Loose ends in Brno

Last week I was at a small, two-day conference on the cognitive science of religion in Brno. There were only twenty-something people there, mostly from the Czech Republic, Slovakia or Poland, The only exception were the two key speakers, Armin Geertz and Jesper Sorensen, who were from Aarhus in Denmark. Most of the papers were quite valuable in some way but the biggest plus of the meeting was definitely the discussion. Armin Geertz has an almost encyclopedic knowledge of a very broad range of material and a fine philosophic sensibility and Jesper has very refreshing attitude to bunk – quite reminiscent of Australian academics at their best (I rather enjoyed half-jokingly turning some of his pointed comments against him after his talk). In addition, Jesper has been working on cognitive explanations of magic, i.e. pretty much the same topic as what I have been dealing with. Indeed, he had a book on this topic out with AltaMira in 2006 - I’ve put it to the front of my reading queue. The fact that I had not come across it earlier is, unfortunately, evidence that I am yet to get a proper grasp of the wealth of material that is out there.

I had only heard about the meeting fairly recently and ended up presenting the same paper as in Bristol. There, the questions were mostly coming from philosophers and psychologists, including of course developmental psychologists. In Brno, it was mostly cognitive anthropologists with a thorough knowledge of religion, which made for a different but also very insightful and challenging audience. The main impression that I got from the discussion was that the kind of epistemological issues that I raise do not fit easily with that approach. This means that I have to be very careful how I phrase things. Jesper, for example, wondered whether I was not falling into the ‘propositional attitudes’ view of beliefs. If he is right, it would be more than troubling, but I tend to think it is more a matter of presentation (both in terms of making my views clear to the audience and in terms of making sure no such assumptions sneak into my own thinking through the back door of inappropriate language). The secondary impression I got was that I have managed to get something of a broad understanding of the main issues, even if many details are still missing – many points that Armin raised, for example, were ones that I had been mulling over and had come to much the same conclusions about. Also interesting was the to and fro on the question of the distinction between magic and religion. Jesper thinks there isn’t one, while I do; even having talked to him. What did become somewhat clearer to me is that I should be explaining that I consider superstition to be a result of the way in which the magical and religious are forced apart in our modern societies that value rationality. This may be a fairly obvious point but it helps to clarify what I see as the relationship between the three, a major issue in my book.

Barrett’s Why Would Anyone Believe in God? The first two chapters

This semester I am teaching a course on the cognitive science of religion using Justin Barrett’s Why Would Anyone Believe in God? as the main text. The audience this semester is a small group of philosophy students from the Marie Curie-Sklodowska University, with the course likely to be repeated by me next semester but for a group of psychology students at Warsaw University. The book is meant to be an introduction to the area of research, but at times it strikes me as being too introductory to be really useful. For example, Barrett has clearly made the decision to avoid most technical language apart from the terms that are central to cog sci of religion, itself. Thus, he talks about mental ‘tools’ when discussing what is commonly referred to in the literature as mental modules – indeed the term module does not seem to make an appearance, a pity given that the massive modularity thesis cog sci of religion relies upon is so controversial. Rejection of technical language may help to avoid jargon overload in students who have no familiarity with psychology but at the cost of making it difficult for them to link what they learn about cog sci of religion to other things they may have already learned or will learn in the future – it removes the discipline from its theoretical context.

Thus far, the students and I have worked through a couple of chapters and to my mixed impressions regarding cog sci of religion I have had to add a mixed opinion regarding the book. In many cases the problems with the Barrett book are the problems with cog sci of religion, but not always.

In his first chapter Barrett sets up the theoretical grounds for cog sci of religion by discussing the notion of belief in general. Central to his discussion is the idea of mental modules (I’ll allow myself the jargon he eschews) and the distinction between reflective and nonreflective beliefs that it underpins. From a philosophical point of view, the discussion of the theory is full of inconsistencies and weak arguments. Thus, the distinction between reflective and nonreflective beliefs seems to be open to many counterexamples which, at the very least, seem to suggest that it is more a spectrum than an either/or distinction that we are dealing with. Clearly, theory is not Barrett’s strong suit, which is not necessarily a fundamental problem when one is a scientist since there is much valuable science done that is conceptually based upon poor theoretical grounds – although the issue becomes more significant when dealing with an introductory text. The problem becomes compounded, however, by Barrett’s seeming unwillingness to also discuss at length the experimental work in cog sci of religion. All he mentions is the general drift of the results without going into the details. Again, this may be due to wishing to write an introductory text, but the effect is that neither the theory nor the empirical results are covered to a satisfactory depth. All that we seem to get is a quick walk-through the basic concepts used by the discipline – not enough to serve as a satisfactory introduction. Clearly, the text has to be supplemented in the course with actual research articles, at the very least. Barrett points to some of this work in the footnotes but does not seem to be focussed on the need to systematically direct the reader to the basic empirical results.

A further worry I have is that I feel Barrett is at times misrepresenting the scientific status quo in a way that suits his approach. Thus, on page three, he essentially claims that cognitivists agree on the massive modularity thesis. From where I stand, this seems to be far from the truth and, indeed, is one of the main sticking points in the evaluation of both cog sci of religion and evolutionary psychology, from which cog sci of religion has inherited its reliance upon this thesis. Of course, I think that most psychologists will agree that there is such a thing as mental modules but the degree to which the mind is modular is an open question so Pinker, to whom Barrett refers, can hardly be claimed to be presenting a settled truth.

Other fundamental worries appear in examining chapter two in which Barrett discusses the idea of minimally counterintuitive concepts (MCICs). In reading Boyer I came to be concerned that minimal counterintuitiveness does not define the right set of entities for a cog sci of religion to be concerned with. Reading Barrett my feelings in this regard have only become stronger. He defines gods as MCI agents that are believed in and belief in whom affects people’s actions. The reference to belief here is meant to deal with the Mickey Mouse problem, i.e. the problem that the concept of Mickey Mouse is an MCIC but, clearly, Mickey Mouse is no god. Even accepting that this is adequate, that does not avoid more fundamental problems. The first is that there are plenty of MCICs of agents who are believed in but are not religious, at least in the context of modern society. I am thinking of some of the examples that Barrett mentions, including beliefs in space aliens or ghosts. The category of the supernatural includes much beside religion and the difference between these elements seems highly significant. Cog sci of religion, as I have noticed and as is very clear in the case of Barrett, wants to have things both ways. On the one hand, it wants to talk about all supernatural beliefs but, on the other hand, it wants to ‘really’ be concerned with religion proper, as the name of the discipline suggests. In Barrett this second tendency is visible in how he tries to define magical beliefs as including MCICs of non-agent things such as magical wands. On this definition faeries would have to be considered as religious beings. While that may possibly be true historically, to claim that this is the case in modern society seems to be ad hoc. Likewise, it would entail that religious relics turn out not to be religious at all but magical.

None of these worries about the scope of MCICs is as significant as a further one. As Barrett allows with his example of the venus flytrap, the world often turns out to run counter to our intuitions. In fact, the disconnect between what the world is like and our intuitions turns out to be ever greater with each scientific discovery. Consider the concepts of beings that are generally like what we think humans are like but are actually more than 99 percent vacuum or, to use another example, that are directly related to the moss that grows on rocks. Both concepts do great violence to our intuitions but also have turned out to be correct, scientific descriptions of people. It would seem, therefore, that I – and every other human being – is actually an MCI agent, even if our everyday concepts of ourselves are not MCI. Clearly, something has gone wrong, given that MCI was supposed to offer a way of defining the way in which gods are different from people.

One would want to say something about scientific concepts being forced upon us by empirical evidence while religious concepts are the effect of the functioning of the peculiarities of human cognitive capabilities – the mental modules mentioned earlier. While this is correct, the view of why certain ideas are accepted that Barrett puts forward closes this route. He claims that, in general, ideas come to be accepted because they ‘fit with’ or activate many of the mental modules. Indeed, he discusses the example of the venus flytrap in this context claiming that we come to believe in their existence because even though the concept is counterintuitive it agrees with a larger number of mental modules than it runs counter to. There is, of course, something to this idea; I would not wish to put forward a theory which presents humans as fully rational beings that only formulate beliefs they have adequate evidence for. Yet, throwing direct empirical evidence into a general grab-bag of agreement with mental modules seems to go too far in the opposite direction. It would certainly imply rejecting the value of science or perhaps the human ability to carry it out.

A final aspect of the problem with minimal counterintuitiveness and how Barrett uses it is that he moves from MCI concepts, through MCI agents to things such as the venus flytrap which happen to run counter to our intuitions. To use a philosopher’s adage, he is confusing the map with the territory. The critical term seems to be ‘MCI agents’, which in Barrett’s hands seems at times to concern MCI concepts of agents and, at times, actual agents who happen not to fit with our intuitions. That the difference is a very significant one can be appreciated when we consider that sliding between the two might lead to an implicit acceptance of the argument that saying that the concept of God exists entails saying that God exists. Descartes tried to run something like this argument many years ago and philosophers have not generally found it to be all that convincing, to say the least. Pointing this out may seem to be nitpicking, except that Barrett is a theist and explicitly claims that work in cog sci of religion is revealing the handiwork of God in our mental make-up – precisely the point that Descartes made and precisely the point that has been thoroughly critiqued by generations of philosophers since.

At the same time as I make these objections I remain very much aware that to a certain degree these are typical philosophical worries about the lack of theoretical rigor. The value of such objections has to always be considered in the light of the fact that, despite all too often lacking such rigor, science has made amazing progress in understanding the world – not something that is as clearly the case with (traditional) philosophy, to put things gently. Thus, even though when Barrett does mention philosophy in the second footnote to chapter one he is talking through his hat, this does not – by a long stretch of the imagination – show that cog sci of religion is meretricious nonsense. If I thought this was the case, I would not teach a course on cog sci of religion nor would I use results from this discipline in my own work. Yet, I do think that cog sci of religion would benefit from taking on board some of these worries and from working on its theoretical basis so that it can better support the empirical side of the inquiry. And it is in the introductory texts that this issue comes to the fore, since it is from these texts that to a significant degree the next generation is likely to learn the basics of the approach.

The Evolution, Cooperation and Rationality meeting

I have to say that I am a little disappointed with the conference in Bristol. I guess I had very high expectations, which the conference only partially managed to satisfy (it was still quite a valuable meeting for me, nonetheless). I will start by focussing on the highlights before moving on to what I found disappointing.

The most interesting talk, so far as I was concerned, was that presented by Christophe. He talked about the work done by Joseph Henrich and others on the different ways that people from various societies play the dictator or the ultimatum game, but argued that the explanation given by Henrich et al is incorrect, a better explanation requiring social heuristics.

Bounded Machiavellians in action: social heuristics versus social preferences

In my talk, I will analyse the alternative explanations for the cultural diversity of economic prosocial behaviour and the theories on which they are grounded. The main explanation that has been put forward in the recent works of Fehr, Gächter, Henrich and others appeals to variations in social preferences. Against this view, I will defend the hypothesis that variations in prosocial behaviour as observed in experimental games are due to differences in learned economic behavioural routines, exploiting and adapted to the specifics of the local institutions. According to this hypothesis, the social preferences are in fact relatively similar across cultures; the variation is due to differences in the learned solutions, which can take the form of ‘rules of thumb’, to common economic or strategic problems and their specific cultural forms.

Two other talks were of immediate significance for what I do. The first was a talk on explanations of altruism by Stuart West, the second was Gerd Gigerenzer’s talk.

The significance of West’s talk for me is that he did what couldn’t be called anything but a demolition job on DS Wilson’s use of group selection. West argued that such terminology is either unnecessary, in so far as it has been shown that kin selection and group selection are mathematically equivalent, or incorrect, in so far DS Wilson makes claims that cannot be payed out in terms of inclusive fitness. A vital point of West’s talk that I did not fully understand was how he dealt with major transitions that typically involve the emergence of higher level organisation. Another point which was less than clear to me was what West thought of how cultural evolution affects the issue. While I’m not directly interested in the whole discussion around group selection I have to be aware of the lines of argument in so far as I am using DS Wilson’s account of religion. After his talk, I asked Stuart and one of his colleagues whether they thought that Wilson’s views on religion could be made to work without needing to buy into the group selection picture. Although they were not sure of the details they did seem to generally think that it should not be a problem. Definitely, when writing up my Bristol talk I will have to try and put things in a way that avoids the issue.

That Gigerenzer’s talk should be of interest to me should be no surprise to anyone who is familiar with how much I use his work. The talk he gave, however, was an introduction to what he does – not something that I am really in need of. The reason it was interesting is that he focussed on his most recent work, not all of which I have actually read as yet. In particular, I was interested to see what he’s doing in terms of explaining the use of heuristics as related to the problem of overfitting. The reason this is significant to me is that is sounds like a possible alternative to the story that I have been developing in terms of the problem of induction. I will have to catch up on this work before I write up that bit of my own research.

There were a number of other talks that I also found interesting. However, as I said at the start of this post, I found the conference a little disappointing. The reason is that it concentrated far too much on rational choice theory for my liking. I knew, before coming, that RCT was one of the main foci of the meeting but – since Gigerenzer was one of the invited speakers – I had been under the impression that it was going to be much more a meeting at which RCT would come under critical examination. As it was, however, there were only a couple of papers that explicitly questioned the adequacy of RCT. With my unequivocal preference for bounded rationality theory, my views definitely fell outside of the norm at the meeting. As I listened to various speakers putting forward ever more refined ways of saving optimality assumptions, I could not help but get the feeling that I was listening to a meeting of Ptolemy’s faithful building epicycles upon epicycles. This was particularly the case after having listened to Gigerenzer’s talk – at times it felt like some of the people actually had not heard him. Of course, that this is how I felt says nothing really about the truth or otherwise of RCT – it does indicate, however, just how different my own views are. As I said to a number of people at the meeting, it really does come down to a fundamentally different view of human rationality. Often, I heard the reply that talk of ‘rationality’ was something that the people found tiresome and merely wanted to get on with the detailed research. And, that is precisely what those people are doing – researching ever newer and better epicycles. The fundamental problem is not going to be wished away, however.

Naturalist accounts of religion and evidence for God’s existence

Another issue that was raised during question time after my Bristol talk was that of the evidence for the existence of God. One of my main points is that religions try to protect their claims against counterevidence, making it also unlikely that any evidence for such claims can be obtained in their normal social context. It is the religions, themselves, that make it difficult to obtain evidence for the truth of their claims! Having said that, if one treats religious claims as factual claims to be investigated by scientific methods, there is no intellectual issue that I can see – the evidence is unequivocally against them. When I said as much after my talk, the response was something of a disgruntled murmur – which I see as evidence for how even scientists internalise the social rules against evaluating the truth of religious claims (the other important part of the story being, of course, that, socially, the truth of the claims is irrelevant). This all follows from the picture of religion I drew during my talk, yet it was shocking for people when I put it as bluntly as that.

Christophe Heintz, who attended the conference in Bristol, suggested that I could avoid the issue of God’s existence by simply saying that it was irrelevant to my account. While this is certainly correct to a degree, it isn’t completely the case (even if it makes for a very expedient strategy). First of all, while the account does not presume the truth or falsehood of the ontological claim, the related epistemic issue is front and centre, as made clear in the previous paragraph. Secondly, even though a naturalist account of religion – such as I presented – does not assume that God does not exist, a successful naturalist account of religion removes a possible argument for the existence of God since it is able to explain the existence of religion without reference to any objectively existing supernatural agents. That this is the case is something that appears not be appreciated by the majority of the religious people who have heard about the work on naturalist explanations of religion. All too often you see people claiming that the fact that religious beliefs are natural for people means that God must exist – it is suggested that discovering the naturalness of religious beliefs is akin to seeing God’s fingerprint in our minds. That this is total poppy-cock does not stop the Templeton Foundation from pouring millions into such research and making theistic claims on the basis of this work. In the context of such well-funded misrepresentation of the implications, I think it is ultimately unjustifiable for a scientist working in the area not to clearly state the truth.

Adaptive value of psychological mechanisms

One the BCDC people raised an important issue in the question time after my talk in Bristol. She said that, as a psychologist, she did not ask why certain things were the way they are but was just interested in what they are like. She was talking about the fact that she, like most psychologists, does her work without having to think about the evolutionary processes that led to humans being the way they are. And, indeed, psychology has made a hell of a lot of progress without spending much time worrying about evolutionary history. Yet, of course, it is not longer altogether the case that no psychologists think about evolution – evolutionary psychology being the exception. As I have made clear in previous posts, I am far from complete happy with evolutionary psychology. I do think, though, that by working with some simplistic theoretical assumptions it has managed to make a fair amount of empirical progress in a short period of time. Getting back to the general issue, however, the comment made me think again about how I use evolutionary theory  and how evolution can be useful to psychologists – one of the points that I failed to make strongly enough in my answers. The basic point seems to me to be that when I read various psychological papers I tend to be constantly considering whether the mechanisms they postulate make sense from an evolutionary point of view. Often, I find myself asking what the possible adaptive value of the postulated mechanism is meant to be. Thinking about this strikes me as something that most psychologists would actually find quite useful to consider when doing their work. When they come across a new phenomenon and put forward a theory as to the mechanism behind it, they can immediately ask whether they are dealing with something that is a by-product, is adaptive or is an ancestral trait. Having some idea about which of these they are dealing with will give them ideas as to what they can expect and, very importantly, will at times raise a red flag that the mechanism they postulate is evolutionarily implausible –  I have come across such implausible mechanisms on numerous occasions, unfortunately.

A good example of this last is the work on loss of control that Bruce mentioned during question time but which I also failed to make any intelligent comments about at the time. The problem I have with it, as I have previously mentioned, is that it seems to postulate a mechanism whose function is to make us feel good. Yet, evolution does not care about whether human beings feel good. Indeed pain, discomfort and unease all have the function of motivating animals, including humans, to undertake actions that are likely to increase their chances of survival. If they didn’t feel bad they wouldn’t do what they are for! So, having a mechanism that turns one of these motivating factors off does not generally sound like a good idea from an evolutionary point of view.

The only scenario where it might be a good idea is where the cost of maintaining the response is greater than the likely benefits from future actions motivated by it – a calculation that is hard to make, to say the least. I can imagine that where there is long term loss of control such a mechanism might make sense – spelling out the correct conditions would take a lot of work that has not been done, however. Yet, even in such cases there are alternatives that sound just as, if not more, plausible. The first is that the illusion of control is a means by which apathy is avoided and, thereby, the potential for effective response is maintained – the problem being that sometimes sitting down and waiting without wasting effort is the best response. The second is that illusion of control leads to determined action that, in those few cases where it just happens to be the correct response, is more effective than half-hearted attempts – the problem being that where the response is inappropriate a more gingerly approach may prove less costly. Clearly, I am not saying that either of my proposals are correct, but I am unaware of literature that takes them into account even to merely show that they are incorrect. Yet, it ought to be possible to think of experiments that will tease apart these possibilities.

Superstitions in Bristol

On Thursday, I gave my “Superstitions, ideologies, and religions, too” talk at the Bristol Cognitive Development Centre. There was a good crowd, with a couple of familiar faces in the crowd. Apart from the BCDC people, some of whom I’d met in Cambridge in the spring, there were a couple of graduate students whom I’d met at various conferences and who are working on related topics. I was happy with how the talk went, although I did become a bit concerned when I realised that I’d managed to fly through the whole thing in under thirty minutes. This turned out to be a good thing, however, as there were a lot of very good questions that people wanted to ask. The questions ranged widely, both in topic and in depth, with some “please explain…” questions and a lot of “what about…” ones. A number of very good points were raised. Unfortunately, I was unsatisfied with my answers. On the one hand, I did not think my answers were as tight as they could have been in a number of cases. I had thought about many of the issues the questions dealt with but often failed to express clearly, or even recall at the time, what my conclusions were on the matter. On the other hand, I have been somewhat worried that the way I answer questions is becoming a little mannered. At times, I feel like I take a stance in response to the questioner instead of engaging with the issue. Such mannerisms make responding much easier, indeed automatic, but kill the intellectual exchange. I wonder how often other people who have given many talks have the same problem. I know that there are some who have succumbed, of course, parrying questions without really thinking about what was said. So I guess there must, therefore, be many others who struggle against the temptation. The way that I have been trying to do it is to see how, if at all, I can take the questioner’s suggestions on board and include them in my own account. This forces me to think about the issue but, it seems to me, it can also become a mannerism of the very bland “we’re a broad church and these are complex things” variety.

In the days since the talk I’ve had a number of people come up to me and say how much they liked it. Of course, the people who did not like it aren’t likely to come up and say so, which means that I’m not dealing with a fair sample of responses. Still, I do think that I have managed to whittle the basic ideas down to the core and am now definitely ready to write this up. One thing that my dissatisfaction with my answers leads me to conclude is that I have to be extremely careful how I express my ideas, making it very clear what my claims are.

Off to Old Blighty again tomorrow

Tomorrow morning, bright and early, I’m off to the kingdom whose Queen is my sovereign – thanks to my Australian citizenship. And, once again, I will be annoyed by the fact that Australian citizens – just like the rest of the Commonwealth – get no special treatment at customs. This is particularly cutting as those traitorous American colonials get to go in the fast queue. Maybe if I were to carry the Eureka flag? Of course, as a citizen of Poland, I get to enter the UK after a cursory show of my Polish ID – no need for any passport at all.

The crowd I expect at my talk at the Bistol Cognition and Development Centre should be fairly knowlegeable. I hope Samir can make it. If the argument makes it past them, it should be fine to publish somewhere. Which I should do fast, seeing that the cognitive science of religion people seem to be heading in a similar direction.

Atheism as the out-group

On the Epiphenom blog, Tom Rees has an interesting discussion of a study concerning the way atheists are distrusted in the US. He ties it to a claim I made a little while ago about religion being used as a marker of the in-group/out-group distinction. He thinks the evidence in the study points against it but I do not think the argument he presents is persuasive. I wonder how he’ll react to my re-analysis of the results. I also wonder where he came across the study that originally comes from a UBC masters’ thesis!

The ESPP talk

Here are the slides for the ESPP talk on Evolution, generative entrenchment and bounded rationality. I have already blogged how it went in my previous entry.

Report from ESPP ‘09

On the night train from Budapest to Warsaw. In my enthusiasm, I have written quite a long post so I’m putting it below the fold. The short version is that I loved ESPP.