May 29, 2011
The Argumentative Theory
From Edge:
Last July, opening the Edge Seminar, "The New Science of Morality", Jonathan Haidt digressed to talk about two recently-published papers in Behavioral and Brain Sciences which he believed were "so important that the abstracts from them should be posted in psychology departments all over the country." One of the papers "Why Do Humans Reason? Arguments for an Argumentative Theory," published by Behavioral and Brain Sciences, was by Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber. "The article,” Haidt said, "is a review of a puzzle that has bedeviled researchers in cognitive psychology and social cognition for a long time. The puzzle is, why are humans so amazingly bad at reasoning in some contexts, and so amazingly good in others?"
"Reasoning was not designed to pursue the truth. Reasoning was designed by evolution to help us win arguments. That's why they call it The Argumentative Theory of Reasoning. So, as they put it, "The evidence reviewed here shows not only that reasoning falls quite short of reliably delivering rational beliefs and rational decisions. It may even be, in a variety of cases, detrimental to rationality. Reasoning can lead to poor outcomes, not because humans are bad at it, but because they systematically strive for arguments that justify their beliefs or their actions. This explains the confirmation bias, motivated reasoning, and reason-based choice, among other things."
More here.
Posted by Azra Raza at 07:00 AM | Permalink
Comments
This is an excellent article offering a balanced outlook of a nascent, yet poorly defined, scientific endeavor --- The posting is the kind of stuff you get used to finding at 3QD.
Just a small editing seems indicated:
‘Al Gore is mentioned in a lecture on clinical psychology, in the context of narcissistic personality disorder.’
The narcissistic personality disorder it’s OK for what it’s worth, but I believe Al Gore should be teaching ‘cynical psychology.’
Posted by: Felix E F Larocca MD | May 29, 2011 8:24:44 AM
There is a discussion of this in Jonah Lehrer's post
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/05/the-sad-reason-we-reason/
and one of the authors Mercier has interesting comments.
Posted by: gaddeswarup | May 29, 2011 9:40:41 AM
Sounds like Rhetoric not Reason.
Posted by: Luke Lea | May 29, 2011 10:25:37 PM
Getting hellishly sick of the recycled insights of evo psych. One only needs to watch a Harold Pinter play to get this point. One might even subject oneself to the sadomasochistic prose of Deleuze and Guattari since they said this explicitly in the 80s and didn't require the lame appeal to an obvious just-so story:
“The elementary unit of language – the statement – is the order-word… Language is not made to be believed but to be obeyed and to compel obedience.”
“Language is not life; it gives life orders. Life does not speak; it listens and waits. Every order-word, even a father’s to his son, carries a little death sentence.”
Posted by: Justin | May 31, 2011 1:36:47 AM
Good gods, Justin, we've all been hellishly sick of unsupported assertions from French theorists for several decades now.
Though I'll admit I never quite get how it's supposed to work. Do they argue from their own authority? Or is one supposed to recognise the insights for oneself? Is it considered bad form to quibble with the little exaggerations, or is one supposed to follow along the chains of association and metonymy?
Then again, perhaps all psychology needs to be said twice, once as illustration to inform our intuition for use in life, and once to explain experimental results. That's Pinter and these psychologist chaps respectively, with D&G falling rather uselessly in the middle.
Posted by: Sagredo | May 31, 2011 9:58:05 PM
I forgot I wrote this. I appreciate the comment and your sentiment Sagredo. I tried to make clear ("one might even subject oneself...") that I too find D/G mostly useless and stylistically overblown and sloppy and onastic; no shit! However, a broad canvassing of the modern philosophical enterprise leads one to the conclusion 'discovered' or allegedly verified in this article.
I do believe that scientific support for intellectual intuitions is important but, at the same time, it often doesn't seem necessary... If one listened to Richard Dawkins, one might conclude that being an atheist was unjustifiable until 1859. The fact is that reason gave birth to science, not the other way around; or, rather, the process is dialectical.
I suppose I was just venting personal frustration -- isn't that what blog commentary is for? Mostly I hate provincialism -- whether it be French oracular provincialism or the hermetic specialist's provincialism. In fact, I keep coming back to this site because it regularly overcomes intellectual provincialism.
Posted by: Justin | Jun 2, 2011 4:12:17 PM
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