Mental shortcuts and cognitive biases

There is a branch of study concerned with a range of phenomena called judgmental heuristics, automatic or intuitive thinking, or mental shortcuts (see Wikipedia article). It aims at uncovering ways in which people reach judgments without resorting to articulated argument. There seems to be a consensus among researchers that this form of thinking is often effective – one might suggest inevitable – but that it involves the risk of certain systematic errors (“cognitive biases”); the concept might be considered a latter-day counterpart of Bacon’s idols.

                      These types of error are typically investigated by asking test persons to form judgments about various ficitious situations. It seems to me that in some cases one may question whether the tests actually reveal what they are taken to reveal. They suffer from what might be called the distance between class-room dialogues and real conversations. (On this compare my earlier blog on experimental philosophy.)

                      The following example comes from the work of Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, two leading proponents of this branch of research (quoted in the Wikipedia article). Test persons were given the following character sketch of a woman called Linda: "31 years old, single, outspoken, and very bright. She majored in philosophy. As a student, she was deeply concerned with issues of discrimination and social justice, and also participated in anti-nuclear demonstrations". They were then asked to rank the probability of certain facts about Linda, among others "Linda is a bank teller" and, "Linda is a bank teller and is active in the feminist movement".

                      Test persons tended to consider the latter description more probable. The answer is wrong, we are told, because a single assertion of the form “L is X” is always more probable than a conjunction of the form “L is X and Y”. The error supposedly shows a cognitive bias (of the kind called the “conjunction fallacy”). What trips people up, apparently, is the fact that the description of Linda is more likely to fit someone who is an active feminist than someone who is a bank teller.

                      However, it seems to me that that is not the relevant comparison. We are told that Linda is a bank teller, so the likelihood of her being one plays no role in the context. There seems to me to be a more plausible explanation: if we are given the alternatives (1) “Linda is a bank teller FULL STOP” and (2) “Linda is a bank teller and active in the feminist movement”, the natural way to read (1) is as implying that Linda is not active in the feminist movement. So what we will actually be comparing, in all likelihood, are the descriptions “Linda is a bank teller but she is not active in the feminist movement” and “Linda is a bank teller and she is active in the feminist movement”. In other words, her being a bank teller drops out of consideration altogether: we are simply comparing the likelihoods that she might or might not be an active feminist; and, given her background, the latter comes to sound a fairly plausible alternative. (One might even think that, given that she is a bank teller, she will need other outlets for her civic involvement; maybe she even chose her trade in order to to have time for political activities.)

                      Undoubtedly there are such things as cognitive biases, and some of the tests carried out in this field might accordingly be revealing. But often a kind of smart-alecky attitude shines through in the manner ordinary forms of reasoning are being shown up, as though the only way of judging a claim is in accordance with the principles of propositional logic or probability calculus. This makes for a deafness to the endless subtleties of actual human conversation. That is a serious drawback, for it is, after all, the reasoning of people in everyday contexts that one purports to be studying.

Face value

This is in response to David Cockburn’s comment on my previous blog. David wrote:

There is something not so very far from what we might call a ‘face value’ of certain sequences of words. (The ‘duck’ example features in the literature because it is a very obvious exception to this.) Much as there is a ‘face value’ of many facial expressions: the face suggests to us (no doubt generally defeasibly) a certain context and certain feelings. And this is important to the way in which our understanding of a situation may run through our understanding of other people. Similarly, I think, with our understanding of words. (I suspect that the grip of ‘standard’ philosophical views of language partly turns on this.)

I’m sure something like face value plays a role in our thinking about language, and in our actual linguistic communication as well. (I believe the notion is closely related to what Bernard Harrison had in mind in speaking of the autonomy of the linguistic sign in his Philosophy of Language (1979).)

                             It seems to me that one might mean several things (some of them closely related) in speaking about face value. One is this: when we encounter a sentence out of all context, say, written on a slip of paper we find in the street, we may be ready to venture an interpretation. E.g. “Caesar was a highly popular ruler.” We immediately suppose that the speaker is referring to the Roman dictator G. Iulius Caesar, who was murdered in 44 B.C. Or: “The sun’s distance from the earth is 300 million kilometers”, where we’d assume the reference was to conditions in our solar system (even though in such a case the sentence would not be true, evidently). This is not equally true of all sentences, e.g. “After he had said this, he left her as he did the day before”, to use Wittgenstein’s example from Philosophical Investigations § 525. There’s much less we’d be ready to say about the latter independently of context (I imagine it comes from a telling of Rumpelstiltskin).

                             These are mere psychological facts, though. In fact, the sentences containing “Caesar” and “the sun”, above, don’t actually refer, since they owe their existence simply to occurring as example sentences in this blog.  It wouldn’t make sense to say that the first sentence “really” or “probably” refers to the Roman dictator, or that “we can’t know” whether it does.

                             Another thing one might mean by face value is something like this. We probably have something like default responses to things we hear. That is, unless the context gives any indication, or an indication to the contrary, speakers of a language are likely to take what is said in such and such a way in preference to some other particular way. Thus, among a certain group of speakers, if they catch the word “cricket”, they’re more likely to assume that the topic of conversation is the game rather than the insect. But this can hardly be a general rule of the language; for in another group, the opposite might be true. (Of course, certain default expectations might be near universal.)

                             Very often, in practice, I would imagine that what’s at play in listening to someone speak is a kind of dialectic between our expectations and the actual situation. But to me these are empirical rather than logical observations. In practice, they undoubtedly have a great role in how linguistic communication is carried on, but I don’t see why they should have a bearing on a discussion of “the meaning of meaning”. (Donald Davidson discusses such matters in “A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs”, but I don’t see what makes it philosophy. When I insist on this, it’s not because labels matter, but because it’s important to be clear what kind of inquiry one is conducting.)

                             Be that as it may, I believe both types of face value phenomena, as David suggests, help explain the lure of much standard analytic philosophy.

Waiting for Wednesday

Catherine, the heroine of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey (her parody of Gothic novels) is impatiently waiting for the incoming Wednesday, when Henry, the object of her ardent love, is due to return: “If Wednesday should ever come!”

The narrator comments: “It did come, and exactly when it might be reasonably looked for.”

We understand this sentence, but how can we understand it? What would it mean for the sentence to be false? “That week Wednesday came right after Monday”? “There was no Wednesday that week”? What the sentence excludes seems not to make sense, then how can it be used to make a point? The whole idea of waiting for a certain day of the week the way you may impatiently wait for a letter or the return of your loved one seems obvious nonsense.

This, any way, seems to have been the position Wittgenstein took in the Tractatus: “to say of one thing that it is identical with itself is to say nothing” (5.5303);  ”one cannot, e.g. say ’There are objects’”;  ”Expressions like ’1 is a number’ ... are senseless” (4.1272); ”If I cannot give elementary propositions a priori then it must lead to obvious nonsense to try to give them” (5.5571).

Wittgenstein makes a similar point in Philosophical Investigations (§ 50): “There is one thing of which one can state neither that it is one metre long, nor that it is not one metre long, and that is the standard metre in Paris. – But this is, of course, not to ascribe any remarkable property to it, but only to mark its peculiar role in the game of measuring with a metre-rule.”

So there is a line of thought that would suggest that “Wednesday came when it was to be expected” should not make sense since it is hard to see what “Wednesday didn’t come when it was expected” might mean. The problem with this line of thought is that it is taken for granted that the sense of an utterance can be adjudicated on the basis of the words of which it is made up. (This assumption is shared by adherents of the traditional – “substantive” – view of nonsense; and mostly, it seems, by adherents of the “austere” view formulated by Cora Diamond in “What Nonsense Might Be” and attributed by her to Frege and Wittgenstein, early and late.)

Yet we have no difficulty understanding the sentence. The narrator is making gentle fun of the heroine’s impatience. Hers is a familiar feeling: we know what it’s like to wish to hurry on time itself, although there is nothing we or anyone else can do about it.

I believe two lessons can be derived from this. For one thing, it seems pointless to pass judgment on the meaningfulness or otherwise of a chain of words without regard to the actual situation of utterance or context of writing. A larger lesson is this: the idea that it’s a philosophers’ task to go around diagnosing nonsense in the ways people speak seems misguided. People may misspeak, they may have deficient command of the language, they may fail to make themselves understood because they’re under a misapprehension concerning relevant circumstances, etc. These problems will have to be sorted out before we can get clear what the speaker is trying to say. But the idea that – pathologies aside – a speaker may, in spite of her effort to say something significant, unwittingly end up producing an utterance that carries no meaning – where there’s nothing even to sort out – seems to me problematic.

(Nonsense as a literary genre is another matter. For instance, Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, or the plays of Samuel Beckett or Harold Pinter, contain passages that are deliberately engineered in such a way that their unintelligibility will stand out – here we recognize the authors’ intention to produce nonsense; their aim, perhaps, is to draw attention to the vicissitudes of linguistic form.)

But here I seem to be up against a dilemma: I want to say that the philosophers’ idea that people may inadvertently speak nonsense doesn’t make sense. But then am I claiming that philosophers speak nonsense? Is the risk of producing nonsense a feature of this peculiar form of language use? My inclination is to answer yes. But I’m not sure how to defend this position.

Reference: Cora Diamond,  “What Nonsense Might Be”, in The Realistic Spirit (MIT Press, 1991).

What We Mean When We Say "I Love You"

My friend Manfred Wolf recently published a column with the above title in The West Portal Monthly. He wanted to discuss “that most problematic of utterances, those between two, shall we say, ‘romantic’ partners.”

                      “Why problematic?” he asks, and he answers, “Because it is at once indefinable and absolutely indispensable. Expressing it in any good adult relationship is not optional... But when lovers or a married couple say it to one another, what do they mean?”

                      Manfred goes on: 

The problem, I suppose, boils down to this: we don't know what ”love” is and what the word stands for when we say it. I might mean ”I like being with you,” but my partner might mean ”Your well-being matters to me more than your presence.” More disconcertingly, one partner may mean ”I'd love you more if your presence were more agreeable” and the other partner might well think to herself, ”I am concerned about his well-being but I sure wish he were different.”

And that raises yet another semantic problem in ”I love you.” The statement can be aspirational, even performative; we want to elicit something more than we say. The age-old problem here, I believe, is that people crave to be loved as they love, and they find the others' different understanding and style of loving to be less than fully, really, genuinely loving.

Take the familiar problem almost endemic to the relationships of men and women: The woman might well think, ”Real love would be much more expressive than this man,” while the man is thinking, ”Doesn't she see that all my acts of consideration, thoughtfulness, concern are much better, more genuinely loving, than frequent effusions of feeling?”

 
My response: does ”I love you” really present us, as Manfred says, with a semantic problem? I find the issue intriguing because of the way in which problems of philosophy and problems of love get intertwined here.

“I love you” expresses a commitment

There is some truth to the idea that saying the words is often performative (and this may be one source of bewilderment). This is connected with the realization that it feels unsatisfactory to think about them simply as a report, say, of some definite inner state (like thirst or fatigue). Rather, they will primarily be used as a declaration or an affirmation. (It is true that they may also be used in a more report-like way, as when I confess my love to someone: “I love you; I’m afraid I can’t help it”; say, circumstances being such that I consider it wrong for me to have these feelings, or my having no hope that my feelings will be reciprocated. But a confession may equally well be uttered to a third party, whereas a declaration or an affirmation will primarily be addressed at the person one loves or professes to love.)

                      The performative character of “I love you” is bound up with the fact that the speaker is undertaking a commitment. This means that there are ways of acting that may be regarded by the other as a betrayal of those words; though not necessarily as a refutation of them. I may fall short in my love, even badly so, and still have love – in fact, it is only as long as I love that I may fall short. This is one reason why saying ”I love you” is not like a report of a state.

                      (But if so, you may ask, when will the other’s words start to sound hollow? Well, who’s to decide that for you if you can’t decide it?)

                     

“I love you” may be true or false

“But ‘I love you’ must be more than a commitment”, we feel like saying. Of course it is not the same as a promise. If I’ve promised to help you move, then if I turn up with my van I’m fulfilling my promise regardless of whether my heart is in it. But if I say I love you it’s not enough that I cook your meals, listen to you talk about your day or accompany you on your vacation – or whatever it is you expect of me – unless I do so willingly and with some degree of enjoyment.

                      In saying I love someone I present myself, my feelings, in a certain light. Even if ”I love you” is not a report of my feelings, I do not speak truly if my feelings aren’t in it.

“Do we mean the same?”

“But this is all intolerably vague”, someone will retort. “You speak about feelings and commitments, but you don’t tell us exactly what you’re supposed to feel and what you’re committing yourself to when you say you love someone.”

Manfred concludes:

when it comes to the basic style and content of loving we want done for us and to us what we do to others. That has the power to make us truly happy. The failure to receive the kind of love you want often leads to the thought that the other "doesn't love me," or, more perniciously, "never loved me," when in fact it was only the difference in style of loving that became the problem. - - -

Perhaps the only thing to do is try to understand that the other person needs, requires, insists on the style of loving he or she wants, and not the one you want. Almost certainly the two of you mean something different when you say "I love you."

My response: it may not be true in all cases that what we want done for us is what we do for others. But even where that is the case, does this point to something problematic about the very concept of love?

An account of the use of the word “love” must allow for its being used between people who have different demands and expectations, between those who are hopeful and those who are disappointed in love, between those who are self-centred, cynical, sincere or generous. Where misunderstandings arise, they do so because people misunderstand each other; it’s not the fault of our language.

We should not look to a conceptual investigation to tell us whether we love truly or are truly loved. What philosophy can do is try to indicate the kind of place the word “love” occupies in people’s lives. It is up to us how we use it.

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For more on the topic, read Ilham Dilman’s book Love and Human Separateness, as well as Camilla Konqvist’s essay “The Promise that Love will Last”, Inquiry 54 (6): 605-668 (2011).

Against some self-images of the age: Raymond Tallis

I’ve been reading Raymond Tallis’s book Aping Mankind: Neuromania,Darwinitis and the Misrepresentation of Humanity. The author’s background is in medicine, specifically clinical neuroscience. The book is a fierce criticism of two currently predominant modes of thinking about human behaviour, uncritically adopted by many scientists and cherished in popular culture: what Tallis calls neuromania (“the appeal to the brain, as revealed through the latest science, to explain our behaviour”) and Darwinitis (the idea that “unsentimental honesty ... requires us to acknowledge that we are just like animals in all respects”).

                      I believe the author has undertaken some urgent tasks: for while brain research and evolutionary psychology may undoubtedly have something to contribute to an understanding of human affairs, all parties ought to welcome a sober look at the uncritical and reductive way in which conclusions tend to be drawn and results from these disciplines to be presented in contemporary public debate. This is what Tallis offers: thus, he brings incisive and detailed criticisms to bear on several experimental studies in neurology.

                      I do have some reservations, though. For one thing, his rhetoric seems too harsh and unrelenting; this will encourage his adversaries to become defensive (or, more likely, given the current intellectual climate, tempt them to ignore his arguments altogether), rather than invite them to a fruitful dialogue.

This, after all, is just a tactical consideration. However, as far as his argument goes, I was disappointed by the extent to which Tallis rests his case against reductionism on classical, “we-know-from-our-own-case” dualism, with all the problems attendant on that position. (After all, if I only know from my own case, what grounds do I have for claiming that it’s the same thing as you know from your own case?) Concerning intentionality, i.e. the fact that perceptions, beliefs, hopes, fears, wishes, intentions, etc, are “about” things in the world, he argues persuasively that it cannot be accounted for in physiological terms; but then he goes on to say: “How ... should we ascribe [intentionality] to anything else unless it was something we had experienced in the first place in our selves?” (p. 110.)

In trying to get clear about muddles about the mind, it is important to acknowledge the interplay between first person expressions and third person ascriptions. Reductive accounts tend to ignore the first person perspective altogether. Dualists, like Tallis, go to the other extreme and present third person utterances as derivative from first person expressions. To strike a balance, it is important to reflect on the fact that we learn to express what we perceive, feel, believe, etc in interacting with others: hence the fact that we have this kind of comprehensibility to others is indispensable to our acquiring this vocabulary. But on the one hand, we acquire the ability to use these words as spontaneous self-expression, and not, say, on the basis of observation of our own behaviour. So the first person perspective too is an inevitable ingredient in this use of words, and is not derivative from the third person.

(I shall comment on Tallis’s discussion of perception in a future blog.)