* Hugo Mercier, ‘The Argumentative Theory: Predictions and Empirical Evidence’, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 20 (2016), 689-700.
* Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber, ‘Why do Humans Reason? Arguments for an Argumentative Theory’, Behavioural and Brain Sciences, 34 (2011), 57–111. [Includes lots of interesting commentary.]

This is another article of a kind I have enjoyed before (and said so): where they say ‘you’d think we’d have evolved to be better at X, but we haven’t, because evolution has preferred to make us good at Y’. The Y here, and before, is social life. Mercier argues in the Trends article that there is increasing evidence to support the proposal made in the earlier piece cited above, written with Dan Sperber. The point of reasoning, he says, is first and foremost ‘to exchange arguments with others’. We’re biased when we make cases, putting them competitively out there without effective reflection. But when we hear others’ cases, we’re more ‘objective and demanding’. This is a ‘fundamental asymmetry between production and evaluation’, they say, and I am going along with the idea so far.
      Not least because there are very interesting consequences, I think. From a social point of view, it might be efficient. Easy answers move quickly, but difficult ones don’t: ‘the more debate and conflict between opinions there is, the more argument evaluation prevails over argument production, resulting in better outcomes’. I am not sure that my experience on committees validates this word ‘better’, but I do recognise this idea that a slow-starting discussion, in which nobody is all that engaged, begins to take off once there is some opinion in the room to deal with. Does this always lead to ‘the spread of the best ideas present in the group’? Maybe. It can lead to worthwhile proposals being stalled because they aren’t watertight, but I suppose it means that truly slack things are very unlikely to get through if we’re functioning at all.

*

One of the things Mercier hopes to inaugurate is a ‘a change in the norms used to evaluate good reasoning performance’. Rather than classical logic, for example, he wonders about something more Bayesian. (I said I’d be using that term a few times back here, and that’s why I defined it there.) In proposing the beginnings of ‘a neuroscience of argumentation’, he notes an interesting possibility in relation to experiments on reasoning.
      Sometimes it comes across as if participants evaluate statements put to them poorly; his argument is that it might just be that they are doing perfectly well at being objective in that phase of thinking, but that ‘it is the subsequent production of unaddressed counterarguments that leads to these apparently irrational reactions’. That is, what the experiments are finding is not that subjects are bad at evaluation but that they are typically lazy in thinking for themselves.
      In modern societies, he says, there may be a problem with some of these mechanisms, in that ‘we often encounter arguments without being able to have a discussion with their source; for instance, when we read the newspaper, watch TV, or participate in a psychology experiment on argument evaluation’. I would say that this is something that goes back rather a long way beyond conventional descriptions of the ‘modern’, to a time when societies evolved beyond their simplest forms – perhaps the development of writing as a means of carrying argument was a significant shift. Nevertheless it does seem possible that nowadays things are a bit out of kilter. Some might say that 2016 was a year of bad arguments, poorly evaluated. Let’s hope 2017 is better.

*

It’s interesting to me that in the cultures I know a bit about the formal art of rhetoric is very important, and it is as old as literate culture itself, more or less. Classical and Renaissance thinkers might well have recognised the idea that reasoning and social persuasion are entwined; later ages criticised them for it. When I say rhetoric in this context I think of it as a science of argumentative culture. It sets itself up as means of persuading others but it may also be thought of as, perhaps, an analysis of reasoning that (as Mercier would have it) understands it as something which is fundamentally linked to social life.
      There were a happy few day a while ago when I wandered around muttering ‘rhetoric is a cognitive science!’ as if I had found the key to all mythologies. A more processed version of that thought made its way into my book Shakespeare, Rhetoric and Cognition (2011). My point was that the tropes of rhetoric seemed to map out a lot of cognitive operations, linking parts to wholes, representing efficient organisations, and could usefully be thought of as a map of the mind, not just of ornate speech. Here we are again, a little bit: in what way might a new ‘neuroscience of argumentation’ interact with the traditional ‘science of argumentation’? My guess would be that the ways in which we respond to arguments do involve some rhetorical habits of thought — ways of thinking (working on certain words; making certain kinds of connection; turning the order of things around) that are described in the rhetorical manuals. The main thing is that a neuroscience of argumentation is (i) a lovely idea, and (ii) not always breaking new ground.

Michael Lewis, The Undoing Project: A Friendship that Changed the World (New York, 2016)

December is usually a slow month for posts on this blog. This was not the plan for 2016, as I have a number of quite weighty ones on the way, but I haven’t quite pulled any of them together, and it’s time to spend less time at the desk for a bit. (Also I have to set exam papers and stuff like that.) I’ve been reading an interesting book recently, though, so I will briefly mention that. The Undoing Project is the story of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, two great psychologists who did pioneering work on cognitive biases, exploring and explaining why humans behave irrationally. They became extremely influential in the field of behavioural economics, for which Kahneman (in effect on behalf of them both) was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2002.
      Michael Lewis is an excellent writer and I read the book keenly. We have some history: in 2004 I read his famous book Moneyball, which was beguiling enough to lure me into supporting the Oakland Athletics baseball team, something that I thoroughly regret at present. Here again he tells a remarkable story, involving Nazi oppression, the early days of the state of Israel, military service, the ups and downs of academic careers, and most of all an intense friendship that proved both fertile and painful (much more the former). Having come across their work on biases in a relatively confined way (a classic essay here, a weighty reputation there) it was good to read about it in a broader context.

* Maria Eugenia Panero, Deena Skolnick Weisberg, Jessica Black, Thalia R. Goldstein, Jennifer L.
Barnes, Hiram Brownell, and Ellen Winner, ‘Does Reading a Single Passage of Literary Fiction Really Improve Theory of Mind? An Attempt at Replication’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 111 (2016), 46-64.
* Keith Oatley, ‘Fiction: Simulation of Social Worlds’, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 20 (2016), 618-28.

This post follows rather rapidly after the last, because on the day I pressed the ‘publish’ button I found myself reading about the Panero et al. piece listed above. It’s part of Psychology’s replication boom, which I have written about a bit here. The researchers set about trying to repeat the experiments described in a well known 2013 essay by Kidd and Castano. It is one of numerous attempts to show that reading literature makes us better at empathy; I mentioned it, and looked at the issues more generally, here.
      What makes Kidd and Castano’s essay most challenging is that they claim an effect on our mind-reading skills as a result of a short and specific exposure to fiction. Usually the claim is looser — correlation, not causation, or it is based on longer-term exposure to the improving influence of literature. In the piece where I mentioned Kidd and Castano I also cited various pieces by Keith Oatley, who consistently presses the general case. Indeed, there’s a recent essay in Trends in Cognitive Sciences by him (details above), which is interesting as ever. And yet I wasn’t going to feature it in the blog: partly because I have dealt with the empathy thing before, but also because I seem to steer clear of it, perhaps because it just seems a bit too neat for comfort.
      Anyway, the thing about the replication boom is that it’s a failed replication boom. As has happened in a number of notable cases, they did not get the same results. This then casts doubt on the conclusions drawn by Kidd and Castano, and Panero et al. follow through by considering whether there is any causal link between reading fiction and empathy skills. Maybe, they wonder, it’s the other way around: mind-readers seek out representations of minds to read. Now this is just one specific ebb against a broader flow in favour of the argument that, as I noted in my last post, was part of a case being made for literature as a ‘public good’. And I was already wary. But we literary types have to stay vigilant, and careful, even when the science is music to our ears.

Rick Rylance, Literature and the Public Good (Oxford, 2016)

I have just got back from St Andrews: photographic proof below. I went for work, but it was very enjoyable work. Also I got to sit on trains for hours (in the dark, so window-staring was out, or at least very dull), and this meant I powered through Rick Rylance’s book. Until recently he was Chief Executive of the Arts and Humanities Research Council, and Chair of Research Councils UK (translation: he was in charge of the main source of research funding that people like me can turn to, and he led the group that oversees all such bodies, including the much wealthier science ones). So he is a very interesting person to listen to on the subject, since he must have spent a lot of time thinking about how to carve out a space for humanities research funding amid the claims of the cancer-curers and the cosmos-crunchers.

I read the book on an old-school Kindle and so, as is quite often the case, I was surprised when it finished, even though I knew that The Literary Agenda series is made up of ‘short polemical monographs’. I never remember to allow for the bibliography and index, that’s the thing: 86% doesn’t mean 86%. Sometimes that early finish is a very welcome surprise, I have to admit, but this time I could have stood a bit more, because I was interested, and because I would have liked to read a conclusion that brought the book’s key strands together. Rylance outlines historical arguments for the value of literature to society, but the weight of the book’s case for the value of literature rests on two main themes.
      First, he develops ways of assessing the contribution of literature to modern British society in economic terms. By that definition of ‘public good’, literature stands up well: we write, we read, we buy, we sell, we edit, we meet to discuss, we attend events, and so on. Second — and without having read any blurbs I was surprised and pleased to see this — he turns to the argument that literature helps society by improving our skills at ‘theory of mind’ and empathy. Among many other things, there is interesting anecdotal evidence from prisons, and there is Steven Pinker’s argument that human society as a whole is getting better and better and one reason is that the rise of the novel has fostered our skills at understanding one another.

Now on the whole I am thrilled that a cognitive approach to literature, the kind of thing we’re on about here, plays such a prominent role in this book by this scholar. I am trying not to worry about the fact that in the past I’ve felt a bit sceptical about the specifics of the theory, and I really liked an essay that pointed in a slightly different direction. (Actually that argument — here — is perfectly congenial to Rylance’s efforts, it’s just not so straightforward in what it thinks reading fiction does for our ability to understand others.) And I would have liked to see the economic bit and the psychological bit put together somehow, but since I can’t easily see how that would be done, I will just be grateful that two independent reasons for the value of literature to society have been put so trenchantly.

Gary Lupyan and Rick Dale, ‘Why Are There Different Languages? The Role of Adaptation in Linguistic Diversity’, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 20 (2016), 649-60.

The argument here is that linguistic diversity may result from the social, physical, and technological environments in which languages develop, rather than from gradual, random change. Acoustic adaptation to ecological niches is well known in animals, for example; maybe it works for humans too. Whistle languages can reach further across difficult terrain, whereas ‘a temperate climate with open vegetation allows for easier transmission of consonants and/or higher frequency sounds than warmer climates with denser vegetation, which better propagate vowels’. There is a correlation between humidity and the use of rising and falling pitch in languages; perhaps dry air affects the ability to perform those tones consistently. The difference could be genetic rather than, or as well as, climatic, they argue. It’s possible that landscape has an effect too: ‘languages spoken in environments with salient topography (mountains or large bodies of water) sometimes grammaticalize these geographic features for spatial deixis, while languages spoken in environments more strongly shaped by human artifacts tend to rely on reference to artifacts and speaker-centered coding (e.g., left and right)’. It’s a nice idea, that languages shape themselves around the things they have to address.
      I found all of this quite intriguing. The comments on ‘how written language has been responding to the pressures imposed by modern electronic communication’ were reasonable too, but less engaging to me: it just seems less enlivening to observe this sort of adaptation as it’s happening during our stressed-out efforts to get things done, than to think about how over long millennia jungles, ice fields, deserts, and mountains impinged on local speakers. I wrote about something similar a while ago, in relation to Barry Lopez’s Arctic Dreams.

*

Sayuri Hayakawa, Albert Costa, Alice Foucart, and Boaz Keysar, ‘Using a Foreign Language Changes Our Choices’, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 20 (2016), 791-3.

This (and the previous article, to some extent) makes me think, as I often do, of the particular, perhaps skewed way that interdisciplinary topics appear in the pages of Trends in Cognitive Sciences. This is about ‘how foreign language affects choice’; apparently it does, and this makes a difference to judgments of risk, morality, and more. The authors deem this ‘surprising’, but I am not sure it is. I suppose that’s because I have a broad, woolly sense that somewhere between history, sociology, anthropology, linguistics, and so on, there’s a field in which our understanding of how languages work on us is growing, or could grow.
      In this essay, though, what matters are experimental results, and these are, the authors argue, gathering into a significant trend. Using a foreign language can reduce decision biases, such as loss aversion, perhaps because it is less bound up in emotions. In one study, subjects perceived more benefit and less risk; in another they were more lenient about taboo violations, in some cases; in another there were signs of more ‘utilitarian’ responses to ‘highly emotional moral dilemmas’. The authors say, interestingly, that the definition of what’s ‘emotional’, and how that varies between languages, is a tricky area. There’s something very interesting here; it feels bitty but the attempt to bring it together is valuable.

*

These things were on my mind this weekend because I went to see the film Arrival. Now this film is good enough for me to want to avoid revealing its secrets, even though that makes it rather hard to talk about. Suffice to say, it does interesting things with the structure of languages, the way our minds work, and the nature of time; and it has aliens in it. It is a film that, unlike most of the ones I’ve seen recently, works with a hyper-extreme .
      It’s not breaking any confidences to say that the film, and the , revolve around the question of how you communicate with entities which are completely different from you. A few clicks of the mouse and I found myself reading about the ways in which designers of nuclear waste facilities are trying to send messages to people who would still be endangered by radiation if they visited the sites after tens of thousands of years.

*

The wonderful, horrifying problem is not just the difficulty of defining visual messages that would mean the same to future humans (or others). It’s also that the history of archaeology tends to suggest that, faced with such signs, people anything like us would think ‘Brilliant, I have found the treasure-filled tomb of my dreams! Indiana Jones!’. So it’s taking a lot of ingenuity (actually I am not sure it’s come to anything much yet).
      The two sites I’ve read about are at Yucca Mountain in the US, which is discussed in this piece on the ‘Anthropocene’ era by my friend Robert Macfarlane, and at Olkiluoto, Finland, which featured in a documentary called Into Eternity. There’s some more detail on how the Americans thought about doing it in this Slate piece. I haven’t read it yet, but Gregory Benford’s Deep Time sounds like it has a lot to say on the matter of communicating across millennia in general.
      As if my mind wasn’t full enough of words and thoughts and time, Youtube telepathically realised that I needed to know about the new OK Go video that has just come out. I’ve included one before and feel like I should do so again. Enjoy. Wonder whether it was all worth it. Decide it was.