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Thanks for the question (and indirectly an example of my main point on natural language as dialog). Sorry for not being clearer. I did not mean the words themse

Thanks for the question (and indirectly an example of my main point on natural language as dialog). Sorry for not being clearer. I did not mean the words themselves. I mean the neural circuitry in humans for language. Also related: "Researcher Responds to Arguments Over His Theory of Arguing" https://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/06/15/researcher-responds-to-arguments-over-his-theory-of-arguing https://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/06/15/researcher-res... "The main idea of the “argumentative theory of reasoning,” put forward by Dan Sperber and myself is that the function of human reasoning — why it evolved — is to improve communication by allowing people to debate with each other: to produce and evaluate arguments during a discussion. This contrasts with the standard view of reasoning — apparently shared by quite a few of the readers — that reasoning evolved in order to further individual reasoning: to make better decisions, to plan ahead, to get better beliefs, etc. ... We do not claim that reasoning has nothing to do with the truth. We claim that reasoning did not evolve to allow the lone reasoner to find the truth. We think it evolved to argue. But arguing is not only about trying to convince other people; it’s also about listening to their arguments. So reasoning is two-sided. On the one hand, it is used to produce arguments. Here its goal is to convince people. Accordingly, it displays a strong confirmation bias — what people see as the “rhetoric” side of reasoning. On the other hand, reasoning is also used to evaluate arguments. Here its goal is to tease out good arguments from bad ones so as to accept warranted conclusions and, if things go well, get better beliefs and make better decisions in the end."

eternalban 6y ago
> We claim that reasoning did not evolve to allow the lone reasoner to find the truth. We think it evolved to argue. Argue over what? One can easily argue (npi, and I will) that reasoning evolved in the individual to aid understanding, to comprehend. You first need to hold a point of view before you can argue that position and collectively reason about an object. You seem to give legs to your position by substituting "truth" for "understanding". A reminder that we humans collectively have "understood", "communicated", and wrote tomes on all sorts of falsehoolds. Reasoning has nothing to do with "truth" in principle.
pvg 6y ago
This clarification doesn't really seem to say, as you did originally, that language evolved to communicate tasks related to hunting and gathering.
gnramires 6y ago
I don't have the time for a more specific reply, but please understand that the epistemic uncertainty related to anthropology, evolutionary biology and psychology ought to be always high. This is very different from physical/natural sciences where a single experiment can often determine to very low epistemic uncertainty (or at least with bounded model error) some working model. This evidence may exist (say with uncontroversial genetic evidence and uncontroversial say neural models), but for most discussions in those fields it's usually not available (and would be very costly). This is why you have to take it as an ongoing discussion and everything as a hypothesis. You can't say "Human language evolved to argue, not to make better decisions", or any similar assertions, with almost any certainty. It's a point of an ongoing conversation. The hypotheses themselves don't always lend themselves to formalization the same way as the natural sciences. Of course any science strives for as much precision as possible though! Simply in practice anthropological and psychological phenomena are even harder or impossible to formalize in the sense of mathematical precision, at least non-trivial observations; the little I understand of those fields they go to great lengths to reduce and communicate uncertainty (this includes History as well, where it seems a core concept of the canonical research methodology[1]). Because part of the reason we develop those theories and those fields in those places is to better understand ourselves and put them to practical use, particularly in practical use (when thinking about thinking, or how to interact with people, etc.) this uncertainty shouldn't be forgotten -- more as an inspiration than strict guidelines for human behavior. I took me a while to understand this, and the subtle differences between the different fields of study! [1] In history research, I believe you rarely hear "Such and such happened..." (unless there's overwhelming evidence), and more likely hear "According to [e.g. some Greek historian] in [such account], such and such happened...", historical records are understood to be unreliable.
- dfischer 6y ago
  Thank you for sharing this. This is critical understanding that the zeitgeist lacks. I appreciate it greatly.

eternalban 6y ago

> We claim that reasoning did not evolve to allow the lone reasoner to find the truth. We think it evolved to argue. Argue over what? One can easily argue (npi, and I will) that reasoning evolved in the individual to aid understanding, to comprehend. You first need to hold a point of view before you can argue that position and collectively reason about an object. You seem to give legs to your position by substituting "truth" for "understanding". A reminder that we humans collectively have "understood", "communicated", and wrote tomes on all sorts of falsehoolds. Reasoning has nothing to do with "truth" in principle.

pvg 6y ago

This clarification doesn't really seem to say, as you did originally, that language evolved to communicate tasks related to hunting and gathering.

gnramires 6y ago

I don't have the time for a more specific reply, but please understand that the epistemic uncertainty related to anthropology, evolutionary biology and psychology ought to be always high. This is very different from physical/natural sciences where a single experiment can often determine to very low epistemic uncertainty (or at least with bounded model error) some working model. This evidence may exist (say with uncontroversial genetic evidence and uncontroversial say neural models), but for most discussions in those fields it's usually not available (and would be very costly). This is why you have to take it as an ongoing discussion and everything as a hypothesis. You can't say "Human language evolved to argue, not to make better decisions", or any similar assertions, with almost any certainty. It's a point of an ongoing conversation. The hypotheses themselves don't always lend themselves to formalization the same way as the natural sciences. Of course any science strives for as much precision as possible though! Simply in practice anthropological and psychological phenomena are even harder or impossible to formalize in the sense of mathematical precision, at least non-trivial observations; the little I understand of those fields they go to great lengths to reduce and communicate uncertainty (this includes History as well, where it seems a core concept of the canonical research methodology[1]). Because part of the reason we develop those theories and those fields in those places is to better understand ourselves and put them to practical use, particularly in practical use (when thinking about thinking, or how to interact with people, etc.) this uncertainty shouldn't be forgotten -- more as an inspiration than strict guidelines for human behavior. I took me a while to understand this, and the subtle differences between the different fields of study! [1] In history research, I believe you rarely hear "Such and such happened..." (unless there's overwhelming evidence), and more likely hear "According to [e.g. some Greek historian] in [such account], such and such happened...", historical records are understood to be unreliable.

dfischer 6y ago
Thank you for sharing this. This is critical understanding that the zeitgeist lacks. I appreciate it greatly.