Reasoning often suffers from a bad press (and not only in high school where nerds are unpopular). It's supposed to be tiring, boring. We would be better off following our gut instincts. And sometimes it is true. But I would like to claim that this is not due to reasoning as such, but to the fact that it is applied to domains that often don't seem relevant to us. Let me use an analogy here. Using our motor control mechanisms can be extremely fun: having a greater control of our own body is one of the pleasures offered by sports generally. But using motor control can also be mind numbing if you work in a factory, or simply if you don't like sports. The difference is that in one case you are applying your skills to something that is relevant to you (being good at squash if you like squash) and in the other to something that is not so relevant (being good at stomping pieces of metal or playing squash if you don't like squash).
It is the same for reasoning: if you like philosophy, or math, you will enjoy reasoning about these topics, if you don't, then you won't. OK, this looks like a truism. My point is only that reasoning is not intrinsically boring, and I hope that if you didn't agree with that from the start you will now. Actually it would be surprising that any cognitive activity would generally have a negative hedonistic value, at least if you are an adaptationist. Using our cognitive mechanisms has to be good for us (otherwise we wouldn't have them), and the trick that natural selection usually employs when it wants to make us do stuff that is good for us is to make doing this stuff feel good (sex being the perfect example). So if reasoning is an adaptation, then we should feel good when we reason. And guess what: we do.
This is obviously not always true. There are several components that determine when reasoning will feel good. One is the relevance of its result (cf. the sport analogy). If, in any given domain, you want to make sure that the claims you make or you read are well justified (have good reasons supporting them) then reasoning about these claims might feel good. Another factor is the fit of the input with the requirements of our reasoning mechanisms. Some problems will be easier to reason about because they have a well defined form, while others are very fuzzy and make our head hurt.
The second point is, I think, what explains the success of Sudoku. To find the answers of a Sudoku grid, you have to reason: you have to compare different hypothesis (is it a 4 or 7 here?) and find which has the good justification (it can't be a 7 because it wouldn't fit with this other line). Sudoku is an artifact that has been made to tap into our reasoning mechanisms. And as other artifacts (such as make up), it might create stimuli that are actually better at taping into some cognitive mechanisms than the natural stimuli that these mechanisms evolved to process. In the case of reasoning, it is not clear what these natural stimuli are (I wouldn't claim to have made a convincing case yet), they clearly are not Sudoku problems (unless we find some grids in a new Lascaux).
And I think that both points explain why some people are fond of doing math or philosophy: they find these domains relevant and in these fields people have been creating things that are good at tapping our reasoning mechanisms, be it a mathematical proof or a philosophical argument. So reasoning in this case might feel really good: first because the result of the process is relevant; second because the inputs are right and the right input in the right place makes us feel good (see this post).
Spinoza is probably the epitome of philosophers who tried to built their entire system on pure reason. One of the reasons for this might be the strength of the hedonistic value reasoning had for him:
I finally resolved to inquire whether there might be some real good having power to communicate itself, which would affect the mind singly, to the exclusion of all else; whether, in fact, there might be anything of which the discovery and attainment would enable me to enjoy continuous, supreme, and unending happiness. (The Treatise on the Emendation of the Understanding)
In her book on Spinoza's life (Betraying Spinoza), Rebecca Goldstein (1) describes this as "ecstatic rationalism". So reasoning can be more than fun: it can lead to a sort of experience that one would more easily expect of a Buddhist monk than of a rationalist philosopher.
From now on, when you try to fill a Sudoku grid while in the subway, you can think about your feeling as a glimpse of what somebody like Spinoza felt like when he was trying to understand the deepest secrets of the universe.
If you want to know more about the The Psychology of Sudoku Problems.
(1) People: Rebecca Goldstein is the new girlfriend of Steven Pinker.
The abundant comments this post received are pasted below:
1. On Saturday 21 October 2006 by Marius
It is inappropriate to say that reasoning had a strong hedonistic value for Spinoza. We need to distinguish in an intellectual context between "eudaimonia" and "hedone", i.e. between the ultimate happiness resulting from rational activity in accordance with excellence over a complete life (see Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics for more on this) and pleasure. Spinoza's typical rationalistic inquiry is of an eudaimonic kind, moreover the so-called "ecstatic" nature of his rationalism is probaby due to his emphasis on knowledge of God (nature) as the mind's greatest good or greatest virtue, a knowledge ultimately attained not via inferential steps, but by a sort of direct apprehension of the mind ("scientia intuitiva", the third Spinozian type of knowledge) Although one can equate happiness with pleasure (as the Epicureans do) and distinguish between types of pleasure (high, low), it is inappropriate to consider pure rational inquiry as a source of (hedonistic) pleasure.
What it is interesting in your observations on the quasi-hedonistic outcomes of reasoning, and I grant that, is that one needs a sort of background motivation or passion in order to put the rational machinery to work on a specific topic or area of inquiry. Our reasoning mechanisms are boosted by the fuel of passion for their subject. Without that passion, reasoning is just a tedious, cold affair, much like in the case of computational devices. But the interesting question here is whether reasoning with a quasi-hedonistic outcome is superior to cold reasoning or not from the point of view of its results. Some may say not, considering that the underlying passion is optional and that reasoning per se goes unabated as long as its mechanisms function properly. But it seems to me that, at least for us humans, the reasoning mechanisms cannot function properly when applied to a subject without underlying motivation, interest and passion for it, to the point that they are quasi-impaired if lacking this motivational underlying network. I think, however, that it is inappropriate to speak of (hedonistic) pleasure as the outcome of passion-boosted rational inquiry; as I said earlier, the outcome of such a process is intrinsically more of an eudaimonic kind.
2. On Sunday 22 October 2006 by hugo
>It is inappropriate to say, as Ms. Goldstein seems to do in her apparently commercial book, that reasoning had a strong hedonistic value for Spinoza.
it might only be my interpretation.
>it is inappropriate to consider pure rational inquiry as a source of (hedonistic) pleasure.
why??
Let me assure you than I sometimes feel pleasure while reasoning about the stuff I work on (but that may not qualify as 'pure rational inquiry').
I don't quite see why Spinoza (or anybody else for that matter) would be incapable of feeling pleasure while practicing 'pure rational inquiry'. Do you have any data?
(I may just be uncomfortable with the difference between eudamonia and hedone. Out of curiosity, do they have an equivalent in modern psychological theories?)
>to the point that they are quasi-impaired if lacking this motivational underlying network.
I would certainly agree on that (that's why I think that motivation explains a huge part of the difference in performances in skills like maths or philosophy)
3. On Sunday 22 October 2006 by Marius
>it might only be my interpretation
Yes, I haven't read the book on Spinoza, and I should not pass judgment on it (I actually retracted the comment from a second version of my message, which I would have wanted posted, but in the end only the first version appeared); from what I have read on the book (on Amazon and a series of other sites) it does not actually seem there is anything in it on the (stricto sensu) hedonistic value of reasoning for Spinoza- it's about the possible role of biographic events in the development of his philosophical outlook, and Goldstein's ideas are very interesting in this respect. When you talk about "ecstatic rationalism" and emphasize the quote from Spinoza's Treatise it's just that it does not have to do, it seems to me, with hedonism, but with the eudaimonic kind of freedom brought by the exercice of reason, culminating in knowledge of God (the same as nature, for Spinoza)- a stance, one could say, typical for the Enlightenment period in which Spinoza wrote.
>I sometimes feel pleasure while reasoning about the stuff I work on
Me too, and I guess Spinoza did as well (no one said he was incapable of feeling pleasure while practicing 'pure rational inquiry'), but my qualification was just that the outcome of such a process is intrinsically more of an eudaimonic kind; non-intrinsically, yes, you might feel pleasure because, for instance, you really put up a good argument or because the subject is exciting and it's exciting to take part at the debates, but what interested Spinoza intrinsically, and what interests or should interest intrinsically someone working on philosophical arguments or mathematical proofs is knowledge of truth, the aim of any rational inquiry, and knowledge of truth is interconnected with eudaimonia. All the rest is incidental, and it seems to me (hedonistic) pleasure derives from the paraphernalia, and not the eudaimonic-driven core of the inquiry.
> Out of curiosity, do they have an equivalent in modern psychological theories?
I am not familiar with the psychological literature on pleasure, but I think there have to be theories accounting for the difference between extrinsic and intrinsic value, i.e. valuing something because of its outcome (seeing it as a means to something else), and valuing something for itself (in our case, rational inquiry having as aim the knowledge of truth, and ultimately leading to continuous happiness)
We could perhaps delve, as starting points, into these two articles in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy for more perspectives on the issues:
plato.stanford.edu/entrie... (on pleasure) and
www.science.uva.nl/~seop/... (on hedonism)
4. On Sunday 22 October 2006 by Florian
I don't know a great deal about dear Spinoza but I must argue against what Marius told about Aristotle. In Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle distingues two kinds of pleasure. First kind is the kind of pleasure that happens when a pain disappears or a natural need is satisfied. The second is the "perfect" kind of pleasure that accompanies any action a skilled agent can perform. The best you perform this action, the more pleasure (in greek : "hedone") you get. The activity of science (or, in Aristotle's own vocabulary, "contemplation") can give us such a pleasure. Later, it will be explained that, as contemplation is the greatest action a man can perform, it gives us the most pleasure possible. For more details, see N.E, X, 4, especially the second half, which I will quote here in the french translation (J.Tricot) : "On peut croire que si tous les hommes sans exception aspirent au plaisir, c'est qu'ils ont tous tendance à vivre. La vie est une certaine activité, et chaque homme exerce son activité dans le domaine et avec les facultés qui ont pour lui le plus d'attrait : par exemple, le musicien exerce son activité au moyen de l'ouïe, sur les mélodies, l'homme d'étude, au moyen de la pensée, sur les spéculations de la science, et ainsi de suite dans chaque cas. Et le plaisir vient parachever les activités (...)". So, the Sudokist, by performing the Sudoku task, gets more pleasure, the better he becomes - so "Aristoteles dixit" (can the Sudoku be seen as a falsificationist way to confirm Nicomachean Ethics ?).
5. On Sunday 22 October 2006 by hugo
Thanks for clarifying Aristotle's thoughts!
6. On Monday 23 October 2006 by Marius
Reply to Florian
> I must argue against what Marius told about Aristotle.
My point was not exegetic; I did not say the distinction is endorsed tale quale by Aristotle. I was using it to argue, independently of Aristotle, that, in a sense, there is a great chasm between the enjoyment provided by Sudoku reasoning and the enjoyment provided by theoretical intellectual ratiocination directed at philosophical problems or mathematical proofs. See also my previous post on what is intrinsic and what is extrinsic with respect to the quasi-hedonistic outcome of rational inquiry. The issue is not whether reasoning gives you pleasure or not, because I agree it does, but we need to qualify the precise type of pleasure that is at stake. It was not my point that Aristotle contests this, as I said, my point was not exegetical at all.
Certainly, Aristotle says that the virtuous person takes pleasure in exercising his intellectual skills and that there is a correspondence between the level of skill and the degree of pleasure experienced via the successful exercice of that skill, but he also says that human happiness consists in one kind of pleasure, namely the pleasure felt by a human being who engages in theoretical activity and thereby imitates the pleasurable thinking of god. I was hinting at this latter kind of pleasure as the one involved in the Spinoza-related cases.
7. On Monday 23 October 2006 by hugo
I'm not sure I understand the difference, not being familiar (at all) with Aristotle (or Spinoza by the way).
I'd like to understand, so if either one of you could draw an analogy between the theories of these philosophers about pleasure and something I might know (like modern psychology), that would be very helpful.
And I'm not sure that the difference in the pleasure brought about by the process of reasoning is that important between sudoku and ratiocination -- that would imply different abilities, wouldn't it? and I'd have to contest that. There might clearly be a difference in the pleasure brought about by the outcome, but merely one of intensity - as you experience more pleasure when you solve a harder sudoku grid.
8. On Monday 23 October 2006 by alberto
the difference between simple pleasure and eudaimonia does exist in contemporary psychology, in the context of positive psychology, a movement featuring some of the best psychologists in the world (J. Haidt, for example, and Martin Seligman, president of American Psychological Association) who try their best to study scientifically hapiness and psychological well-being.
The books of positive psychologists could be easily confused with unscientific popular psychology if one were to judge by the title (e.g. "authentic happiness" Seligman, "The happiness hypothesis" Haidt). The difference is that they really try their best to meet empirical, critical and psychometric standards of contemporary psychology and that they have sound theoretical reasons to try to explain hapiness: namely, evolutionary psychology. They think that happiness is a psychological dynamics designed by natural selection: so it can be studied in a scientific and functional way. In that I think they are right. Nonetheless, going in the direction of Hugo's scepticism, it must be said that their high quality work is often a little to hasty in trying to show that the ancients (and Aristotle in particular) got almost everything right. Sometimes it seems they just devise clever empirical ways to validate ancient philosophical categories (e.g. eudaimonia as opposed to pleasure) instead of exposing that ancient wisdom to all the critical pressure it deserves.
In any case, the contemporary version of eudaimonia is the concept of "flow" elaborated by Csikszentmihalyi
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Csi...
"flow" is almost exactly the same thing as Aristotle's eudaimonia, only with validated mesures and empirically documented effects
9. On Monday 23 October 2006 by Martin Skov
You might want to look into the work of Olivier Houdé (yes, he is French!). In several imaging experiments he has showed that emotion plays a role in reasoning task. For a quick overview, see his 2003 review:
O. Houdé & N. Tzurio-Mazoyer: Neural foundations of logical and mathematical cognition. Nature Reviews Neuroscience 4: 507-514.
While this emotional input into the reasoning process may not have anything to do with having a hedonic feeling - it is probably more likely to function as an error-detection signal - Houdé's experiments demonstrate that emotion is, in some way, an integral part of reason, also "pure" reason.
www2.cnrs.fr/presse/journ...
10. On Monday 23 October 2006 by Marius
> an analogy between the theories of these philosophers about pleasure and something I might know (like modern psychology), that would be very helpful
As said, I am not that familiar with the psychological literature on pleasure. Some interesting bibliographic items in this direction might be Kahneman, Diener and Schwarz (eds.), Well-Being: The Foundations of Hedonic Psychology, 1999 and Davidson, Scherer and Goldsmith (eds.), Handbook of Affective Sciences, 2003.
Prima facie, it does not appear straightforward that the eudaimonic pleasure could be operationalized in order for it to be scientifically investigable. Some key elements could be a) the fact that it is not solely a punctate or diachronically scattered state of mind, but rather an activity spanning a lifetime in which the excellence of reasoning and the satisfaction it engenders are indissociable, and b) that the ratiocinative activity from which positive hedonistic value ensues is pursued for its own sake and not just as a means to something else (intrinsic vs. extrinsic value). Of course, the general picture of the interconnections between motivation, enhancement of one's ratiocinative skills and positive hedonistic value engendered by their use is much more complex and comprises factors at several levels- neurophysiological/biological, functional/cognitive, cultural and so on-, the balance of which gives you the quasi-hedonistic (resp. eudaimonic) outcome. What prompted me to signal the distinction was your mentioning of Spinoza, because we need to qualify the precise meaning in which reasoning (applied to the philosophical issues he was interested in) had hedonistic value for him. We often find in the metaphilosophy, if you like, of these authors, conceptions inspired by the eudaimonic telos, often interspersed with quasi-theological observations concerning the knowledge of the mind of God (Einstein is famously quoted as having said this, with the specification that God is Spinoza's God, i.e. Nature) or the emulation of divine thinking. If we disentangle the theological aspects from the eudaimonic telos, we are left with something like 'virtuous activity'- I agree, as I stressed earlier, that, at least prima facie, it is not straightforward how to operationalize this in a scientific study.
>the difference in the pleasure brought about by the process of reasoning between sudoku and ratiocination would imply different abilities, wouldn't it? I'd have to contest that.
Clearly, it seems to me, there are general-purpose reasoning mechanisms at play in both these cases, even one and the same ability, one may grant (but this is debatable- one could say the degree of exposure to and reasoning exercice with the subject matter influences the performance), but this does not entail the positive hedonistic value engendered must be the same- ex hypothesi, you have the same analytic reasoning ability for Sudoku and a mathematical proof, but your success at these tasks may not make you experience the same pleasure simply because the mathematical proof is more important than the Sudoku grid- in one case, the pleasure is part of a larger, more holistic picture interconnecting the scientific ideal of the pursuit of truth with the enhancement of your reasoning abilities, while in the other case pleasure is much more punctate or diachronically scattered. In this sense, the difference is not merely one of intensity (quantitative), as you suggest, due to the correspondence between perfection of one's ratiocinative capacities and the satisfaction their successful exercice generates (a correlation I agree upon), but one of quality. In other words, we need to distinguish between the mechanical exercice of one's analytical reasoning abilities and their exercice in service of something like a scientific ideal- there is a qualitative difference, it seems to me, between the positive hedonistic outcomes of the two.
11. On Monday 23 October 2006 by Marius
Thank you, Alberto, for the very interesting observations you made.
I found a talk with Seligman on Edge, entitled "Eudaemonia, The Good Life" (www.edge.org/3rd_culture/... ), which may be of interest in this context.
12. On Tuesday 24 October 2006 by hugo
thanks everybody for the very interesting links between philosophy and psychology and insights into these matters.
And I'm interpreting what Marius says as something like 'the process is the same (for sudoku and ratiocination on more pressing topics) and the pleasure brought about by the process itself is the same - more or less - but what depends is the pleasure - or eudeamonia or whatever - brought about by the outcome - i.e. understanding life/the universe/the mind vs. filling a sudoku grid'. (Excuse me for the gross oversimplification of your ideas.) I agree with that.
13. On Tuesday 24 October 2006 by hugo
I can't resist to add this excerpt from a poem by Keats (if you wonder about the link with the discussion, well, there has to be a link between beauty and pleasure...)
When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st,
"Beauty is truth, truth beauty,"--that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
14. On Wednesday 25 October 2006 by Michael Blowhard
Interesting posting and comments! FWIW, I'm a bit of a Sudoku fan, though not generally a big fan of mental games. I've found there are evenings when I'm happier spending an hour on Sudoku rather than a novel -- leaves me in a more peaceful, sated mood. And if/when I wake up in the middle of the night from a nightmare, or from some physical unease, spending an hour on Sudoku puzzles generally sends me back to bed happy and calm. I'm 'way too much of a mental klutz to experience "flow" playing Sudoku. But there's still pleasure for me to be had in trudging throug the puzzles. My own small theory about Solitaire, Sudoku, crosswords, etc is that some people's minds have (for whatever variety of reasons) an excess of oomph, and need problems to chomp away on until that oomph is spent. I wonder if there's any correspondence between psychological "types" and the kinds of mental games they prefer?
15. On Thursday 26 October 2006 by hugo
I'm not aware of any study that would have linked some traits (need for cognition being an obvious candidate here) with the taste for this kind of mental games. You might have some interesting correlations though.
Azzouni certainly has the bona fides to weigh in on this. But it seems to me that the pure sociology of it isn't quite so simple.
Take Wiles' first proof of Taniyama-Shimura. It had an error, but it took concerted efforts by extreme experts to locate it. But that's not the end of the story. It turns out that he and Richard Taylor were able to ascertain that piecing together two parts of the theory that didn't quite seem to work on their own was in fact enough to 'patch' the proof together (Wiles himself says as much).
So, Yes, the original proof was wrong. To a much lesser extent, Perelman didn't fill in all the blanks in his landmark proof of Poincare, leading to a (minor scandal) where two other mathematicians claimed to give the "first" proof based on the "ideas of" Perelman and Hamilton.
The question is this: if someone had done the patching of Wiles' proof for him, would THEY be the prover? How large does the hole have to be? When an error is found, who gets to decide whether it is trivial, whether it wrecks the proof entirely, and who will be the one credited with the insight that makes the whole thing work?
These are not trivial matters, and the issue isn't apportioning credit, but deciding what an error truly is. Typos don't count. Proving incorrect results certainly do. But what about "generally correct" ideas that eventually lead to a proof? How loose do those ideas have to be?
I don't think there's ANY argument about when large, demonstrable errors have been found in published proofs. But there are many other cases -- like de Branges' purported proof of the Riemann Hypothesis -- that fall through these neat cracks.
In respect to kinship terminologies, Levinson's question, "What constrains this exuberant diversity of systems?", is not answered by Kemp and Regier's analysis for one simple reason: Terminologies have a structure and logic, like grammars for language, that determine the possible range of kinship terminologies. Kemp and Regier assume any partition of the space of genealogical relations is a potential terminology and then show that existing terminologies occupy only a small portion of this space due, they assert, to a tradeoff between simplicity and usefulness. This would be like saying a sentence can be any subset of all possible vocabulary words, then asserting that the realized languages have sentences that are a tradeoff between simplicity and usefulness, but ignoring the fact that the simplicity and usefulness of sentences is created through the grammar of the language that constrains what are admissible sentences. The same is true for kinship terminologies, and the answer to Levinson's question has already been made by showing that kinship terminologies have a generative structure that determines the corpus of kinship terms, starting from the primary kin terms of a terminology, along with kinship concepts that are expressed in the terminology (such as reciprocity of kin terms), and the kinship structural properties embedded in a particular terminology (Read 1984, 2001, 2007, 2009; Read and Behrens 1990; Leaf and Read 2012, among others). For example, the difference giving rise to the fundamental division of terminologies into descriptive versus classificatory (bifurcate merging) terminologies derives from two different ways that sibling relations are conceptualized in different societies: (1) a sibling is the child of my parent other than myself (descriptive terminologies) or (2) siblings are those persons who have parents in common (classificatory terminologies) (Bennardo and Read 2007; Read, Fischer and Leaf 2013). Trying to understand kinship terminologies (and hence kinship systems) without first working out the generative logic of a terminology is like trying to understand languages without working out the grammar of a language. Extensive work has already been published on the generative logic of kinship terminologies and this work makes evident what constrains the variability in kinship terminologies that Levinson asks about.
References
Bennardo, G. and D. Read 2007. Cognition, Algebra, and Culture in the Tongan Kinship Terminology. Journal of Cognition and Culture 7: 49-88.
Leaf, M. and D. Read. (2012) Human Thought and Social Organization: Anthropology on a New Plane. Lanham: Lexington Press
Read, D. l984. An algebraic account of the American kinship terminology. Current Anthropology 25: 4l7-440
Read, D. 2001 What is Kinship? In The Cultural Analysis of Kinship: The Legacy of David Schneider and Its Implications for Anthropological Relativism, R. Feinberg and M. Ottenheimer eds. University of Illinois Press, Urbana. Pp. 78-117.
Read, D. 2007. Kinship Theory: A Paradigm Shift. Ethnology 46(4):329-364
Read, D. 2009. Another Look at Kinship: Reasons Why a Paradigm Shift is Needed. Algebra Rodtsva 12:42-69.
Read, D. and C. Behrens. 1990. KAES: An expert system for the algebraic analysis of kinship terminologies. J. of Quantitative Anthropology 2:353-393.
Read, D., Fischer, M. and M. Leaf. 2013. What are kinship terminologies, and why do we care? A computational approach to analyzing symbolic domains. Social Science Computer Review 31(1): 16-44.
Yes, kinship is back -- or more accurately, it is reclaiming its original vigor. Haven't you heard of the Kinship Circle? For each of the past three years, and as part of this year's annual meeting of the Amerian Anthropological Association as well, we have had highly successful sessions on kinship. The sessions have been integrated with the themes of each of the meetings. We have had an international group of scholars from Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, England, France, Germany, Italy, Qatar and the United States, presenting a wide range of papers, ranging from more "classic" questions about kinship systems to current research that is challenging some of our theoretical ideas about what constitutes kinship. The papers from the first two sessions will be published shortly.
Dwight Read
Fadwa El Guindi
Dear learned scholar of mathematicians, I disagree with your premise that mathematicians do not disagree, and, being wonderful souls, are easily converted to consensus. No less a scholar, intellectual and role model than Von Neumann (1961), the founder of game theory, argued against your premise. In fact, he bemoaned that unlike physicists, mathematicians who don't agree behave in an unsocial manner by striking out in new directions, leaving their conflicts unresolved. In his article, the first in his collected works, Von Neumann wished that mathematicians disagreed as physicists did. Whenever conflict arose between two physicists (e.g., Bohr and Einstein), physicists refused to ignore it, often bringing their field to a standstill until a resolution was found (i.e., consensus via debate, unlike your fanciful example of consensus without debate). I have long cherished Von Neumann's insight, and his remarkable paper on mathematicians. BTW, in my research, I too have found that consensus without conflict is indeed possible, except that none of the participants can agree on the result.
Von Neumann, J. (1961). The mathematician. Collected works, Pergamon.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/10/magazine/the-professor-the-bikini-model-and-the-suitcase-full-of-trouble.html?_r=3&
People concur in saying that Frampton is unusually gullible.
This story of an incredibly gullible scientist (or so it seems) might also be relevant to your remark that the optimality of epistemic vigilance can only be measured in view of its fit to the milieu. An optimal epistemic vigilance would enable people to believe most of the true things they are told and to disbelieve most of the false things they are told (especially the costly one). The inconvincible sceptic as well as the gullible has less than optimal epistemic vigilance. The optimal vigilance fall in between, but its precise position depends on whether the environment is full of false claims or not. It would be interesting to know whether there are different cognitive developments of epistemic vigilance depending on the type of environment in which a child grows up. This could account for some variability across individuals.
As for scientists, they are supposed to instantiate high epistemic vigilance. So how can Frampton be at the same time so gullible and a good physicist? I see two non-exclusive possibilities:
(1) Frampton exercises epistemic vigilance, but only in the domain of physics. This can happen because the scientific environment fosters argumentative abilities. By contrast, Frampton did not wish or need to convince others that he was having a relation with a beautiful model. He did not need to find good reasons for his beliefs and did not wish to adress counter-arguments. Hugo Mercier pointed to me that this difference in the argumentative context could explain the fact that Newton, with so great achievements in physics, did so badly in chemistry/alchemy. There was in alchemy no need to convince others; it was a secret enterprise.
(2) Frampton does not exercise much epistemic vigilance, but does well in physics nonetheless because the process of checking the plausibility of claims is distributed to others. Only very selected information arrives to his creative mind. This is thanks to the process through which scientific information comes to be distributed---the review process for instance. In science, epistemic vigilance is distributed across individuals and institutionalised. In that context, some gullibility might be an advantage. The schoolgirl, in any case, does better by believing the apparently crazy things that her teacher says (e.g. sound is the vibration of matter). At the research level also, it can pay to believe improbable hypotheses; it means pursuing a high risk, high reward research programme.
Thank you all for the very interesting discussion!
First, I would like to recommend a paper by Paul Rubin entitled “Folk Economics," where some of the views that have come out of the discussion are treated in an evolutionary framework.
In addition, I would like to mention that during my doctorate I have worked on the intellectual aversion for the market economy from a historical angle, studying the implications of the rhetorical phenomenon of the personification of money in the English literature of the early modern period. Comparing the economic views expressed by satyrical dramatists and pamphleteers to those of the economists of the time, aka the “early mercantilists,” I found out that the characterization of money as a supernatural force that takes hold of human behavior (a “visible god,” as Shakespeare called it) reveals a naive understanding on the part of the writers of the social and economic transformation taking place at the time. Most of them overlooked the economic implications of that transformation, and construed it merely as a process of corruption of traditional ethical values. This investigation led me to conclude that a promising line of research on the aversion for the market economy might consist in understanding how lay people make sense of complex economic ideas.
Let me give you a hint. When economists use such concepts as rationality, profit, cost, trade, competition, and so on, they are using words that embed a whole set of assumptions, a shared knowledge that defines the economic way of thinking. On the other hand, also common people are exposed to this jargon in their daily life: they often use the same words, but they arguably attach to it a different, non-technical meaning. How does that meaning form? Drawing on the culture and cognition research program, I have hypothesized that it forms according to the way people relate their own understanding on the word in question with real-world examples of which they have personal experience. More generally, our opinion on matters on which we have no special competence may emerge from the relation we establish between the delusively familiar ideas involved in them and our own interpretation of the small piece of world we see around us.
I have more fully developed this hypothesis here. I’ve recently also uploaded a draft here, in which I explore the topic of the aversion to the market using as a case study the Italian movies of the economic boom era. It turns out, that the Italian filmmakers, just as the English dramatists of a few centuries earlier, were quite wary of the capitalistic development of the country.
Let us suppose that there is a characteristic (or a set thereof) which determines the functioning of epistemic vigilance, and let us suppose that this characteristic varies between individuals. Simply put, some individuals are more gullible than others, everything else being held constant. These individuals are unversed in worldly matters, or they have an inclination to believe everything they are being told, or an inclination to trust everyone. Maybe they present a combination of these features. Among these, only the most gullible ones would fall for a 419 Nigerian scam. (I am referring to current circumstances, not to those of initial scams). You must have never paid attention to web security to have never heard about the scam, and you must be very trusting of people to put your money into their hands, or as greedy as to make you blind to the telltale signs. I’d say you are lot more gullible than almost everyone I know - your characteristics of epistemic vigilance make you a clear outlier.
But victims of fool’s errands are no outliers. Although, (in my estimation) most novice workers fall for the prank, I would consider their epistemic vigilance as entirely warranted by the situation. By warranted, I mean that they are as vigilant as required to function as competent social actors given that they know apprentices should trust their masters, that their technical competence is low and obscure terms will appear in conversations, etc. They know no more and no less than the average novice and are as gullible (in terms of personal characteristics - see above) as the next guy. Moreover, they are as epistemically vigilant when they leave to search for a “pipe-stretcher” as when searching for a “round about” (a real tool with funny-sounding name used for pipelines). What differentiates a fool’s errand from a normal request is the malicious intention of pranksters. The “initiated” know that victims cannot tell the difference between a real and an imaginary tool, that victims trust them with expertise and professionalism, etc. The dice are loaded from the start against the “fool”, and the prankster knows it.
To sum up, I would say that deceivers in each case are angling for different fish in different waters. 419’ers search for the easy prey, the most gullible individuals from an immense pool of unknown recipients. They send out the lure and expect the golden fish, yet know nothing about potential victims. Organisers of fool’s errands are shooting fish in a barrel, since they have control over specific victims in advantageous institutional settings ( distribution of knowledge,structure of command, authority of social roles, etc). This explains the vast difference in success rates between the two forms of deception: one is addressed to millions of users to “capture” a few, the other aims at a handful to ensnare most of them. In order to make the contrast clearer, I venture to say that most people tricked in “fool’s errands” would avoid Nigerian scams. A victim of 419 starting as an apprentice is doomed by the double handicap of institutionalised ignorance and personal gullibility. On a more amusing line, 419 artists would like to replicate the power of fool’s errand practitioners, such as by cracking into the email database of “I am wealthy and I trust unknown people too much” Anonymous.
The interesting theoretical implication suggested by your comment addresses the level at which we evaluate epistemic vigilance. On the one hand, we have the level of personal traits of gullibility. On the other hand, we have the level of structures of knowledge distribution. Can we pry them apart analytically? Empirically, it is problematic since it is very possible that forms of deception take into account both levels. For example, one would not attempt a “fool’s errand” with a highly suspicious apprentice bound to ask questions defusing the prank. Perhaps scammers try to eliminate segments of likely targets according to their web expertise (this is Herley’s argument).
One example comes to mind where both levels are addressed by scammers. On La Rambla in Barcelona, extremely well organised groups of con men play the three card trick. They target individuals with scarce local knowledge - tourists - by using a “touristy” location. However, their hope lies with the most gullible (greedy? drunk? careless?) tourists which can be parted with their money. The population of likely “marks” is selected by con artists (at the level of distributed social competence), while the actual mark selects himself by betting on the rigged game (at the level of individual characteristics).
Sorry for the long reply which mostly stated the obvious and restated in a less concise form your keen observations - but I think there is something theoretically interesting here: is epistemic vigilance only something “in the head”? Or do we need to rely upon an externalist perspective in which levels or mechanisms of epistemic vigilance can only be judged in the context of wider institutions of knowledge production and distribution? On my part, I think future explorations in the latter direction are promising.
P.S. Thinking about gains: fool’s errands are about hearty laughs and humiliating social initiation. Three card tricks aim for the quick buck, 50 euros made in a few minutes, a score of marks per day. 419 target the rare and precious victim, stripped of considerable sums after a prolonged investment in deceptive maneuvers. An association between kinds of gain and kinds of exploited weakness in epistemic vigilance?
Your two posts on the targets of fool's errands and scams raise the question: are the victims less epistemically vigilant than is usually the case?
It seems that authors of fool's errands and scams exploit the normal mechanisms of epistemic vigilance. In the case of fool's errands, as you nicely explained, they exploit expert status. For instance, if you are a newcomer in a construction site, the best thing for you to do is to trust what a veteran tells you, and go for the "pipe-stretcher" ... whatever this might be. Your trust is well calibrated to the situation thanks to your epistemic vigilance, and this is exploited by the authoritative person making the joke.
In the case of scams, you point out all the argumentation that comes with a mail and the ensuing procedures. Your alternative explanation of the persistence of Nigeria in scams is to say that, for historical reasons, the place allows for low cost production of arguments. If Herley's filtering hypothesis is true, then those that are filtered out are those that know about scams more than those that are more epistemically vigilant.
Cognitive mechanisms of epistemic vigilance are not foolproof mechanisms. Bounded rationality applies to all domains. So vigilant people can be tricked in believing false information.
This is why I'm wondering whether what is targeted in fool's errands and scams is:
(a) personality traits taking the form of general gullibility and low epistemic vigilance, or
(b) ignorance in some specific domains and the communicative context
(just discovered this site and post, both very interesting !).
(i) what you call the moral-economic fallacy is also called "Montaigne Fallacy" after his claim "that the profit of one man is the damage of another".
(ii) it might be useful pointing out that though economic exchange has to be mutually beneficial ex ante, is does not have to be so ex post. People exchange because they think they will all benefit from those exchanges, but might be disapointed afterwards. Denying that exchanges are, by necessity, mutually beneficial ex post is not a fallacy, and might perhaps help explain the moral-economic fallacy: having bought a disapointing product leads us to retrospectively construe the exchange as unfair.