[lit-ideas] Re: Motivated Irrationality
- From: Donal McEvoy <donalmcevoyuk@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: "lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 26 Feb 2016 10:33:14 +0000 (UTC)
McEvoy:
"here logic simply defeats him. There is no alternative."
Well, I don't think Susan Haack would agree. She wrote "Deviant logics," as
did Quine.>
Please spell out the alternative valid logic. We could all do with a laugh.
DL
On Thursday, 25 February 2016, 20:26, "dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx"
<dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
When Pears speaks of 'motivated' irrationality, he is obviously being
'Griceian', for a motive is not a reason, not even a wrong one (McEvoy was
expanding on wrong reasons of late).
In a message dated 2/25/2016 2:46:08 P.M. Eastern Standard Time,
donalmcevoyuk@xxxxxxxxxxx writes [I'm paraphrasing slightly]: "I think we can
boil
it down to something more straightforward: is there a valid alternative to
the "logic" which underpins "what is correct" and "what is incorrect
according to Wason's selection task? The answer is no. I.e. there is no valid
alternative to what is correct and what is incorrect according to Wason's
selection task, properly framed. On this an anecdote: Wason's selection task
was
given to the teachers at a secondary school as part of a student project.
Those in maths and computing science were the only ones to briskly get
Wason's selection task right. They then stood back in quiet amusement as
teachers in other departments refused to accept their answers were incorrect
and
instead engaged in elaborate (and doomed) attempts to give a different
interpretative sense to Wason's selection task according to which their
answers
would be correct. The language teachers were the worst for contrived
attempts to 'evade falsification' in this way."
I hope that secondary school wasn't CLIFTON, that Grice attended! (Grice
attended 'elementary school' at his own house since his mother, Mabel
Fenton, was a teacher, and they couldn't afford -- Grice's father being a
failed
businesman -- but when the time came for Grice to attend a proper school,
the Grices -- Grice's parents that is, made a bit of an effort and sent him
to Clifton. He stayed there until he won his scholarship to Corpus Christi
-- arriving at the Dreaming Spires as a 'Midlands scholarship boy'.
McEvoy goes on: "It is not known whether any of the language teachers were
Griceians."
Well, as long as the school wasn't Clifton, I shouldn't care. But McEvoy is
right in taking Griceians as obsessed with language. In fact, pre-Griceian
Oxonian philosophers were also obsessed with lingo, and it is said that
Lewis Carroll's "Humpty Dumpty" is a parody on the Oxonian philosopher, as he
knew him ("I'm the master of my words").
McEvoy:
"That is also to say: there is no valid alterative. And [Speranza's] talk
of alternatives is doomed to failure and irrelevance - for logical reasons.
For the whole notion of validity here is logical validity."
On which Strawson spent PAGES in his "Introduction to Logical Theory". He
found it the most difficult of the concepts he had set to analyse! (but
promptly acknowledges "Mr. H. P. Grice" as he "from whom he never ceased to
learn logic").
McEvoy:
"So while [Speranza] may never admit defeat (in the search for a Gricean
alternative to Popper),"
-- or Wason, since I like to rob Peter [Cathcart Wason] to pay [Herbert]
Paul [Grice] (The idiom, 'to rob Peter to pay Paul originates from the days
when St. Paul's cathedral was built -- 'awful', the king said, meaning or
implicating 'awesome' -- with funds collected at Westminster, i.e. St.
Peter's.
McEvoy:
"here logic simply defeats him. There is no alternative."
Well, I don't think Susan Haack would agree. She wrote "Deviant logics," as
did Quine. But Haack is notably a deviant logician. She taught at the
University of Warwick, which is not in Warwick, but in Coventry.
McEvoy:
"Though _Logik der Forschung_ may be unread by many on this list, [Peter
Cathcart] Wason's work is a reminder of what a profound and inspiring
masterpiece it is, with ramifications for the whole field of knowledge."
Did Wason care to read it in the vernacular -- since 'forschung' can
trigger the very RIGHT implicature!
The fascinating thing, too, is that Peter Cathcart Wason and Herbert Paul
Grice were working at more or less the same time -- or the same year, 1965.
While Wason came up with his selection task, that people failed, Grice was
coining 'implicature'. Consider the implicature of 'if' in a formulation of
Wason's selection task.
If we say 'if' implies, or implicates, we mean that an utterer of Wason's
'if' utterance in his selection task IMPLICATES.
The underlying idea is that what is literally said -- the logical form and
the content of an 'if' utterance, as rendered by the 'horseshoe' used by
standard logicians -- is not what is actually meant.
For instance, if Clifton teacher’s reply to the question
Is Grice a good student?
is
"He never return library books."
the implicature seems to be that 'it depends on what you mean by 'good'".
(In fact, Grice kept this habit when at Corpus Christi, which almost had him
fail in getting his Merton scholarship).
Grice specifies this situation by means of some conversational maxims and a
general principle of cooperation, all rooted on what counts as 'rational'
and 'reasonable'.
According to the 'conversational' maxims -- he is making a joke on Kant --
one’s contribution to the conversation should be adequately informative,
relevant, not believed to be false by its utterer and generally unambiguous
and brief -- as Wason's selection task is not.
The cooperative principle (as formulated in Harvard 1967; in his earlier
Oxford lectures on "Logic and Conversation" he had spoken of desiderata,
principles of clarity and candour and desiderata of conversational benevolence
and self-interest) states that participants expect that each of them will
make a conversational contribution such as is required, at the stage at
which it occurs, by the accepted purpose of the talk exchange.
Thus, when an utterer, say, Wason, makes an apparently uninformative
remark such as "Psychology is psychology", or "Confirmation bias is
confirmation
bias" or "Logical adequacy is logical adequacy", the addressee assumes that
the utterer (even if he is being Wason) is being cooperative and looks
for the implicature he is aiming at.
We can see how the Gricean conversational implicatures associated with free
uses of 'if' (as per Wason's selection task) are non-conventional, for
they are is drawn in accordance with pragmatic principles only, rather than
involving the meaning of a linguistic expression (notably 'if' -- German
'ob', as Popper would prefer).
But crucially, on Grice's alternative view, truth and assertibility
crucially part ways -- that's why in his "Indicative conditionals" he brings in
Dummett and Kripke for good measure, as he discusses the 'paradoxes' of
'material implication' interpreted in probabilistic terms.
According to Grice, in fact, a proposition (such as the 'if' utterance of
Wason's selection task) can be true, without being assertible.
Consider:
If spaghetti grow on trees, the Pope is a German.
This is vacuously true. But, unless you are Geary, it is not really
assertible (Geary loves a German pope), because the antecedent is false and the
utterer will mislead his addressee in uttering the corresponding sentence.
(As it happens, on April fools' day, in 1957, the year Grice got his
"Meaning" published, Auntie Beeb had nothing better to do but to broadcast a
hoax short documentary about the crop of spaghetti. As it happened, hundreds
of people contacted Aunt Beeb to ask where they could buy their own
spaghetti trees.)
This would contradict one of the conversational maxims.
Consequently, our wong intuition (yes, there are such things, Virginio)
that that proposition is false is due, not to its falsity, but to its lack of
conversational assertibility.
However, we could easily think about someone who would assert the previous
sentence and genuinely believe that the antecedent was true, without
violating Grice’s maxim.
Be that as it may, since Grice’s theory of implicature has been highly
influential among both philosophers and psychologists interested in the study
of natural language -- and Wason indeed should quote him more often.
So, how would a Griceian account for Wason's selection task?
Well, for starters, we would have Grice leaving Oxford and attending one of
Wason's seminars in London (he said he would prefer to say at the "Lamb
and Flag" or the "Bird and Baby"), and one might say that when Wason's 'if'
utterance in Wason's selection task is asserted, its implicatures sadly
affect people’s reply to it.
Wason SHOULD warn his experimentees: Beware the implicature.
Or if you prefer
Beware the Implicature, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Disimplicature bird, and shun
The frumious M-intention!
In particular, what we may refer to as "Wason people" (i.e. those who were
subjected to his experiment) seem to understand the "if" of the conditional
sentence to mean "if and only if". Pears recognised this in an issue of
the Canadian Journal of Philosophy: "if" standardly implicates "if and only
if" (Conditional Perfection, Pears called it)
In other words, the 'if' utterance in Wason's selection task might not
come across as a material implication, but as a bi-conditional, alas. Not as a
horseshoe, but as something so vernacular that Grice didn't care to list it
in his list of 'formal devices' -- he only mentions the dyadic
truth-functors: 'and', 'or' and 'if' -- the latter being the horseshoe.
On this account ("if" implicating "iff") in order to satisfy both the
conditions put on the "if" sentence in Wason's selection task by each
“direction
” of the biconditional, one would expect the majority of "the Wason
people" to choose all the four cards (I know Geary would).
Nonetheless, that is contrary to what the data highlight, namely that the
majority of "The Wason People" (Geary is not one of them) goes for
p
and
q
only.
As a result, it WOULD seem as if Grice also fails to provide a suitable
justification of people’s response to the why "the Wason people" fail to pass
Wason's selection task.
There have been attempts (surveyed by Grice himself in his "Retrospective
Epilogue" to WoW) to develop Grice’s conversational implicature as applied
to 'if' -- which features notably in Wason's selection task.
It is generally accepted that the inferential component of communication
rests very largely on the ability to work out what is and is not 'related'
(Grice relies on Kant's category of Relation, which he (Grice) turns onto a
conversational category, as he calls it) in terms of contextual effect, in
what people are saying to you (Cara and Girotto apply this to Wason's
selection task).
Another very influential proposal was given in the framework of
evolutionary psychology. Believe it or not, Grice was an 'evolutionist', like
Popper,
only different.
Thus, Cosmides claims that people -- even the Wason people -- have not
evolved in such a way that would allow them to perform Wason's selection task
successfully.
This idea seems to find strong support in experiments conducted with
different versions of Wason's selection task involving "social exchange"
scenarios.
In these cases, people’s success in performing the tests highly increases.
An interesting project has been pursued by Oaksford and Chater. They argue
for a stricter conceptual analysis of Wason's selection task based on the
theory of optimal data selection in Bayesian statistics.
By applying such standard, they try to justify the claim that the most
frequent card selections are also the rational ones -- or as Grice might
prefer, the 'reasonable' ones.
Cheers,
Speranza
REFERENCES
Grice, Studies in the Way of Words.
-- Aspects of Reason.
Pears, Motivated Irrationality.
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