Interesting quote I just came across today:

On the one hand, reading acquisition should “encroach” on particular areas of the cortex—those that possess the appropriate receptive fields to recognize the small contrasted shapes that are used as characters, and the appropriate connections to send this information to temporal lobe language areas. On the other hand, the cultural form of writing systems must have evolved in accordance with the brain’s learnability constraints, converging progressively on a small set of symbol shapes that can be optimally learned by these particular visual areas. — Stanislas Dehaene and Laurent Cohen

The spot for the recognition of letters and such is right next the area dedicated to recognizing faces. I love the suggestion that on the one hand we have a largely innate capacity for recognizing faces, but that the writing systems we developed were designed to take advantage of just that sort of capability, so with a little specialization we get this. It's not that our writing systems are innate, but it's also no coincidence that we have the writing systems we do.

I don't know much about the whole war over modularity, but I don't understand how lesion studies make any sense if the brain just gives us one big general intelligence. Some degree of modularity seems really obviously right.

On the other hand, the great bulk of our behavior is going to draw on many, many modules in the brain. Exceptions might be things like flinching, ducking, those basic reflexes. But not, you know, art, or modeling someone else's beliefs, or making dinner.

Maybe that puts me -- as if I had any expertise here, and I don't! -- in your lowercase "ep" camp.

activities, as: different and more than brain processes — Antony Nickles

our (human alone) relation to our understanding of our relation to objects — Antony Nickles

Agreed.

But to @NotAristotle's question, it does appear that objects are by and large constructed within the brain, without our awareness, and that this is true even of infants only some months old as well of many other animals. Not just by the brain as some sort of passive observer of course, but also through interaction with the environment.

That still leaves a lot of room for human ways of relating to objects that are distinct from dog ways or hummingbird ways and so on.

(1) where do we get the criteria for what counts as an object? — NotAristotle

Based on recent findings, some researchers (such as Elizabeth Spelke and Renee Baillargeon) have proposed that an understanding of object permanence is not learned at all, but rather comprises part of the innate cognitive capacities of our species. — wiki article on Developmental Psychology

(2) I think the issue is a "how does our brain do that" mystery. Light enters the brain through the retina, it is parsed as images (lines, shapes, colors, and so on). At what point does that assemblage of lines shapes, colors, etc. become an object? If it's the brain that does that, how does it do so? — NotAristotle

You'd have to read up on developmental psychology more than I have, but that's the place to look. The little bit of research I've read about has to do with infants, so for sure we're not talking about reasoning our way to objects -- there's almost certainly a specialized module for handling this stuff wired in, and connecting directly to a module handling some basic physics, which infants considerably less than a year old already understand.

One way to put this is that physical science can’t do the work of philosophy, can’t solve our concerns and confusions with our human condition. We want it to take us (our failings) out of the picture, but the process of working with objects is a human activity. — Antony Nickles

"Human"?

Dogs don't bury bones? Beavers don't build dams? Owls don't catch field mice?

Does nobody want to compare the behavior of the (young, online) left to the behavior of the (young and old, online and on-air) right during this period? The insular paranoid style has come back with a vengeance on both sides. The right sees SJWs and RINOs and libtards everywhere, the left white supremacists and transphobes and libertarian trojan horses. Everyone doing their part for the return of religious fundamentalism worldwide, even if your gang isn't officially a religion. QAnon looks a lot like the satanic panic, looked at one way. Hounding Kathleen Stock into retiring looks a lot like McCarthyism in almost every way -- or the Cultural Revolution, jesus.

These last many years I have found plenty of reason to say, "That whole Enlightenment thing -- big waste of time."

Just a general comment here. I think you're missing the point of the field.

There are a lot of areas where people assume they know roughly what the explanation of some human behavior is, even if they don't know the details, and that explanation often begins with a broad gesture at history and culture.

But sometimes there is a kind of explanation available that is really quite different. Often what the sort of explanations I have in mind have in common is that they contest the generally "intellectualist" approach to human culture and behavior. There are classic examples in the work of anthropologist Marvin Harris, who offered what we might call "material" explanations for things like religious dietary restrictions. Just as curious is the reverse: the emphasis on culture as shaping economics in the work of Marshall Sahlins. Harris in his day was about as controversial as Robert Trivers is in ours.

All of this to say that I think evolutionary psychology is valuable at the very least for moving the Overton window here, in much the way that anthropologists like Harris and Sahlins did -- what if we don't assume we already know how this works but try, you know, the opposite? In the case of human behavior, what if we don't assume it's all cultural, but consider that maybe a great many facets of our lives make perfect sense if you remember to think of as animals first and foremost and expect that to be more than sort of the bare substrate upon which we grow our rich and marvelous cultural lives.

What's the alternative? We're born animals but leave all that behind almost immediately? After the last 150 years of biology and psychology that sounds like a non-starter.

I think the category 'logic' may be just too broad and in cognitive psychology terms isn't a 'natural kind' at all, but rather two (or three) completely separate processes, which involve both sensory data, and interoceptive modelling. — Isaac

Okay, that's helpful. Toward the end I was starting to imagine an almost adhoc building up toward the general, generalizing just as much as you need to resolve a conflict. But it bothered me that once again I was starting to treat inference rules as premises, habits as beliefs.

I like this less abstract approach of considering what sorts of cognitive departments an organism might develop and then looking at what those could conceivably do and what that would look like. My whole approach in the last post was way way too abstract.

it is often a matter of a 'picture' rather than a narrative — wonderer1

I do think that's really important. (Sellars used to actually draw pictures in his typescripts and commented once that everybody uses images it's just that he leaves them in. One of his two most famous papers has the word "image" in the title and the other has "myth".) These days I almost always approach probability problems by imagining a rectangle and then carving up the total space into areas. Numbers are decoration. (Bonus anecdote: Feynman describes an elaborate visualization technique he used to figure out whether a conjecture in mathematics was true or false, game he used to play I think as a grad student talking to guys from the math department. If he got it wrong and they pointed out the condition he missed, he'd reply, "Oh, then it's trivial," which is incontestable when talking to mathematicians, kind of an "I win" card.)

Blah blah blah, I'm just so focused on linguistic and symbolic reasoning that it's hard to know what to do with visual reasoning, but if it's not obvious then I must be doing something wrong. This is probably me being too abstract again and it would be clearer if we considered how organisms like us rely on visual "input".

I don't think I posted this but I did a little introspective experiment last week where I looked at objects on the porch and out in the yard and imagined them moving. I developed some skill at that kind of visualization as a chess player, though I'm rusty now. The result was that I did not hallucinate the objects moving, there is no interruption of the visual stream, which still shows the lawnmower in the same place, but it "feels" like I'm seeing it move. It's like hypothetical movement does fire the extra "what this means" pathway but stays off the main "what I'm seeing pathway", almost like the reverse of Capgras delusion. When I coached young players I used to tell them to imagine the pieces very heavy when they calculate so they could more easily remember which square a piece was on in their imagination. Curious.

A chapter into Mercier and Sperber and the model is pretty exciting.

filtered out — Isaac

suppressive feedback — Isaac

This! I'm always forgetting how much of our mental processing is devoted to filtering. That's another point that makes my last post feel off.

There is an argument to be made that focusing on arguments in isolation is akin to putting all your effort into finding out the best way to walk and making the most accurate maps, while completely ignoring the question of where you are walking from or to and why. — Count Timothy von Icarus

That is exactly the sort of position I was hoping someone would advocate -- but for some reason even you hedge here and don't advocate it -- and why I didn't feel comfortable just branding @Wayfarer's lectures on history non-sequiturs.

Saying these turns are "necessary," might be a bridge too far, but they also aren't wholly contingent as in the natural selection type theory of how knowledge progresses. — Count Timothy von Icarus

And this is just obviously right.

Here's two points, one from the thread, and one kind of its background:

(1) Lots of people say history has pedagogical value, that you can understand ideas better if you know their history, what they were responding to (as in the second quote), the whole context, even what came after in response.

(2) Some people hear "the Enlightenment" and think, "Greatest wrong turn in history, still sorting out the mess it made," and some people think "Finally! That's when we got on the right path, the only trouble is staying on it."

I think one of the issues @Isaac was raising is that (2) exerts a considerable influence over how you enact (1). Are you going to put the Enlightenment into a story in which it's the good guy, disrupting Bad Old Tradition (especially religion), or the Bad Guy, depersonalizing nature, atomizing everything, destroying the tried and true holistic understanding of things (and banishing God to fairy land). @Isaac's suggestion is, I believe, that there is no 'objective' context to recover to understand the Enlightenment; however you describe that context, before and after, is going to be shaped and colored by the story you're telling about it.

And that's likely just true, but may leave some room for comparing stories, judging them more or less comprehensive, more or less true to the (cherry-picked) facts, just the usual stuff. I mean, of course we do that. But the calculus changes here if you recognize that all you have the option of doing is comparing stories (and what they present as evidence for themselves) to each other; it's obvious with history, but true everywhere, that you don't have the option of judging a story by comparing it to what it's about, 'reality' or 'what really happened'. Comparing stories to each other might give some hope of 'triangulating' the truth, until you remember that this triangulating process is also going to be shaped and colored by narrative commitments, just like the material we're trying to judge.

Thanks for bringing us back to the topic. More interesting points in there than I've responded to.

Basically, if the process of reasoning (which is effectively predictive modeling of our own thinking process), flags up a part of the process that doesn't fit the narrative, it'll send suppressive constraints down to that part to filter out the 'crazy' answers that don't fit. — Isaac

Corrective rather than constructive, and the consistency being enforced is that of the narrative your current model is organized around, rather than "the way the world really is" or something.

Some of that seems almost obviously true, but here's what still bothers me: if logic is a system of constraints that enforce (or, as here, restore) consistency, even if that consistency is with something like a narrative arrived at by other means, that still leaves logic as a set of universal, minimal constraints that everybody ends up following. Our narratives may be handmade and idiosyncratic, but unless the consistency I enforce (with that narrative) is also handmade and idiosyncratic, logic is still universal.

We don't have to go straight there. One of the things @Joshs talks about is paradigm or culture as the constraints on what counts as evidence. You could see something like that operating at the layer we were describing here as the corrective constraints. The next level up from your narrative might be this cultural layer that enforces a specific sort of consistency that would be different in another culture or under another paradigm. That's plausible. And there could be any number of layers, a hierarchy of constraints, variously idiosyncratic or cultural or community-driven, or even species-specific. But it seems like that pattern points to a minimal set at the top that looks a lot like logic, which annoys me if there's no explanation for where that set of constraints came from.

If, on the other hand, the most general constraint level is constructed by successively generalizing from the lower layers, whatever they may be, then that sounds a bit like the story I was hoping to tell about logic emerging from our practices rather than pre-existing them. Once in place, of course they can cascade (selectively) back down through the hierarchy to constrain our belief formation and so on, so they play that normative role of something we strive to conform to, but we're striving to conform to rules we ourselves have made and can take a hand in remaking and revising. All that's needed is a mechanism for generalizing and some motivation to undertake such a project. (And I swear to god this sounds almost like the old empiricist theory of generalizing from experience.) It is still a little uncomfortable for us to be converging on very, very similar top-level constraints, but maybe it shouldn't be.

One thing I haven't paid much attention to yet is that logic, like language, needs to be usable while it's being built. You can generalize a new higher level constraint and begin cascading that back down as soon as you build it -- and handling some specific case immediately is probably why you've built it, though it might take like forever before you get around to enforcing that constraint everywhere -- it's more of an as-needed, just-in-time thing.

There's also some question about whether the constraints at any given level are consistent with each other. Could very well not be and that could go on until some major failure forces you to add a new level with a rule for sorting that out. And if it comes to that, this might really be a hierarchy only in the sense that it has a kind of directed graph structure where two nodes may not have a parent (only children) until there's a conflict and a parent node is created to settle that conflict.

We're not a million miles away from Quine's web of beliefs, but he tended to talk in terms of a core area of the most abstract rules like logic, and a periphery that is the most exposed to experience. And he continually waffled on whether the rules of logic at the core were subject to revision.

Is this all just empty model spinning, or does it sound reasonable? @Janus? @wonderer1

What I'm convinced doesn't happen (contrary to Kahneman, I think - long time since I've read him) is any cognitive hacking in real time — Isaac

I don't recall getting such an impression from Kahneman — wonderer1

It's probably me misremembering or misunderstanding, and I'll look again. Mercier & Sperber mention in the introduction to Enigma of Reason that their model is different from Kahneman's in not really having two different types of reasoning process.

I do remember feeling back when I was reading TFS (which, full disclosure, I didn't get all the way through) that the thrust of it was that we reason logically less than we think we do, but we can make an effort to notice when a bias has crept in and respond. (Remember the little self-help sections at the end of the chapters? "Gosh, maybe I'm letting system 1 get its way here, and I should slow down, have a system-2 look at this." To which my response was always that I already spend a hell of a lot of time in system 2, so, you know, "does not apply" boss.) If that's so, logic is still a system of rules for getting better -- meaning, more likely to be true -- answers and its status is still unexplained.

I'll just go look at the book, but another general impression I got from the book is that we rely on system 1 so long as it works well enough, but system 2 is there for when things go wrong, and the response to surprise is that the slow, careful process takes over, and it has different rules, actually looks at the evidence, makes properly logical inferences, and so on. Which, again, leaves what logic itself is and why it works unexplained.

But I'll go look.

This all seems fine on a cursory reading. — Janus

But it's also whacko. I'm surprised you're nonplussed, but cheers.

If it's to give us better belief sets (where 'better' here could be any measure for now), then we're putting the cart before the horse in our argumentation methodology, we should be saying "look how successful my belief sets are - that proves they cannot be self-contradictory", forget logic - point and counter-point should be various successes and failures in our personal lives!

But we don't. We think it the other way round, we think that one ought hold a belief set which adheres to these argumentative rules regardless of whether it's useful or not. As if there were some nobility to doing so. Perhaps we'll be rewarded by God...? — Isaac

This is the main thing I'm trying to get past. I think there's a typical assumption that our beliefs have a clear logical structure and if an inconsistency has snuck in then your beliefs are in a sort of defective state, you'll make worser predictions, and you'll end up mistakenly drinking bleach. Or at any rate, false beliefs get weeded out through contact with the real world, leaving behind true ones you can safely make sound inferences from. That kind of model. Representational, computational, and rational.

Certainly some chunks of our beliefs look to us like they were stitched together with some care, and some don't, but I'm not convinced that whatever consistency, whatever structure there is is there by choice. Even before "AI" became something people said everyday, there was talk of evolutionary algorithms at places like Facebook and Google, so complicated that none of their engineers understand them. I assume something a lot like that is true of our beliefs. There's probably something identifiable as structure in there but it's nothing at all like the two column proofs you learned in school and it's inconceivably more complicated. That's my guess anyway. The occasional dumbed down summaries of what's going on in there are what we call reasons and arguments.

That still leaves room for an account of reason as a social practice rather than, I guess, a cognitive faculty.

Is this roughly where you are?

I think Kahneman's view is that we can learn how to intervene in our own thinking process, correct our misguided intuitions using logic and math, and over time thus improve our habits of thought. I'd like to believe that...

My impression is that we are talking about entirely different things. — Janus

We are, yes, absolutely. I'm just kind of curious to see how it goes.

All I'm addressing is, if you want to engage in such debates, then your argument better not contradict itself, or it won't be taken seriously or be of any use to anyone. — Janus

Maybe. I think @Isaac would agree with that -- rules of the game we play here.

If there is such a convention, I could certainly choose to follow it, and that might be worthwhile, depending on what I get out of playing the game. That would leave a couple questions: (1) is it anything more than a convention -- a law of the universe, say? (2) if it is a convention, does it have a purpose and if so what?

(1) I'm just going to ignore, but (2) is exactly what I'm interested in.

You've suggested a couple times that if I contradict myself, you can't tell what I'm advocating. Let's say that's true. If I contradict myself, there's no clear response for you -- at least agreeing or disagreeing with me don't seem to be options, but you can still call me out for breaking the rules, and you can indicate you don't intend to break the rules yourself. So that's a cost you willingly incur, making the effort not to contradict yourself, and that should count for something, a bona fide of your intention to engage seriously. Someone who breaks the rules has refused to ante up, and is not taken seriously. Everyone agreeing to incur some cost, to put in a modicum of effort, builds trust. That's clear enough.

If there's a cost to not contradicting yourself, if it takes effort, then we must be sorely tempted to contradict ourselves, must be on the verge of doing so regularly, and that doesn't sound right. I don't expect people to hold consistent beliefs, but direct self-contradiction is still pretty rare -- it's like we don't have an introduction rule for 'P & ~P', just not the sort of sentence we generate except by accident. (If there are contradictions or inconsistencies, they're generally more subtle. I searched the site for accusations of self contradiction, and, as you can imagine, the accused party universally denies that they have done so, and then there's a back and forth about whether what they said really is a contradiction or not. It's never dead obvious like 'P & ~P'.)

I mean, maybe the cost story holds up even if the cost is minimal -- it's the thought that counts -- or maybe it works better as a package, agreeing to something nearly amounting to all of classical logic and some induction and some probability and on and on. Now we're talking quite a bit of effort.

But is there something else? Some reason for this rule in particular? Do I have a motivation to make sure you have clear options of agreeing or disagreeing with me? I might, if we're choosing sides. Might just be politics. Anything else? There is the standard analogy of assertion as a bet -- you look at the odds but then you have to actually pick what to bet on to stand a chance of winning anything. (Cover the board and you'll tend to break even.) Do I have a motivation to gamble in our discussion? Do I stand to win anything by picking one of the two sides I have evidence for? Maybe, if it makes your response more useful to me. If I have evidence for both sides of an issue, it might not even matter which side I pick, so long as I can elicit from you more support for one side or the other, by giving you the opportunity to argue against me, or add your reasons for agreeing.

So that's two arguments for a strategy of respecting the LNC: (1) especially when taken together with other conventions of discussion, it represents a cost incurred by participants, which builds trust; (2) it's an efficient strategy for eliciting responses useful for updating your own views. (The latter is the sort of thing apo mentions regularly, the need for crispness, all that.)

Good enough for now, I guess. I'm still mulling it over.

Are we just going to do another round of the endless consciousness debate in this thread? — Srap Tasmaner

No. — schopenhauer1

But is it [ human behavior? ] amenable to science is the question. — schopenhauer1

But that is exactly the endless debate about consciousness here.

but what if you added — Janus

Well, that's the thing. It's really already in there, because we're just talking about a working hypothesis, just pragmatism. All bets come hedged.

And if your position is self-contradictory would that not amount to being no position at all? — Janus

I don't know what to say to that because I don't see how it's a useful question. It's fighting the last war.

Should I be afraid that I might sometimes sound like I have an opinion when, unbeknownst to me, I don't?

Should I worry that I might try to predict whether that rock will hit me but somehow fail to make any prediction at all because a contradiction snuck in somewhere?

Reasoning as we actually do it is a rough and ready business, constantly on the move. I can imagine arguing that contradictions get weeded out because they're inherently useless, being necessarily false, but I doubt even that's right. We often have good reason to believe both sides of a story, so we keep our options open, and for a while they live side by side. So what?

Eh, evolution related to physical artifacts, and biological systems, even perhaps cognitive systems. But more complex behavior? Much more of a grey area. — schopenhauer1

Sure, but what do you take away from that?

Are we just going to do another round of the endless consciousness debate in this thread? "Science still hasn't explained it, so it's not biology." That's a crap argument. Science is hard, and it takes a long time, and people need to deal. Why is everyone so intent on second-guessing science? Why all the armchair quarterbacking? Just say thank you and let them do their work.

Everyone knows behavior is both nature and nurture; we're just working out the details. I think it's both natural and salutary for biology to push the envelope a bit because that's how you can find the limit, the point where you say, past here it must be something other than biology. If that means evolutionary psychology and sociobiology are still in the 'over promising' phase then the 'under delivering' will pull things back, probably too far, and the pendulum will keep swinging but with a shorter and shorter period. We hope. But if no one ever tests the biology-first approach, we're not going to learn much.

that last sentence kind of contradicts what you're saying — schopenhauer1

I meant the list as a whole -- some of the stuff on the list might be cogent critiques that are crucial to the future development of the field or even its collapse. I wouldn't know. But some of what's on there is definitely not that, so the list as a whole is not, say, evidence that the field is disreputable or something. That's all I meant.

Anyways, I think it's fine as a discipline. However, I see it really straddling the line. It's not just a field of study. It's underlying premise is that various behaviors, some very specific ones, can be traced back to processes that are hard to prove. — schopenhauer1

Proof isn't exactly on the table anyway. I think what you're saying is that evolutionary explanations of behavior are inherently more speculative than other sorts of explanations, and I'm not sure that's true, because we have some pretty solid ideas about how evolution works, so at least the foundation is solid, even though shifting all the time. Cultures and languages also evolve, and the mechanisms are quite similar, but I think there's not much prospect of science of culture that would look much like biology. Maybe someday, but for now that appears to me at least to be beyond us.

I think the big takeaway from the last hundred and fifty years of biology and psychology is that we are not nearly so different from other animals as we used to think. We're still trying to figure out just what is and what isn't different about us, and evolutionary psychology is the obvious terrain for whatever fights we have about it.

my point isn’t some crazy outlier — schopenhauer1

No of course not, but why should you care if it's an outlier? You're an anti-natalist, for chrissakes. Outlier is where you live.

Of course people have critiqued evolutionary psychology. Of course there are examples, especially I think from earlyish days when people were a little over-excited about the prospects for it, and some of that stuff is a bit cringe.

But so what? It's obviously not a stupid idea. We are what we are, and the principle science of what we are is biology, and biology is completely steeped in evolutionary theory at this point. Of course there will be insights about human beings that are shaped by our understanding of evolution. How could there not be?

(I was ever so slightly teasing you about the list because it's obviously a real mixed-bag, even to someone as ill-informed as I am. Some of what's on there is clearly going to be a defense of the ideas you were attacking. Some of it is notoriously, let's say, "motivated" attacks, not taken seriously by anyone, I think, rather like the drubbing sociobiology took mainly from stuffy humanities types. It's nothing like evidence that evopsych is a disreputable field or a field in crisis or something. Might be, but that list would have nothing to do with it.)

What I meant was that within the presentation of an argument self-contradiction would make it unclear what position was being asserted, or even mean that no position is being asserted. — Janus

I just don't see how you're going to cleanly partition what is and what isn't part of an argument.

Why am I even arguing about this?

I don't think the LNC is useful at all as a description of how people reason or how they argue. People are frequently inconsistent, and philosophers know that better than most, not least because they accuse each other of it all the time. I see no sign that communication requires the kind of perfect consistency suggested, and I suspect there's a terribly unrealistic model of language and communication at work there.

I doubt the LNC is even useful as an ideal to strive for. If our mental faculties are primarily geared toward making useful predictions, and those predictions are probabilistic, I don't see what the LNC even brings to the table. My beliefs are mixed, my expectations are mixed, the evidence I accumulate is mixed, and what's required of me is flexibility, continual updating and exploration. It's not a matter of adding or subtracting atomic beliefs from my store of truths; change is always cascading through the system of my beliefs, modifying the meaning even of beliefs I "retain".

I do think I get where you're coming from, as a reformed logic guy myself. I'm not really arguing to convince you, just giving you some idea why I don't find much of value or interest in the LNC.

So what did you think of all those books and papers? --- Or, wait, was your OP a summary of your position after reading all that stuff?

I'm not sure that was a critique of evolutionary psychology rather than of a critique of the idea of human nature, and maybe even of psychology tout court.

Actually I have some sympathy for John McWhorter's take, that wokism is a new religion. And that's not based on what young progressives advocate, but on the behavior.

We don't seem to share the same wants when it comes to philosophy. — javra

Indeed. I think reasoning serves a purpose.

Probably nothing more to be gained from further discussion, but it was fun. Appreciate you indulging my heterodoxy.

Have a great trip! We'll be here when you get back.

Which is to say, who the heck can conclusively answer this & by no means necessarily. It could be as much an uncreated "just is" aspect of reality as matter is to the materialist. — javra

Okay, but you can't possibly find that satisfactory. That is the weakest conceivable position it is possible to take and still call this 'philosophy'. I'll pass. -- But having passed, I have to wonder about a position that says "who the heck knows" and then makes a claim about the nature of reality. Doesn't inspire confidence. Are you even sure you know what you're claiming?

But no one actively holds two (or more) contradictory beliefs at the same instant. Instead, one flip-flops between them while upholding both as true. — javra

So when it comes to reasoning, what is it we're upholding again? What's the model of rationality we should aspire to? Flip-flopping and hypocrisy are fine so long as you don't contradict yourself? We're supposed not to contradict ourselves because it's a bad thing to do. (In some circles, the principle of explosion will be darkly alluded to.) But your position is that we don't just because we can't, and we do the next best thing, which is advocating contradictory positions seconds apart. If we want to say that's not okay either, evidently the "law" of non-contradiction won't be any help, and we'll need a whole 'nother principle to rule that out.

variation in the constellations of cognitive strengths and weaknesses people have — wonderer1

Perfect! For me. Just moments ago I realized I meant to say something about Whitman over in the thread where I'm pissing on the law of non-contradiction:

(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

And what you posted is almost exactly what I wanted to say. Ask me a question and I'll be responsible for the answer I give, as a person, as a moral agent by society's reckoning, but that doesn't mean it was "I" who answered. Some cognitive lieutenant piped up and said, "I've got this one, boss." We have many many specialty departments, and one of them produces the answer I (the person) give.

This is perfectly clear in some linguistics research. You can identify a race between concurrent processes -- maybe one applying the "-ed" rule and one looking up the irregular preterite -- and whoever gets there first wins. Availability bias is obviously like this too, and suggests multiple sources of the answers we give, the things we say.

I've complained about it, recently, with respect to my own posting habits, when I notice that I'm giving a type of answer out of habit, even if it's no longer representative of my thinking. We say stuff, and sometimes the stuff we say strikes even us as someone else talking with our voice.

BTW, a belief that A which is held with a probability of .90 is not contradicted by a belief that ~A held with a probability of .10. Each proposition entails the other, for they address the same thing. The LNC however does affirm that it not possible to hold a belief that A with .90 probability while at the same time holding a belief that A with .10 probability. — javra

It depends.

I thought you were going to finish that paragraph with A at 0.7 and ~A at 0.7, which should also be impossible but is known to happen, at least when considering the implications of people's beliefs. Polls routinely show slightly (and sometimes not so slightly) inconsistent opinions, and are notoriously dependent on how the questions are worded. How the questions are worded suggests a certain framework, calls up particular associations, all that extra-logical stuff. I think the approach you take suggests it would be possible to word questions "perfectly" to account for all of this and only get consistent results. I not only doubt any such thing is possible, I'm not sure it's coherent to claim that it is. There's just too much language getting in the way when you put things into words, so your first step will have to be to make the questions non-linguistic.

And then what is it the LNC actually applies to? Is it the non-verbal intellections of God?

Joke I heard while I was there about the little bells people wear especially on particular trails: What's the difference between grizzly scat and, say, black bear scat? Well, they look almost identical, except the grizzly scat has these little bells in it.

the left wing has been effectively neutered by it's own internal divisions — Isaac

That's hardly news though. Been the case since the Judean People's Front split off from the People's Front of Judea.

Again, it's simply naive to think that this is coincidence. That the only campaigns which receive any air time (from the bought and paid for conglomerate media) are the ones which have zero impact on the ever greedy consumer machine. — Isaac

Capital's always going to be doing that thing where any identity division is exacerbated, monetised, coopted in an attempt to create and maintain markets. This ultimately isn't a good or a bad thing, it is just a thing that happens. — fdrake

Or there's overlap between emancipatory politics and capital here. I noted earlier that capitalism's tendency to eat through whatever institutions you've got has sometimes been a good thing, and that might be what's going on here. Just consider how focused on the workplace emancipatory issues are, equal pay, hiring and firing practices, workplace conditions. Some of that bears some resemblance to labor union struggles of old, but some of it is demanding that everyone have the same opportunity to be a wage slave, right? So that might be emancipatory but it's also capitalism eating through institutions like sexism, ableism, racism. Use those divisions, destroy them, rebuild them, whatever. Capital don't care.

The tendency of capital to dissolve social forms also tends to dissolve stultifying ones. Disruption isn't always bad. — fdrake

Ah, so you said the same thing. Hurray for us.

So it could be that there is no successful left-wing politics anywhere; all we really see is a kind of mirror-image of capitalism's opportunism. Where people can use the universal acid of capitalism on some injustice, there's some redress possible, but only there.

Because it might not be possible to stop capitalism. ("Internal contradictions" always sounded like wish fulfillment to me.)

Yellowstone — wonderer1

I've been there! Just in a touristy way, not camping. It is beautiful.

My favorite Yellowstone story. Driving along with the in-laws, and we see some cars pulled over, which is a sign there's something to see, so we pull over. There's a bunch of tourists standing around in a little picnic area and a couple of park rangers standing over by some trees talking to them, because behind the rangers out in the meadow is a grizzly bear. So this dude is standing with his back to a tree, and the meadow, answering questions about the bears and being educational. The other ranger is off to one side where he can see everyone and also glance over toward the bear. "Uh, Bill," and a nod toward the meadow, where it turns out the grizzly has covered some ground since the talker last looked. He turns to glance over his shoulder and visibly jumped! "Okay, everyone, you all need to move back now, that's it, move on back now, DON'T GO IN THE WOODS!" Just ever so slightly lost his cool as this grizzly ambled toward us, it was awesome.

in the name of philosophical accuracy, the law of non-contradiction states that A and ~A cannot both be at the same time and in the same respect — javra

Yes, yes, we all know you can make this sound more precise, but ceteris paribus conditions always grow toward infinity. How fully do you think you can specify "in the same respect"?

Hence the incomprehensibility of much of QM as its currently interpreted. — javra

I'm not going to wade into QM interpretation -- I wear water wings even in the shallow end of that pool -- but I think you needed something here besides "QM is incomprehensible" else you're undermining your own case.

And don't forget the other major paradigm shift in modern physics. You casually invoke simultaneity in your precise definition of the LNC. Feel on solid ground there? No qualms at all about specifying some universal time-stamp for phenomena? We just recently here on the forum had a discussion of an event that will appear to have occurred in one frame of reference but not in another, and there's a paradox if those frames of reference can communicate about it.

Let's put it this way: the law of non-contradiction appears to be a rule that would be suitable for an omniscient god. Down here in mortal land, we frequently have good reasons for both P and ~P. Some of this just goes away if instead of laying down rules for the universe to follow, we just note that all of our beliefs are held with some degree of confidence, so a belief that P with a confidence of 0.90 is the same as a belief that ~P with a confidence of 0.10. Every opinion we hold is a contradiction viewed this way, which is just to say that the contradiction framing is not particularly useful.

Not only easing the discomfort, but this is also the most profitable policy for reducing surprise. If actual agreement (top priority) doesn't reduce surprise, then we can at least fall back on predictable narratives about conflict. — Isaac

That's a piece I was missing.

I'm selling the whole package of support relations as a whole — Isaac

Interesting. One thing I forgot about is kettle logic.


There's still something a little off though.

If I make some claim, I might expect you to agree. (Remember our "same as me" discussion, my weird insistence that this would be the cheapest and fastest way to model you?) But suppose you don't. I said that presenting some reasons is an attempt to bring your views into alignment with mine, but that feels both obviously true and a little weak. If I now know that you disbelieve P, I should be able to model you just fine, so that's not the whole story. (Keep reading, progress below.)

When you disagree, there is also the surprise that I've been modeling you wrong, and it feels like one of our first responses is to get a quick sitrep on that failure -- to assess just how much damage this response does to my model of you, to figure out how wrong I was. This you can definitely see on the forum: people go from noting your disagreement right to "You mean you don't think you're conscious? You can't smell the sunrise and see the flowers??" That incredulity is a siren going off at the model-of-you desk. Oh, and we need to make sure the failure is confined to you, that I haven't been getting all kinds of stuff wrong.

But once things settle down again, likely through the emergency deployment of narrative, why do I try to change your views? That could actually be the same as what was going on above -- an attempt to determine whether I've gotten more than you wrong. Are you in fact right? Do I need to update to ~P? So I request a report from the modeling team -- why is P in the model anyway? (It's fun writing as the clueless executive. I literally don't know why P is in the model! There are some nerds somewhere who take care of that stuff...) The modeling team -- working on a deadline -- throws something together and sends it up and I show that to you. "This is what the boys down in modeling say about P, and it sounds pretty good to me." That will look like an argument, and if I didn't have you around, but were only entertaining a doubt of my own, that might be that. But now my trust in the modeling department has weakened, so by showing you their report, I'm also checking up on them, testing them. "Look, you seem to know something about this P business. Here's what my boys are telling me. Is this any good? Did they miss the boat here?"

Around here (TPF) it's almost a certainty that your answer will be "This report is crap. Your modeling team got this one wrong." But by saying this, you've now disagreed with more of my model, and even though my confidence may have been shaken, I don't just reset to impartial open-mindedness; I may have fallen from 95 to 93.8, that's all, so your responses are still being discounted by default as overwhelmingly likely to be wrong. By disagreeing with my Official Reasons, you're just pigeonholing yourself as an anomaly for me, making the case that my model only failed to recognize how perverse you are, while getting almost everything else right.

Through these first few exchanges, there's been no sign of the need to bring your views into alignment with mine, only a brief flirtation with bringing mine into alignment with yours. --- Actually some of the initial incredulity-driven tests might amount to "Surely you misspoke," so there's that.

There might be something else going on here though. When I recognize that you had a genuinely different view of what I assume is the same body of evidence, that piques the curiosity of the modeling team. "How did he come up with that?" There might be a bad algorithm there worth knowing about and avoiding, or there might be an interesting inference technique there we didn't know about, and even if it doesn't change our view in this case we're always on the lookout for new inference tech. So there's going to be a strong need to know why you had a thought that I didn't. Oh, and of course this plays directly into my need to model you better! My model of you was inaccurate; I need to update it with a model of the crappy inference algorithm you're using, in case I talk to you again.

Still no sign of needing to change your mind though, even though it looks like that's what arguments are for. The only thing I can think of is some hand-wavy thing about cooperation in the general project of all of us staying alive. I might (will! do!) prefer not to have to maintain a desk just to keep track of your screwy views and it would be easier and cheaper to bring you back into line with "practically everyone". --- Or, at least, assign you to one of the narrative departments. I just don't have the manpower to track every rando's views individually.

That's actually not bad, and less hand-wavy than I thought.

I don't know what you had in mind regarding a social explanation for reason — wonderer1

Roughly just an "arguing first" view -- that logic is not a handy tool waiting to be used, pre-existing our use of it when arguing, but that the rules of logic come out of what we do when we discuss and argue. That looks impossible because what other criteria could we have for whether I win the argument or you do, for whether my argument is better or yours? --- Still, I'm convinced (at the moment) it has to be done.

I speculate that logic becomes a matter of undeniable intuition as we are grasping the relationships between language about reality and reality itself. — wonderer1

I'd be hesitant to put it that way. I don't quite want to just block anything that smacks of a representational view of language -- at the very least I'd want to know why we are so strongly inclined to think of language as representational.

Also, if you think of logic as kind of a distillation of language, something implicit in it, I think that's going to turn out to be wrong. As above, I think there's a strong impulse to think of language this way, as carrying along logic inside it as its necessary skeletal structure, but natural language is much more subtle, much more flexible, and also much wilder than logic. But I also don't think it's simply a mistake; something about the way language works, or the place of it in our lives, almost demands that we misrepresent it, so to speak.

But now I'm speculating about your speculation...

Here's my favorite passage -- and for @Wayfarer the most beautiful description I know of the "subject of experience" -- and in this one there's a direct contradiction:

Trippers and askers surround me,
People I meet, the effect upon me of my early life or the ward and city I live in, or the nation,
The latest dates, discoveries, inventions, societies, authors old and new,
My dinner, dress, associates, looks, compliments, dues,
The real or fancied indifference of some man or woman I love,
The sickness of one of my folks or of myself or ill-doing or loss or lack of money, or depressions or exaltations,
Battles, the horrors of fratricidal war, the fever of doubtful news, the fitful events;
These come to me days and nights and go from me again,
But they are not the Me myself.

Apart from the pulling and hauling stands what I am,
Stands amused, complacent, compassionating, idle, unitary,
Looks down, is erect, or bends an arm on an impalpable certain rest,
Looking with side-curved head curious what will come next,
Both in and out of the game and watching and wondering at it.

Backward I see in my own days where I sweated through fog with linguists and contenders,
I have no mockings or arguments, I witness and wait. — Leaves of Grass 4

"Both in and out of the game and watching and wondering at it." I feel that every hour of every day. But it's a contradiction.

Forgot that last pair of lines, which are weirdly on point.

To contradict oneself is to simultaneously claim two contradictory things. — Janus

Do you often say two things simultaneously?

would you say he does actually contradict himself there? — Janus

He's already gone, that's the point of the whole passage and why I posted it. Our mental lives are oriented toward the future. What does it matter if a moment ago I thought there's no way there's a tiger in those bushes? And so it goes, we continually leave thoughts behind, continually update our beliefs. Our beliefs one moment are never consistent with the last, by design and a good thing too, else how would we learn about the world.

But I've had a lot of time to think about this sort of stuff on my own. — wonderer1

Alas, so have I. I remember -- this may have been 25 years ago -- arguing on the defunct ANALYTIC-L mailing list that producing reasons for your beliefs is (just) a practice of ours. I was very Wittgensteinian back then.

I was much impressed with David Lewis's Convention some years ago, his attempt to ground language in game theory, and after that I began to think of Wittgenstein as a man trying and failing to invent game theory. I wanted to do something similar for logic and reason -- modus ponens would fall out as a pareto dominant strategy, that kind of thing.

I wanted to provide a social explanation for reason, but leaving it more or less intact -- and this is the aporia that Lewis ran into, that he couldn't directly link up the convention account of language to the model-theoretic account he was also committed to.

So recently I've decided that if I have to give up the the timeless truth of logic to get to a social grounding for reason, something consistent with psychology and naturalism, that I'll just have to give in to full-bore pragmatism, no more mysterious third realm for logic and good riddance.

Obligatory quote.

The past and present wilt—I have fill'd them, emptied them.
And proceed to fill my next fold of the future.

Listener up there! what have you to confide to me?
Look in my face while I snuff the sidle of evening,
(Talk honestly, no one else hears you, and I stay only a minute longer.)

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.) — Walt Whitman

I don't think it is so much a matter of the principle of non-contradiction being true as it is a matter of it being necessary for sensible discussion to be achieved. — Janus

Is it?

Consider that if I assert A, and you convince me of ~A, then when I join you in proclaiming ~A, am I contradicting myself?

No, of course not, you'll say. But suppose I say A at one time and ~A at another, without anyone having argued for ~A, then I'm contradicting myself? Apparently my thinking has changed, as apparently it had when you convinced me. Is that contradiction? Does being convinced magically absolve me of inconsistency?

How close together must my saying A and saying ~A be before it counts as a contradiction? How far apart must they be before you call it "changing my mind"?

Now consider the other claim made routinely around here: you say A, but A entails B and you don't want to say B so you ought to give up A. Chances are that I'll dispute the entailment or add in some condition that blocks it, or I'll say B is fine after all, or - or - or -. You try to hang a charge of being inconsistent on me and I weasel out of it somehow -- mustn't contradict myself! -- and this is what we want to hold up as the paradigm of rationality?

On the other hand it is a known fact that people do not appreciate particularly the implications of their beliefs and that inconsistency lurks on the edges of everyone's thinking. Now and then it makes conversation frustrating but it doesn't seem to make it impossible.

the depth and importance of the principle of non-contradiction — Leontiskos

people who are involved in discussions don't usually contradict themselves (because if they did, they would be presenting no clear position) or speak incoherently (because if they did, they would not be saying anything) — Janus

I'm not convinced civilization would collapse if people were inconsistent and contradicted themselves, because I think they are and they do, consistently.

But that also means I'm inclined to throw out this framing of people as consistent or inconsistent. I'm not sure you can pull off partitioning people that way. Your ultimate backstop is going to be a single compound statement of the form P & ~P, with the usual caveats. If people don't ever say things like that -- leaving aside, though I'm loath to, rhetorical usages -- that's interesting, but it's not the same as only ever asserting P and never ~P, and it's not the same as having a set of beliefs that supports only one of the two.

Count me as the skeptic there is any such law.

Kahlil Gibran — wonderer1

Nice. There are times when the obvious truth of this really hits you, and it's just as true that we learn an enormous amount from other people. Somehow.

Also, I think it turns out I'm re-inventing the approach of Mercier and Sperber in The Enigma of Reason. Just read the introduction and there were lines that could have been in my post, which is odd. Now I don't know if I should wait to read the book until I've worked out some more of this on my own. (Call it Gibson's Dilemma: there's a story that William Gibson bolted from a screening of Bladerunner because he was in the middle of writing Neuromancer and it was too close.)

Very chancy business, this life of the mind.

a lack of a model for 'the generic person' — wonderer1

Very interesting!

One of things @Isaac and @Count Timothy von Icarus seem to have been arguing about for some reason circled around this "generic person" who is the target of the logically valid argument, the argument that any rational agent ought to accept.

One thing I was thinking about -- going back to that thread of yours -- was the difference between someone who shares your intuitions, so no argument is necessary, and someone who doesn't. My first thought was the thing about intuitions being tacit knowledge, and if that were the case, to explain something to someone who doesn't "get it" what you have to do is spell it out, you have to demonstrate some of the little steps you had skipped over. And that's very much the feel of doing things logically, clear little steps, everything implicit made explicit.

But of course that's wrong. Not everything is made explicit. Not everything can be made explicit. More importantly for this discussion, not everything needs to be made explicit; you only to need to spell out as much as the other person needs to "get it". How much is spelled out, how much made explicit is sort of negotiated.

At least that would be the plan, but when the plan fails, we point to the step-by-step-ness of our chitchat as if that's proof that we're right. And I'm saying the step-by-step-ness is an artifact of our negotiation process, not some standard of truth and justice. If I weren't talking to you, I'd hold the same beliefs without the step-by-step demonstration.

In short, yes, there's the generic person, the rational agent, like homo economicus, but we only pretend to craft our arguments to suit him, or we only invoke him when things go wrong. He represents an idea about what we do when we talk, but not even an ideal we try and fail to realize. --- I think this is one of those things everyone assumes is true (the way we use logic and respond to it) that if you could show them what that would really look like if we did it, they'd realize it's nothing like what we actually do.

Or I'm barking up the wrong tree. We'll see.

Like this.