Frontiers of Neuroscience: Practical implications of empirically studying moral decision-making

www.psysr.org on groupthink

J. Ginges & S. Atran, "War as a moral imperative"
For one of the most surprising statements about the social sciences I have read:

"However, to date, no published work has directly investigated whether people use the logic of instrumental rationality or deontology when reasoning about war."

That was written in 2011. This, after 6 decades of research on game theory, game theory which was applied to real-life situations of conflict. And the discourse of game theory ends up in narratives like Dr. Strangelove. And storytellers have pointed up the gap between a theory that frames decisionmaking in cost-benefit terms and the way groups forge decisions. And not even as coalitions, but as a group behaving as a group.

Trends in Cognitive Sciences: Thinking the Unthinkable: Sacred Values and Taboo Cognitions

The Price of your Soul: Neural Evidence for the Non-Utilitarian Representation of Sacred Values

James brings together ancienct atomism, radical empiricism, and natural selection to describe the evolution of common-sense categories. Not enough incorporation of the way reproduction with imperfect duplication, and the way changing selection pressures encourage or discourage the flourishing of related populations. But not bad for someone contemplating change before the advent of the modern synthesis in evolutionary biology and the development of evolutionary game theory. Had he seen that you can create programs that can interact with other programs and learn from those programs, he might have had more to say. But being pals with C.S. Peirce certainly got him pretty far.

On the Evolution of Common Sense Concepts

“But when we look back, and speculate as to how the common-sense categories may have achieved their wonderful supremacy, no reason appears why it may not have been by a process just like that by which the conceptions due to Democritus, Berkeley, or Darwin achieved their similar triumphs in more recent times. In other words, they may have been successfully DISCOVERED by prehistoric geniuses whose names the night of antiquity has covered up; they may have been verified by the immediate facts of experience which they first fitted; and then from fact to fact and from man to man they may have SPREAD, until all language rested on them and we are now incapable of thinking naturally in any other terms. Such a view would only follow the rule that has proved elsewhere so fertile, of assuming the vast and remote to conform to the laws of formation that we can observe at work in the small and near.”

My knowledge of philosophy is sketchy. As a step towards rearranging the scrambled knowledge, I am trying to reach out from James's array of evolved (ambiguously biological and social) cognitive categories to other philosophical categories. These are my connections and arrangements ... they no doubt do serious violence to the original frameworks.

from Lecture V: Pragmatism and Common Sense

Contents\/           Categories >	James	Kant	Aristotle
“Find a one-to-one relation for your sense-impressions ANYWHERE among the concepts, and in so far forth you rationalize the impressions. But obviously you can rationalize them by using various conceptual systems.”
that whose existence one “might interpolate between its successive apparitions” but infants and others do not	Thing - ENS = a subject in which qualities inhere, a construct of common sense		?
“the same again” is perhaps more primitive than a “thing” as the status of the entity between appearances may not have been interpolated/ inferred/deduced, “experiences might have all been singulars, no one of them occurring twice”	Same/Different	TS: number Cat: quantity	Quantities (continuous/ discrete)
“colossally useful DENKMITTEL for finding our way among the many!” “manyness might conceivably have been absolute”	Kinds - discrete groups of subjects	?	Fundamental? Eternal?
	Minds	?	Rational mobile souls inside living things (destructible mobile substances)
	Bodies	?	Destructible mobile substances
time is a “world receptacle,” a “one Time which we all believe in and in which each event has its definite date”	One Time	TS: pure understanding’s sensuous condition for use of categories	?
space is a “world receptacle,” “that one Space in which each thing has its position”	One Space	Since space is the form of all appearances of the outer senses, it may seem that space could serve as a schema. Indeed, any phenomenon that requires space, as well as time, as a form would also need a spatial schema.	?
“permanent”/”changing” a “thing” is a kind of “a permanent unit-subject that ‘supports’ its attributes interchangeably,” things have qualities “they live and act by, and are what we act on” “No one stably or sincerely uses the more critical notion, of a group sense- qualities united by a law”	Subject/Attribute - a subject is a substance	Substance's schema is the permanence of the unchanging substance (subject) to which accidents (predicates) belong, or the permanence of the object in time	SUBSTANCES - unmoved - moving (eternal/mortal) QUALITIES
Santayana “you depend wholly on divine favour, yet that unfathomable agency is not distinguishable from your own life” [on a dog’s mind] Or perhaps every thing influenced all the others.	Causal Influences - arc. pan-influence - mod. “law” substitutes	Causality's schema is the necessary succession of a consequent to an antecedent.	Relatives?
“Men believed whatever they thought with any liveliness, and they mixed their dreams with their realities inextricably.” [ish … there special categories, this is too general]	The Fancied	?	Relatives?
time, space, thing “these abstract notions unify the world incomparably; but in their finished shape as concepts how different they are from the loose unordered time-and-space experiences of natural men!”	The Real	TS: degrees of reality Cat: quality	Relatives?
[a 19th century construction]: “something less than the actual and more than the wholly unreal”	The Possible	In the class of modality, the category of possibility has the schema of possibility at any time. The schema of actual existence at a certain time belongs to the category of existence. Finally, the category of necessity has the schema of being an object at all times.[51]	?
	<     these are evolved,     constructed, cultivated	<     transcendental, empirical	<     Eternal

are not the same as the biological evolution of cognitive faculties

Once again, an evolutionary model of change need not be sociobiological. It is a a paradigm for understanding historical changes where contingency is given its due place. The iron hand of necessity may be shaking the dice box of chance (Nietzche, echoed by Foucault). But dice are inert and do not change from one round of the game to the next. People and their cultures are not inert. Reproduction with variation, and retention of variations in the face or because of certain selection pressures,

are not the same as the biological evolution of cognitive faculties

Once again, an evolutionary model of change need not be sociobiological. It is a a paradigm for understanding historical changes where contingency is given its due place. The iron hand of necessity may be shaking the dice box of chance (Nietzche, echoed by Foucault). But dice are inert and do not change from one round of the game to the next. People and their cultures are not inert. Reproduction with variation, and retention of variations in the face or because of certain selection pressures, are the order of the day.

The Critical Thinking Institute provides a nice overview of the kind of questions that encourage critical thinking. It is given in the context of a discussion of school restructuring. How to bring this into practical teaching is another matter.

Intellectual Foundations: The Key Missing Piece in School Restructuring
http://tinyurl.com/agbg4zs

Questions are key therein …

Sound Intellectual Judgment Is Needed When
·      deciding which questions to ask
·      how to put the questions
·      when to put them.

To do this teachers must themselves acquire an inner sense of the interrelationships that exist between structures in reasoning and a clear sense of how to bring intellectual criteria to bear on them.

Inner-Dialogue to Promote
·      “Let’s see, if we put the question this way, then we are bound to focus on this.”
·      “Does that make sense?”
·      “And if we interpret the information this way, then we are assuming that. Are we justified in doing so?”
·      “And if we use this idea to organize the data, one implication will be …”
·      “But is that implication consistent with the results we obtained when we ...”

Questions of Clarification
•   What do you mean by ______? • Could you give me an example?
•   What is your main point? • Would this be an example: ___?
•   How does _____ relate to ____? • Could you explain that further?
•   Could you put that another way? • Would you say more about that?
•   Is your basic point _____ or _____? • Why do you say that?
•   What do you think is the main issue here?
•   Let me see if I understand you; do you mean ________ or _______?
•   How does this relate to our discussion (problem, issue)?
•   What do you think John meant by his remark? What did you take John to mean?
•   Jack, would you summarize in your own words what Jill has said? ... Jill, is that what you meant?

Questions that Probe Assumptions
•   What are you assuming?
•   What is Karen assuming?
•   What could we assume instead?
•   You seem to be assuming ______. Do I understand you correctly?
•   All of your reasoning depends on the idea that ____. Why have you based your reasoning on
______ rather than ______?
•   You seem to be assuming ____. How would you justify taking this for granted?
•   Is it always the case? Why do you think the assumption holds here?
•   Why would someone make this assumption?

Questions that Probe Reasons and Evidence
•   Could you give us an example of that? • Are these reasons adequate?
•   How do you know? • Why did you say that?
•   Why do you think that is true? • What led you to that belief?
•   Do you have any evidence for that? • How does that apply to this case?
•   What difference does that make? • What would change your mind?
•   What are your reasons for saying that?
•   What other information do we need?
•   Could you explain your reasons to us?
•   But is that good evidence to believe that?
•   Is there reason to doubt that evidence?
•   Who is in a position to know if that is so?
•   What would you say to someone who said ____?
•   Can someone else give evidence to support that response?
•   By what reasoning did you come to that conclusion?
•   How could we find out whether that is true?

Questions About Viewpoints or Perspectives
•   You seem to be approaching this issue from _____ perspective. Why have you chosen this rather
than that perspective?
•   How would other groups/types of people respond? Why? What would influence them?
•   How could you answer the objection that ______ would make?
•   What might someone who believed ___ think?
•   Can/did anyone see this another way?
•   What would someone who disagrees say?
•   What is an alternative?
•   How are Ken’s and Roxanne’s ideas alike? Different?

Questions that Probe Implications and Consequences
•   What are you implying by that?
•   When you say ______, are you implying _______?
•   But if that happened, what else would happen as a result? Why?
•   What effect would that have?
•   Would that necessarily happen or only probably happen?
•   If this and this are the case, then what else must also be true?

Intellectual Standards for Diagnosing Questions
·      Was that clear?
·      Is that accurate?
·      Are we being precise enough?
·      Is that relevant to the question?
·      Is that logical?
·      Are we dealing with the complexities of the question (depth of thinking)?
·      Do we need to consider some other points of view (broad-mindedness)?

It is interesting to see a discussion evolutionary processes at work in philosophy and psychology without the writer eternalizing this or that set of "innate" principles. Archaic and long enduring -- and of practical value -- is not the same as eternal, ineluctable, and necessity-imposing.

James, William

The Evolutionary Components of Thought

Lecture V: Pragmatism and Common Sense

“[T]he actual world, instead of being complete ‘eternally,’ as the monists assure us, may be eternally incomplete, and at all times subject to addition or liable to loss.”

So the universe is not an infinity, in that the copulas “and” or “with” can be added to connect parts of it, and such copulas can also be erased. An infinite set is one where the elimination or addition of items neither diminishes nor increases it. But if I remove a functioning connection that means the universe is joined together less securely than it was before, or parts of it are not co-ordinated to the same degree. If it’s not the same functioning whole, is it not diminished?

“New truths are the resultants of new experiences and of old truths combined and mutually modifying one another. And since this is the case in the changes of opinion of today, there is no reason to assume that it has not been so at all times. It follows that very ancient modes of thought may have survived through all the later changes in men’s opinions. The most primitive ways of thinking may not yet be wholly expunged.”

A variety of categories of cognition may have evolved:

Contents    \/                                 Categories >	James
“Find a one-to-one relation for your sense-impressions ANYWHERE among the concepts, and in so far forth you rationalize the impressions. But obviously you can rationalize them by using various conceptual systems.”
that whose existence one “might interpolate between its successive apparitions” but infants and others do not	Thing - ENS = a subject in which qualities inhere, a construct of common sense
“the same again” is perhaps more primitive than a “thing” as the status of the entity between appearances may not have been interpolated/ inferred/deduced, “experiences might have all been singulars, no one of them occurring twice”	Same/Different
“colossally useful DENKMITTEL for finding our way among the many!” “manyness might conceivably have been absolute”	Kinds - discrete groups of subjects
	Minds
	Bodies
time is a “world receptacle,” a “one Time which we all believe in and in which each event has its definite date”	One Time
space is a “world receptacle,” “that one Space in which each thing has its position”	One Space
“permanent”/”changing” a “thing” is a kind of “a permanent unit-subject that ‘supports’ its attributes interchangeably,” things have qualities “they live and act by, and are what we act on” “No one stably or sincerely uses the more critical notion, of a group sense- qualities united by a law”	Subject/Attribute - a subject is a substance
Santayana “you depend wholly on divine favour, yet that unfathomable agency is not distinguishable from your own life” [on a dog’s mind] Or perhaps every thing influenced all the others.	Causal Influences - arc. pan-influence - mod. “law” substitutes
“Men believed whatever they thought with any liveliness, and they mixed their dreams with their realities inextricably.” [ish … there special categories, this is too general]	The Fancied
time, space, thing “these abstract notions unify the world incomparably; but in their finished shape as concepts how different they are from the loose unordered time-and-space experiences of natural men!”	The Real
[a 19th century construction]: “something less than the actual and more than the wholly unreal”	The Possible
	<     these are evolved, constructed, cultivated not eternal or transcendental

The difficulty is creating writing tasks that may be scored in a responsible and non-arbitrary manner.