#dan sperber

[maaarine]

The Enigma of Reason (Dan Sperber, Hugo Mercier, 2017)

“Ziva Kunda led participants to believe that extroverts are more likely to be successful than introverts.

On a later memory task, these participants found it much easier to recall memories of their own extroverted rather than introverted behavior.

Another group of participants was led to believe that it is introverts who are more likely to be successful than extroverts.

They found it easier to recall memories of introverted rather than extroverted behavior.

Both groups were simply seeking reasons to believe that they had the qualities that would make them successful. (…)

If reason is an instrument of individual cognition aimed at better beliefs and decisions, it should be biased toward information that violates our expectations.

Reason should look for counterarguments to our generalizations, reasons to question our decisions, memories that clash with our current beliefs. (…)

Instead, reasoning systematically works to find reasons for our ideas and against ideas we oppose. It always takes our side.

As a result, it is preferable to speak of a myside bias rather than of a confirmation bias. (…)

The lawyer analogy brings to mind a context in which persuasion is paramount and the myside bias makes obvious sense: when defending a point of view, the myside bias is a good thing.

It is a feature, not a bug. This fits with the prediction of the interactionist approach.

If the function of reasoning, when it produces reasons, is to justify one’s actions or to convince others, then it should have a myside bias.”

[kenyatta]

What is a word, the word “love” for instance? It is standardly described as an elementary unit of language that combines sound and meaning. Yes, but a word so understood is an abstraction without causal powers. Only concrete uses of the word “love” have causes and effects: An utterance of the word has, among its causes, mental processes in a speaker and, among its effects, mental processes in a listener (not to mention hormonal and other bio-chemical processes). This speech event is causally linked, on another time scale, to earlier similar events from which the speaker and listener acquired their ability to produce and interpret “love” the way they do. The word endures and changes in a linguistic community through all these episodes of acquisition and use. So, the word “love” can be studied as a population of causally related events taking place inside people and in their shared environment, a population of billions and billions of such events, each occurring in a different context, each conveying a meaning appropriate at that instant, and all nevertheless causally related. Scholarly or lay discussions about the word “love” and its meaning are themselves a population of mental and public meta-linguistic events evolving on the margins of the “love” population. All words can similarly be thought of not, or not just, as abstract units of language, but as populations of mental and public events.

What Scientific Term of Concept Ought Bt Be More Widely Known? (Population Thinking) Edge.org

Species evolve, early features may disappear, novel features may appear. From a populationist point of view, a species is a population of organisms that share features not because of a common “nature” but because they are related by descent. A species so understood is a temporally continuous, spatially scattered entity that changes over time.

Population thinking readily extends beyond biology to the study of cultural evolution (as argued by Peter Richerson, Robert Boyd, and Peter Godfrey-Smith). Cultural phenomena can be thought of as populations, the members of which share features because they influence one another even though they do not beget one another the way organisms do and are not exactly copies of one another.

[jazbaaati]

[maaarine]

Explaining Culture (Dan Sperber, 2005)

“Humans can mentally represent not just environmental and somatic facts, but also some of their own mental states, representations and processes.

The human internal representation system - the language of thought, to use Jerry Fodor's expression - can serve as its own metalanguage. (…)

Doubting and disbelieving involve representing a representation as being improbable or false. 

Presumably, other animals do not have the ability to disbelieve what they perceive or what they decode.

Secondly, meta-representational abilities allow humans to process information which they do not fully understand, information for which they are not able at the time to provide a well-formed representation. (…)

A device with rnetarepresentational abilities, on the other hand, can embed a defective representation in a well-formed meta-representation.

Children use this ability all the time to process half-understood information.

They are told things that they do not quite understand by speakers whom they trust.

So they have grounds to believe that what they are told is true, even though they do not know exactly what it is that they are told. (…)

The obvious function served by the ability to entertain half-understood concepts and ideas is to provide intermediate steps towards their full understanding.

But it also creates the possibility of conceptual mysteries, which no amount of processing could ever clarify, invading human minds.”

[maaarine]

The Enigma of Reason (Dan Sperber, Hugo Mercier, 2017)

“Actually, they argued, the way we explain our own behavior isn’t that dfferent from the way we would explain that of others.

To explain the behavior of others, we take into account what we know of them and of the situation, and we look for plausible causes (influenced by the type of causal accounts that are accepted in our culture).

To know our own mind and to explain our own behavior, we do the same (drawing on richer but not radically different evidence). (…)

Our inferences about others are often quite insightful; our inferences about ourselves needn’t be worse.

We may often succeed in identifying bits of information that did play a role in our beliefs and decisions.

Where we are systematically mistaken is in assuming that we have direct introspective knowledge of our mental states and of the processes through which they are produced. (…)

It is not that we commonly misidentify our true reasons.

It is, rather, that we are mistaken in assuming that all our inferences are guided by reasons in the first place.

Reasons, we want to argue, play a central role in the after-the-fact explanation and justification of our intuitions, not in the process of intuitive inference itself.”

[tanakhcast]

TanakhCast #118: The Meanwhile in Egypt Edition

In this week’s episode: Jeremiah 44–47.  We continue in the book of Jeremiah with some thoughts about confirmation bias.

[wordswilling]

Failures in communication are to be expected: what is mysterious and requires explanation is not failure but success.

Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson, Relevance: Communication and Cognition

[randomglory]

Worrying is an investment of cognitive resources laced with emotions from the anxiety spectrum and aimed at solving some specific problem. It has its costs and benefits, and so does not worrying. Worrying for a few minutes about what to serve for dinner in order please one’s guests may be a sound investment of resources. Worrying about what will happen to your soul after death is a total waste. Human ancestors and other animals with foresight may have only worried about genuine and pressing problems such as not finding food or being eaten. Ever since they have become much more imaginative and have fed their imagination with rich cultural inputs, that is, since at least 40,000 years (possibly much more), humans have also worried about improving their lot individually and collectively — sensible worries — and about the evil eye, the displeasure of dead ancestors, the purity of their blood — misplaced worries. A new kind of misplaced worries is likely to become more and more common. The ever-accelerating current scientific and technological revolution results in a flow of problems and opportunities that presents unprecedented cognitive and decisional challenges. Our capacity to anticipate these problems and opportunities is swamped by their number, novelty, speed of arrival, and complexity What I am particularly worried about is that humans will be less and less able to appreciate what they should really be worrying about and that their worries will do more harm than good. Maybe, just as on a boat in rapids, one should try not to slowdown anything but just to optimize a trajectory one does not really control, not because safety is guaranteed and optimism is justified — the worst could happen — but because there is no better option than hope.

--- Dan Sperber, Age of Anxiety