Evolving Thoughts

Hello? Can you hear me now?

As I sit at Berkeley in the warm (suck on that Melburnians), I am moved to ask: can anybody hear me? My server provider “upgraded” their hardware with the immediate result that I couldn’t access or even see my blog for about 6 or so days. Of course this happened as I got on a plane, so I wasn’t able to sort it out until now. It is still not fixed entirely – old links may fail because I have moved the blog to use the default permalinks rather than the Month-Year-Post title format previously, so if you find that a link doesn’t work, sorry. I’ll try to resolve this.

When I fly back on Friday I will arrive in Australia on Sunday (18 hour flight but I cross the dateline), in time to sleep and then go to the AAP conference to talk on the role of classification in the natural sciences. I must write that soon. Tomorrow I have to write my critique of the Mercier and Sperber paper that argues that reasoning evolved for argumentation not belief formation as such. I’ll put the slides up again. I have some concerns about the foundations of this argument (ironically) but the major conclusion seems to me correct. Here are some links to follow up if you want to.

Reasoning isn’t about logic (it’s about arguing) at LessWrong

Mercier and Sperber on the origins of reasoning at NewAPPS

Mercier and Sperber on the origins of reasoning at M-Phi

Bad reasoning about reasoning at Rationally Speaking

and a conversation with one of the authors at The Edge: The Argumentative Theory

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Evolution Quotes: Quine on evolving similarity

A sense of comparative similarity, I remarked earlier, is one of man’s animal endowments. Insofar as it fits in with regularities of nature, so as to afford us reasonable success in our primitive inductions and expectations, it is presumably an evolutionary product of natural selection. Secondly, as remarked, one’s sense…

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Comments (16)

  2. Hi John, coming through loud and clear ! How’s the knee ? And what’s wrong with 9 degrees in the middle of the day ? At least it hasn’t rained for almost, er, well, a day…

  3. Good. You’re back. I was getting to the point of trimming my bookmarks (and we couldn’t have that, could we?).

  4. Well, i could find you, but not thru my rss feed ( and i tried to resubscribe – same result. 404). I want ,you in ny rss feed! Whaaaaa.

  6. Good you’re back.
    What’s wrong with 9 degrees in the middle of the day if that is Melbourne winter? We’ve got 17 degrees, but that is called summer!

  7. I didn’t pick up the RSS feed, which is why I’m late commenting. When I tried to connect to your homepage the first couple of times, the page would come up but then an error message popped up saying Internet Explorer cannot open this site. Now I can open it but the background of the main part of the page is no longer green. I don’t know how much of this is due to the clunky old computer I have at work. I redid the RSS feed and it now seems to be working.

  8. There’s definitely been impermanence and vagueness about your blog site. I ususally get to it from the link on Cromercrox End of the Pier Show. This time it came up with the now expected error messages and wierd repeat tries at acces – but then settled down. – I then set it as a favourite when I read that you have made adjustments. – I switched off internet – reloaded – clicked the new favourite icon – it loaded first time – so now you seem well up and running (bar the leg of course). – I take it the leg’s improving – you havene’t mentioned it in the last two blogs – must be a good sign – best of luck with it.

  9. Just tried the link on End of Pier Show again – that still comes up with a wierd result. – The new favourites link works fine though.

  10. Wilkins!! If you can make it to Triple Rock, beer is on me. I should be there 9 pm or so, maybe earlier.

    Me: 510-301-0179, call or txt

    Triple Rock is on Shattuck 1 block north of University Avenue, 1920 Shattuck Avenue Berkeley, CA 94704, http://triplerock.com/

  11. Glad to see you back. I’ll be interested in your response to the ‘Arguments for an argumentative theory’. I’m going to have to wade through the paper properly, but I have to say that (against my expectations) Massimo Pigliucci has picked up on some of the weaknesses of the paper. The data appear to be correct, but the inference… we shall see.

    1. All you have to do is find the travel funds and I would happily do so. I want to see more of the States, but on someone else’s dime…

  13. My first thought when reading the arguments against the paper were;”Well, it’s all good and well to say it’s unproven as to why our reasoning is stronger when we argue. But it doesn’t change the fact that it is…. Hey, wait a second…..” The way it was put forth I had thought they had found an effect through experimentation and were trying to explain it. But looking at the abstract that does not seem to be the case. Are there some actual experiments that show we can reason better when arguing?

    1. There are experiments that show we use reasoning more consistently, yes, and they are cited in the paper. What is more central to M&S – who didn’t do the work themselves – is that we do not use reasoning to come up with our beliefs. Or rather we use what is sometimes misleadingly called “intuitive reasoning”. M&S however, are giving (somewhat ironically) post hoc arguments for the argumentative theory of reasoning:

      We find these things happen, and if argumentative theory were true we’d find these things happening, so argumentative theory is true.

      For fans of classical logic, this is called affirming the consequent. Whether or not it is a fallacy is the subject of much debate.

      I’ll put my slides up.

      1. Well crap. That was amazingly stupid. I’m so used to there being a paywall I didn’t even check the link. *facepalm*

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