and taking a different path.
In fact Cosmides puts it this way herself.
After a century, it is time to reconsider this model in the light of the
new knowledge and new understanding that has been achieved in evolutionary
biology, development, and cognitive science since it was first formulated.
Cosmides identifies three major defects here:
(a) Naive and erroneous theories of development (viz. teeth, breasts, which
are not present at birth but are not purely ex cultura either). Faulty
analysis of nature-nurture issues: the phenotype cannot be partitioned into
genetic and environmental traits.
(b) The fact of cultural variation is consistent with a genetic substrate.
(c) Wrong (and probably nonsensical, impossible) psychology.
A psychological architecture that consisted of nothing but equi-potential,
general-purpose, content-independent or content-free mechanisms could not
successfully perform the tasks the human mind is known to perform or solve
the adaptive problems humans evolved to solve." It cannot account for the
behavior observed, and it is not a type of design that could have evolved.
Cosmides argues that characteristic practices of 20th-century social
scientists are designed to reinforce the standard model by extra-scientific
means, and that this warps the empirical work of social scientists and
especially the modes of analysis based on it:
Whenever it is suggested that something is innate or biological, the
anthropologist or sociologist riffles through the ethnographic literature to
find a report of a culture where the behaviour varies.
Because of the moral appeal of anti-nativism, the process of discrediting
claims about a universal human nature has been strongly motivated.
Anthropologists, by each new claim of discovered variability, felt they
were expanding the boundaries of their discipline (and, as they thought, of
human possibility itself) and liberating the social sciences from
biologically deterministic accounts of how we are inflexibly constrained to
live as we
do.
This has elevated particularism and the celebration of variability to
central values inside of anthropology, strongly asserted and fiercely defended.
The most scientifically damaging aspect of this dynamic has not been the
consequent rhetorical emphasis most anthropologists have placed on the
unusual.
As Bloch puts it, it is the professional malpractice of anthropologists to
exaggerate the exotic character of other cultures.
Nor is the most damaging aspect of this dynamic the professionally
cultivated credulousness about claims of wonders in remote parts of the world,
which has led anthropologists routinely to embrace, perpetuate, and defend not
only gross errors but also obvious hoaxes.
The most scientifically damaging aspect of this value system has been that
it leads anthropologists to actively reject conceptual frameworks that
identify meaningful dimensions of cross-cultural uniformity in favor of
alternative vantage points from which cultures appear maximally differentiated.
In general, there is no question that the intellectual pendulum is swinging
towards some version of the evolutionary-psychology point of view, with
large potential effects in the social sciences and the humanities.
One natural question to ask is what the political implications will be.
This is not to say that all science is politics, just that broad questions
about human nature and its relationship to culture are likely to have a
political dimension.
For example, the leaders in establishing the standard social science model
in the early 20th century, such as Franz Boas, had a very clear idea that
their scientific conclusions were connected to their (liberal,
cultural-relativist, anti-racist) politics.
Does a return to a more biological view of culture and cognition presage a
return to racist science, or to scientific justifications for imperial
hegemonies?
Not necessarily.
In Noam Chomsky (who quotes Grice in his 1966 "Aspects of the theory of
syntax" and further in his own John Locke lectures -- dubbing him wrongly a
behaviourist, alas) in his review of Skinner's "Beyond Freedom and Dignity",
he presents an interesting argument that Lockeian "tabula rasa" views of
the human mind might be used as justification for totalitarian mind control,
and suggests that scientific ideologies are sometimes a sort of Rorschach
blot onto which a wide variety of political viewpoints and interests can be
projected.
In any case, the movement in the direction of an evolutionary (and
therefore biological) approach to human nature has so far not accumulated any
particular political baggage, unless we are still somehow too close to it to
see
what is happening.
Cheers,
Speranza
REFERENCES:
Grice, Aspects of Reason
Pears, Motivated Irrationality.
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