Evolving Thoughts

Grayling on Gopnik

Anthony Grayling has one of his measured and literate reviews up at the Barnes and Noble Review, which, like it or not, is becoming the online TLS (which is also online). In it he reviews Alison Gopnik’s The Philosophical Baby,which argues that neonates to five year olds are engaged on a rational process of learning and focusing on the environment as they construct a sense of self. It looks like an interesting book, which I will soon read.

In the course of the review, Grayling says this:

A matter that Gopnik does not address is that there is a downside to the readiness with which young minds imagine and believe. Credulity of course is of great evolutionary advantage; if older people in authority say that fire hurts you, tigers eat you, and the gods are recording your every sin, the child will believe, and occasional rebellion will (at least in such cases as a finger in the candle flame) confirm, what they have been told. Astute educators have always recognized that if they can espalier the young mind it will more likely than not keep that given shape thereafter. The Jesuits’ mot was “give me the child until the age of seven and I will give you the man.

The evolutionary justification for this is, of course the following: if evolution were a designer, trying to ensure that thinking beings learned and knew what they had to to survive, a cheaper rule than putting everything into the head from the start is “learn from those around you, because they are not dead”. The term Grayling uses, which I have linked, espalier is entirely appropriate: we train young minds to catch the (environmental) “light”. This includes fire and tigers (in Africa? really?), but it also includes believers in tribal gods. So it is entirely rational to believe what you are told by non-dead elders, since if they can get to that age without losing the battle in the struggle for life, then you ought to as well, if the conditions haven’t yet been changed.

Therein lies the rub. Until fairly recently, traditions changed pretty slowly. it was a very good bet that if you emulated your parents and peers, then their “Good Tricks” for living (including living amongst other people) would work equally well for you. A heuristic that says “do what the majority do” is going to balance the costs of early adoption with those of late adoption, and ensure that your cognitive task for getting up to cultural speed is as low as it can be. So it is adaptive to believe what all around you believe, most of the time.

Along came printing and other mass communication methods. Now the environs are changing fairly rapidly, as Papuans and Amazon indians and San Bushmen all are exposed to the latest vapidity from Hollywood or Paris or Redmond. So learning what your elders know is less useful (although it is often overstated how much different it really is. I could carry on a good conversation with my parents’ generation in the 1940s, I think). The differential rate of change of traditions is now much greater than before.

So as the individual develops and learns, they will employ other heuristics nicely laid out in Gigerenzer’s and colleagues‘ work, such as “follow the best”. I think also there will be a later bias towards peer emulation, but given that we are looking now at early development, I would like to make a point about the Jesuit Rule: any general biases or dispositions acquired early will tend to be harder to modify later, for evolutionary reasons. That is, we tend to learn the most salient and important “facts” first, and build our cultural superstructure on them afterwards. This is what I argued in my “Are Creationists Rational?” paper.

Social ecology scaffolds, to use a term of Sterelny’s, later development. So what we see around us now is a tradeoff between the rates of change of cultural traditions and the need for people to rapidly and cheaply acquire basic conceptual commitments. This is why, I think, that later we find it hardest to adapt to new culture, like musical styles that just sound like noise, because we are not acculturated into the styles and traditions that make these “good” music. We can still adapt, if we make it our work to do so, as professional musicians do, but it is hard work, not easy.

Epistemology Evolution Philosophy

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Comments (10)

  1. -rant (August is poke a philosopher month)

    Oh good grief!

    I’m sorry, but neonates to five year olds are engaged on a rational process of learning and focusing on the environment is just so much philosophical woo.

    Neonates to five year olds are engaged on a rational process of learning and focusing on the environment, as opposed to what? Telepathy? What other processes are available to neonates that they rationally chose to ignore in favour of the environment?

    When people fall over on a slope they generally roll downslope. What rational process of learning and focusing on the environment is involved in rolling downslope as opposed to upslope? Or is downslope the only option open to them? What’s the evolutionary justification for rolling downslope?

    Learning and focusing on the environment is the only option open to neonates, just as rolling downslope is the only option. No evolutionary justification is required for either.

    All life with the capacity to modify its behaviour does so by focusing on the environment. Or do tigers use telepathy? Do worms have a secret tome of learning that says Verily, I say unto ye, a shadow that casts over ye several times in a given period may dispossessed of big sharp pointy teeth . .

    neonates to five year olds are engaged on a rational process of learning and focusing on the environment

    Philosopher discovers reality . . . news at 11.

    Why are we suddenly drowning in non-science disciplines desperately trying to justify their existence through evolutionary significance?

    -/rant

    1. Claims of unreality… from a paleontologist!? Give me a break…

      Gopnik is a psychologist who has written a book that is a philosophical rumination upon her results. First point. Second point is that the default opinion was that (since Piaget) the prevailing opinion is that children do not employ rational means of learning until they are much more mature. Amongst psychologists. Second point.

      Finally, it should be noted that while everyone has presumed children were learning, they were doing so based on innate mechanisms and dispositions which themselves were not considered to be rational. Again, amongst psychologists. Yes, the philosophers tended to believe the developmental psychologists (who have recently been discovering a number of these truisms are not true), so sue us for taking scientists seriously. But, to take one instance, it is received doctrine amongst developmental psychology that children are innately essentialists (cf. Susan Gelman’s The essential child). This is not rational, it is an arational heuristic that satisficies in the standard environment. So Gopnik is reporting news. Film at 11…

      1. Without having read Gopnik’s book it may be slightly rash for me to offer the following, but there has been a lot of defining rationality down in the wake of gene-level biology (Selfish Gene) and neuron level cog-sci (AI, functionalism). What “rational” used to pertain to was evaluation by a human agent who did the reasoning; now it just pertains to the results (e.g. Evolutionarily Stable Strategies are “rational” according to game theory), though no “reasoning” as we know it has taken place.

        It seems to me that Gopnik contributes to this corruption of the term by writing “”Children are unconsciously the most rational beings on earth, brilliantly drawing accurate conclusions from data, performing complex statistical analyses, and doing clever experiments.” Allowing reasoning to happen “unconsciously” downplays how difficult it is to clear the distortions from one’s thinking when defining problems and solutions.

        I have little doubt that Gopnik is accurate according to the fashionable definition of rationality; the question is whether this definition is really helpful in understanding human psychology in a meaningful way; that is, where our agency is not ultimately swept away.

  2. OK, slight correction

    -rant (August is poke a psychologist month – because they are more deserving)

    neonates to five year olds are engaged on a rational process of learning and focusing on the environment is just so much psychological woo.

    Point still stands, that neonates to five year olds are engaged on a rational process of learning and focusing on the environment requires no evolutionary justification.

    But it gets worse.

    if older people in authority say that fire hurts you, tigers eat you, and the gods are recording your every sin, the child will believe

    it is entirely rational to believe what you are told by non-dead elders

    Yeah, well, who else are neonates going to listen to? Each other? I’d hardly expect two neonates to have an in-depth intercourse on the physics of flame formation.

    However, once children get to 5 or so, the peer group becomes probably as important as elders. Is that ‘rational’ too?

    So neonates learn by listening to elders who are the only people that can communicate with neonates. Another great moment in evolutionary psychology

    Next up – Psychologists explain neonates rolling downslope as a rational response to listening to slopes.

    Evolutionary psychology – you couldn’t make this stuff up! Umm . . . no . . . wait a minute . . .

    1. It is rational to switch to peers, for two reasons. One is that you need to compete with them for resources, so you’d better start paying attention to your cohort. The other is that a single parental pair will not know all that is required by the culture, and cannot teach it all. Specialisation occurs even among foraging societies, so there is a spear maker role, a food preparer role and so on. It’s thought, so I have read, that stone tools were made by specialists who undertook long apprenticeships to make the best weapons and tools.

      Incidentally, this is not evolutionary psychology. This is psychology informed by evolution, which is a rather different thing. But I can see I’m going to have to get ranty on paleontological and geological inference making….

  3. Oh goody, Sunday afternoon rants! (I’ve apprenticed myself to the elder curmudgeon)

    Wait a minute. Are you arguing that it is rational to switch from a cohort (elders) who’s knowledge far exceeds yours, to a cohort of peers who’s knowledge (or lack of knowledge) is on a par with yours?

    In terms of competition is it not more advantageous to stick with those that know much more that you or your peers? Who is going to the the more competitive, those who try and work things out as a group, or those that learn from experienced people?

    Your stone tools/spears example is a case in point. Who is going to be the most competitive, the person who learns with his or her peer group through trial and error, or the person who undertakes a long apprenticeships with a master tool maker? Apprenticeships, by definition, are not made amongst peer groups, they are made between learner and master.

    Pay attention to your cohort, yes. There are good reasons to participate in peer groups, but superiority of learning at the early stage isn’t one of them (remember I asked whether or is was rational to switch to peers at year 5). Once the cohort becomes proficient with knowledge that you and your elders lack, then the peer group has advantages in learning, but not before. Switching from elders learning to peer group learning in the early years cannot be supported as a rational move. (Again there are other rational reasons to switch to a peer group)

    Single parent? We are talking elders plural. Even single parent neonates have a range of elders, they are not brought up in isolation.

    This is exactly evolutionary psychology. Look at the words in the original post.

    Credulity of course is of great evolutionary advantage

    The evolutionary justification for this is

    The observation that neonates learn by listening to their elders came first, the attempt to justify it in terms of evolution came second.

    It’s a just so story. Here’s an observation (learning from elders), now lets see if we can rationalise it from an evolutionary standpoint.

    If this is psychology informed by evolution, what is the variation that evolution has worked on?

    What DNA is being worked on by evolution that promotes listening to elders above other methods of learning? What are the other methods of learning?

    1. Are you arguing that it is rational to switch from a cohort (elders) who’s knowledge far exceeds yours, to a cohort of peers who’s knowledge (or lack of knowledge) is on a par with yours?

      At some point it has to be, for the reasons I have given, but also because there will be a point at which the much larger population of the cohort will have knowledge the parents do not. Most elders will not be teaching the individual until peers start to pay off. Even if they do, there are still personal experiences among peers that they will get more effectively from peers. As conditions change, elders may become unreliable.

      As to what the variation is, it has to be dispositions to attend to different sources. I think it highly likely that psychological dispositions, the substrate for personality types, are highly hereditable and thus can be selected.

  4. Re learning from peers versus elders: The only time I’ve seen Kim Sterelny talk about this stuff (I used to be at the same university, should have followed his work more closely), he made the point that children can’t just physically copy what adults do. They aren’t strong enough, their hands don’t work quite the same way, etc. In that case, if one of your peers knows how to do something you’ll learn more easily just by directly copying them, than by trying to figure out exactly what your elders are doing. See also the recently(ish) reported differences in how chimps and humans learn.

    None of which has much bearing on the quibbling over terminology that you two are doing. Carry on, gentlemen…

    1. Thanks Chris. I think this is more than terminology. If Chris N thinks that this is evolutionary psychology then I think he’s very wrong: but it is sociobiology of a kind. I am a born-again sociobiologist, within constraints. Species have hereditable and typical behaviours that are the outcome of evolution.

  5. I just read some of Kim Sterelny’s work for the first time after reading this. Some of his ideas are intresting and can be tested.

    The evolutionary aspects are outside of my field, I am not familiar enough with them or the terminology. So I will sit on the fence on that for the moment.

    He makes a nice comment about learning on the last paragraph of page 5 in this article. I would interpret the cultural variability of elders and cohort to be included in what he refers to as languages sensitivity to local culture.

    http://www.victoria.ac.nz/phil/staff/documents/sterelny-papers/macdonald.pdf

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