Running head – THE ECOLOGICAL RATIONALITY OF FALLACIES

The ecological rationality of argumentation fallacies:

Adaptationist reasoning applied to informal fallacy theory

Velisar Manea

Dan Ungureanu

Timișoara, România; Charles University, Prague

THE ECOLOGICAL RATIONALITY OF FALLACIES

Abstract

We have identified three related problems of argumentation theories of fallacies. First, a selection

bias, is the widespread focus on a tail of the total distribution of argumentation acts for identifying

fallacies. Secondly, most textbook “irrational” arguments are about modern issues while our evolved

intuitions are calibrated for those problems that the species faced in Pleistocene environments. And the

third problem is the choice of benchmarks for evaluating argumentation. Recently, different theories have

separately tackled some of them by restricting the definition, introducing context, relaxing the norms or

introducing new ones. We argue that an adaptationist perspective for deriving hypotheses about informal

fallacies should account for all three.

To illustrate our thinking we will be using the ad hominem argument. The „fallacy‟ should be a

byproduct, given certain conditions, triggered by those cues that activate reliable inferential

specializations for hazards or social exchange. As a consequence, we can build falsifiable predictions of

when the three types of ad hominem, the tu quoque, circumstantial and attack, will be intuitively

perceived as fallacious. It is ecologically rational to quickly detect possible hypocrites or cheaters,

because other negative traits are either harmless or easy to detect by other means.

Keywords: adaptation, ad hominem, argumentation, ecological rationality, evolutionary

psychology, fallacy, heuristics, informal fallacies, methodology, rationality, social exchange.

THE ECOLOGICAL RATIONALITY OF FALLACIES

Introduction

Any organ in the biological world is the result of huge selection pressures. As natural selection is

an optimization process that tests billions of designs against each other since the beginning of life, any

observed feature of an organism is far more likely to be an adaptation to its ecological niche that a by

byproduct or genetic noise (Williams 1966; Trivers 1971,1972, 1973,1974; Hamilton, 1964 I & II;

Dawkins, 1976,1982).

The field of psychology is studying only one organ in the whole of biology, although (arguably)

the most complex. The view that the human brain is a collection of interacting specialized information

processing machinery, has amassed more and more experimental evidence – that is, besides the logical

and parsimony constrains1. Brain function, like any other organ, is mainly an adaptive response to the

problems our species was facing in its evolutionary past in its ecological niche. A niche sometimes

referred to as the cognitive niche (Tooby and DeVore, 1987). Natural selection is a very basic and slow

optimization process; it needs enormous time-spans to build complex parts. It follows that we are

handling our modern world problems with our Pleistocene minds: man can change environments, societal

structures and tools/technologies far faster than natural selection can produce new architectures.

Cognitive psychology offers the tools to characterize our information processing device, its

routines, specialized syntax for different types of problem solving, search rules, attention biases etc. Most

of the operations of any biological mind are automatic, that is, they use reliable and vivid inference

engines well-tuned to be triggered by certain classes of stimuli. For linking the tools of cognitive science

with the constraints imposed by the slow optimization of evolution, scientists that study any minds-related

subject are greatly aided at narrowing their hypothesis space by an Adaptationist framework. As Tooby

and Cosmides (1999) bluntly say, “when one is searching for intelligible functional organization

underlying a set of cognitive or neural phenomena, one is far more likely to discover it by using an

1
See Buss (2005) and Tooby, Barkow and Cosmides (1992)
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Adaptationist framework for organizing observations because adaptive organization is the only kind of

functional organization that is there to be found.”

Natural language, probably the defining unique feature of Homo sapiens, enables us to exchange

far more complex strings of information than any other creature. For signaling behavior, other animals

have to make do with less efficient information transmission media compared to us: we can use the

leverage of language for various problems. Also, a capacity for natural language, along with other

adaptations, allows us to tackle new problems, exploit new resources2, and send knowledge across

generations. Compared to other animals, we have the additional option of language use for cooperation,

begging, threats, to deceive, to display various things, or negotiate social status. In addition, we can do

things that are close to impossible without such an information-rich media, our unique superpower of

widespread, fast, innovation.

Argumentation theory, like linguistics, economics or sociology is, in this view, a subfield of

psychology. And psychology, by studying the product of only one of nature‟s evolved machinery, is a

subfield of biology3. If psychological research is the reverse engineering of human mind, then it needs to

operate with a stable and concise definition of what function is. Evolutionary theory offers such a

technical definition of function: a design feature of an organism that reliably helps that organism produce

copies of the genes that build it (Williams, 1966; Dawkins, 1982, 1986). For philosophical detailing, see

Allen et al. (1998) or Allen (2002).

Many theories of human behavior either fail to use the appropriate scientific definition of function

or make it really hard to trace it. A biologist should not have any difficulty in distinguishing proximate

causation and distal causation. The „why‟ and the „how‟ have non-mysterious, precise, meanings. The
2
See Tooby and Cosmides (2000a, 2001) for a theoretical overview of cognitive mechanisms needed for
use of contingent information, improvisation, scope syntax etc.
3
Consilience (Wilson, 1999) or vertical integration (Tooby and Cosmides, 1992) means unity of
knowledge. A discipline that describes a more complex phenomenon needs to build upon those that describe the
simpler phenomena.
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relatively recent evolutionary approach to the field of psychology has quite successfully used those tools

to build and test hypotheses4.

We feel that argumentation theory and the study of the fallacies are still largely misguided

because of pop-psychology intuitions based on (psychological) valence instead of (biological) function.

The study of argumentation has so far been preoccupied with only high level descriptions. A new field of

inquiry targets at first the obvious questions, those accessible to introspection or available to scrutiny by

ease of observation (e.g. obvious mistakes, noticeable differences, game-like environments). In the case

of normative argumentation theory, it is the professional debate, the very high level problems of etiquette

in conducting an argument that maximizes the epistemic truth. It is far easier to practice fallacy-spotting

with recent issues of modern environment, we don‟t have the necessary instincts for them. Textbook

examples only identify fallacies in environments with no immediate ecological negative consequences:

mostly when tackling difficult, unnatural problems, like scientific debates, ethics, academic issues, law,

policy or discussions about vague things such as theology or supernatural phenomena. The debaters hunt

for mistakes made by the other party, but because of special attention devoted, there may be observational

biases. Besides, if people generally fall back to some particular activity when they are “lazy” or

“ignorant”, that activity can be a precious hint about human nature. Our adapted information-processing

mechanisms should account for the generation and/or acceptance of (at least some) fallacious arguments.

A psychology of argumentation has to dispense with the intuition that the relevant information is

where the “interesting” discussions are. This exposes the study of argumentation acts to unrepresentative

sampling. We have to narrow a huge complexity gap when attempting the reverse engineering arguments

to deduce function. There are many levels of description from the computational mechanisms to the

4
See e.g. Daly and Wilson‟s work on familicide (1995), uxoricide (1988, 1992); David Buss‟s on jealousy
(1992, 2000), cross-cultural mate preferences (1989); Cosmides and Tooby on cheater detection (1989, cross-
cultural evidence in 2002), Debra Lieberman on kin detection, incest, morality (2003, 2007), frequency format
suited for probability judgments (1996; also Gigerenzer, 1994, 1995, 2002, 2009); Martie Haselton on the evolution
of „cognitive biases‟ (2000, 2006); Kurzban on stigmatization (2001), cooperation of unrelated individuals and
friendship (2008, 2009) and much more.
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“fallacy behavior”5. Also, was the case of long decades of prescientific anthropology, people were only

noticing differences: we are blind to similarities.

Another blind spot for scientists trying to come up with hypotheses about behavior is the sheer

vastness of the search space for almost every decision, for almost every cue that our attention isolates:

natural selection has made the work for us, we look automatically for relevant information, and when it

comes to deciding, most issues appear as dilemmas. Even the “interesting” discussions that we have noted

earlier are only a small region in a wide region-space of argumentation acts. Our intuitive ontologies

actively hide evolutionary irrelevant information from us (Jackendoff, 1983; Cosmides & Tooby, 1994;

Cosmides, Barrett & Tooby, 2010). We only consider few alternatives out of almost infinitively many;

this way natural selection is smarter than us at building brains that avoid the combinatorial explosion

(Cosmides & Tooby, 1994).

Before moving on to modern theories of fallacies, let‟s explore another search space, that of what

an informal fallacy could be, but, intuitively, it is not: (1) a fallacy is not a bad advice – there is no listen

to strangers/children/newbies fallacy, also there is no „appeal to cruelty‟ fallacy; (2) a fallacy isn‟t just

any analogy (no non-sequiturs) – there is no appeal to the contour/the bird/the neutrino/the gaze fallacy;

and (3) it is also not a too obvious rhetoric device – there is no appeal to honesty/peace/dialogue fallacy –

they are too common to be classified as such. This could be a hint about the frequency of an

argumentation pattern that could elicit the fallacy naming.

Psychologically, at some level, an informal fallacy is appealing. It exploits core human

capabilities: easy to understand; fast processing; appear trustworthy/ bypass some skepticism; exploit the

way we sample information; our attentional biases; facilitates availability. Thus, informal fallacies (the

content-dependent ones) directly address some parts of us that work reliably and automatically. Fear,

emotion, social exchange violations, imitation, recognition, are all vivid attributes of our mental universe.

5
The Informal Logic School has underestimated the levels-of-complexity problem: by adding if clauses to
logical schemata, it has to deal with the same issue of combinatorial explosion that A.I. researchers have.
THE ECOLOGICAL RATIONALITY OF FALLACIES

Some fallacy-like argumentative behavior can be derived from situations that engage cognitive

adaptations supported by already established scientific evidence. Since much work has already been done

in those areas, most inferential tools are already available. It‟s just that they are in other domains,

traditionally unrelated with the study of arguments. Therefore, an adaptationist approach to argumentation

fallacies only has to develop and test predictions based on the verbal manifestation of such cue sampling,

specific syntaxes, and goal-oriented motivation specifics of our internal life in relation to the

environments that trigger them.

In sum, argumentation theories that are not ecologically informed should have three related

difficulties. The first is a sampling bias: the fallacies will be observed only on “interesting” (hot) topics,

and not the whole range of argumentative behavior6. The second is the modern environment: there are

problems where we don‟t or couldn‟t have evolved specializations (intuition for), e.g. delayed feedback,

multiplying, large numbers of items, extreme scales etc. And the third difficulty is that normative

standards used to measure argumentation, like content-free logic or Bayesian updating, are indifferent to

the function of the evolved cognitive apparatus. That is, epistemic standards are used in places where

arguer‟s goal is to impress or ridicule or simply manipulate. An agent that is an epistemic maximizer

could hardly evolve in the environmental conditions that gave rise to our species: that restricts even

normative theories of argumentation to narrower than previously thought scopes.

We also need to state that although the “fallacious” argumentation is often used intentionally by

advertisers, politicians, or stubborn arguers, we don‟t need here to trace the distinction between

argumentation, manipulation, advice, explanation or negotiation. Those are just names that we have for

different verbal exchanges; they are also grayish, vague, overlapping concepts. Natural selection favors an

enormous range of deceit strategies (Trivers, 2012), and it is not important here if they are consciously

employed or half-consciously or not at all. If some resource or pattern is relevant for an animal, another

6
Hahn and Oaksford (2007) have a similar observation, but in the context of arguing for their Bayesian
approach: “Many textbook examples of these arguments are not fallacious because of their structure but, rather,
because they occupy the extreme weak end of the argument strength spectrum given the probabilistic quantities
involved”.
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animal can in principle exploit that to its advantage. We only assume here that the things that the informal

fallacies appeal to are relevant for us humans.

Previous work

Argumentation theorists of the last decades have rightfully observed that what is called a fallacy

is not always fallacious (Hamblin, 1970; Woods and Walton, 1982; Groarke & Tindale, 2011). While it

quickly became obvious that simple formal logic criteria weren‟t enough to model human arguments

(Neuman, 2003; Ricco, 2003), the role of contextual factors has been explored in various forms (Neuman,

Weinstock, & Glasner, 2006; Ricco, 2007; Cummings, 2012). For example, Walton (1990) acknowledges

that it is reasonable to use ad hominem in quarrels. At the other end of the spectrum, Van Eemeren and

Grootendorst (1984, 1995, 2004) do have precise normative definitions of fallacies, but strictly for a

critical discussion. Other normative criteria are "relevance", "sufficiency", and "acceptability", as

proposed by Blair and Johnson (1987a, 2006).

A different epistemic standard of evaluation, Bayesian probability, has been adopted lately (Korb,

2004; Hahn and Oaksford, 2007; Harris, Hsu, and Madsen, 2012; Zenker, 2013). Hahn and Oaksford‟s

normative theory suggests that fallacies are arguments with weak Bayesian evidence. The same

argumentation form is rational when it accounts to a good update from priors to conditionals. It is

fallacious when, for example, the context is such that the priors are very low to guarantee an update,

given the argumentative evidence. Empirical tests of the rationality (or calibration) of people when

encountering a fallacious argument have started to appear (e.g., Harris, Hsu, & Madsen, 2012; Oaksford

& Hahn, 2013). And somehow related to what we will show here are Walton‟s (2010) and Cummings

(2014) cognitive heuristics perspective.

The philosophical normative work, of course, cannot address the first issue that we pointed out,

that of representative sampling: the fallacious arguments are more available when you look for them. On

the Bayesian side of things, we must point out that even if the issue would always be computationally
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tractable, very often the “p(AIB)” is not all that clear if we don‟t have a good model of the real desires of

the arguer. Those desires are sometimes unconscious; they may be multiple and sometimes conflicting:

the Bayesian ideal is vulnerable to Type III errors: providing the right answer to the wrong question

(Yadav & Korukonda, 1985). And the second issue, that of alien environment/ complex problems/

modern world: a critical discussion is usually about some unresolved issue; otherwise we would have a

protocol in place to deal with it – if not a well calibrated intuitive response7. A critical discussion, at least

nowadays, will be called for in a situation that deals with issues of academic interest, policy debates,

subtle moral conflicts and other complex, relatively new problems.

Many famous cognitive biases identified by psychologists seem to be conceived in a similar way

to fallacies. The choice is unrepresentative criteria, instead of a computational theory of evolved

function. Overconfidence effect is a result of non-random sampling (Juslin, Winman & Olsson, 2000) or

regression to the mean, if data is plotted the other way around (Daves & Mulford, 1996). Planning fallacy

is the result of the total possible distribution of outcomes (Taleb, 2012). Hindsight bias is and artifact of

memory retrieval explained by regression to the mean (Hoffrage, Hertwig & Gigerenzer, 2000). The

fundamental attribution error is explained by error-management logic (Andrews, 2001) that predicts that

organisms do not try to minimize the total rate of errors, but only the costs of errors (Haselton & Buss,

2000).

What we feel is the missing ecological approach is related with our third identified difficulty, that

of proper standards. It concerns not only the whole field of argumentation theory but, to this day, much of

psychology (see Gigerenzer, 1996, 2008; Tooby and Cosmides, 1992). If one compares the foraging

decisions of an animal or the fallacious argument strength with a Bayesian norm, we have at the very least

the black box problem: due to computational complexity of using real Bayesian updating, we have an “as

if‟ model, that only checks results to a synthetic benchmark. We have no way to see how people use cues

7
Even if specialization/division of labor is a universal human trait, today we have great variability on
expert performance for different domains (Shanteau, 1992). It‟s safe to assume that (with the notable exception of
medicine) this variation was far smaller in Pleistocene environments.
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with their natural algorithms (Gigerenzer, 2006), only to ask the Bayesian daemon to check the results.

The same applies for other content-free norms. Even more so when the norm is something like

propositional logic: it is only a functional model if the problem8, by chance, fits the particular logic

system. For studying our own minds, we need computational theories of evolved function to correct for

instinct blindness (Cosmides and Tooby, 1994), because we do not have built-in cognitive science

intuitions.

A technical definition of function, in the biological sense, reveals that a cognitive apparatus

without its environment is meaningless (if we would lack the sense of hearing, it would be really hard to

understand what an – alien – tape player does9). Same for contextual factors without ecological

hypotheses to test. The function narrows the hypothesis-space to those that account for the relationship

between organ and environment. An inferential specialization is also referred to as a „mental organ‟

(Chomsky, 1965; Tooby & Cosmides, 1989), therefore we think that a fallacy is to be detected as an

exception, an error triggered by ambiguous cues and/or ambiguous resources to be gained (e.g. the need

to respect the truth simultaneously with the need to win the argument).

Ecological approaches to argumentation have started to appear, Mercier (2012) shows a model

based on Herbert Simon‟s (1956) “satisficing” that accounts for the search for arguments and a stopping

rule at a minimum threshold and not necessarily at some desired optimum. More famously, Mercier and

Sperber‟s (2009) evolutionary approach shows that the hypothesis that human reasoning has in fact

evolved to improve arguments, accounts for a lot of psychological and anthropological data. Their

reasoning goes like this: if an individual manages to convince another one to do or believe the things he

does, then, on average, he is better off.

We note that this implies that skepticism is, in this view, a counter-strategy that co-evolved.

8
E.g. some “bystander” fish use transitional logic to infer hierarchy by just watching fights between rivals
(Grosenick, Clement, Fernald, 2007).
9
See Williams (1966) for the partially solved mystery of the lateral line on many fish.
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Methodology

Only in the English-speaking nations there is a single world, fallacy, via the scholastic Latin,

fallacia10; other cultures and languages do not have a name for this vague class of arguments. The

collections of fallacies seem to be collections of expressions that contain the word „fallacy‟. Classification

is difficult because some fallacies violate logical norms, others break probabilistic norms, yet others only

change the subject. Still, nobody seems to care to do a cross-cultural check, at least for some of the „bad‟

arguments. But that is also an ongoing validity issue for the wider field of psychology (Brown, 2004).

Donald Brown‟s ongoing list of human universals suggests a path for thinking about universality

of arguments. There are entries that seem highly related to argumentative behavior: “poetry/rhetoric”,

“polysemy”, “proverbs, sayings – in mutually contradictory forms”, “language, prestige from proficient

use of“, “decision making, collective”. Other language-related universals are “language employed to

misinform or mislead”, “language employed to manipulate others”, “insulting”, “polysemy”, “metonym”,

“explanation”. Mentally there are “discrepancies between speech, thought, and action”, “logical notions”,

“entification/antropomorphisation”, “decision making”, “differential valuations”, “conjectural reasoning”,

“beliefs, false” etc. Also, from the social realm, we will pay special attention to “exchange”, “prestige

inequalities”, “cooperation”, and “reciprocity”.

George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (1999) have shown about conceptual metaphors that

universality is only weak evidence of biological programming. There are universals that are not innate,

but everybody stumbles on them.

Trying to answer this problem, the reconciliation of the constant (for shorter than evolutionary

time-frames) human nature with the huge variability of behaviors and cultures, Donald Brown (2004)

proposes a list of five answers:

10
For translating Aristotle‟s σόφισμα, sophisma, sophism.
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1. Functions are different from effects, that is, computational mechanisms designed by

natural selection to solve ecologically relevant problems often have side-effects or

byproducts. Also, different mechanisms interact with each other; the resulting

behavioral effects are huge: think the limited number of sounds a piano can produce

but potentially infinite piano plays.

2. “Many mental mechanisms motivate us toward goals (mating, ingesting food, etc.)

without specifying the means.” Our choices for solving these problems (times different

environments) is again potentially infinite.

3. Mental mechanisms will be triggered in different environments, so even if the

computation is the same, the behavior may appear different. As an example (p. 10)

Brown shows that “there is evidence to suggest that humans have an evolved

mechanism for detecting and preferring faces that, for many of their features, are near

the mean (or average) of what one sees. Since the mean may vary from one population

to another, the resulting standards of beauty would vary too, and this could easily be

interpreted as a cultural difference”.

4. Not only adaptations interact with each other, often they conflict. The resulting behaviors

will be compromises, and different local conditions will tip the scales in particular

directions.

5. Even at genetic level, the different environments will trigger different responses: obesity

when exposed to widely available processed foods comes to mind. Other supernormal

stimuli resulted from market economies, as well. Brown uses the sometimes weird

behavior of animals in Zoos as the better analogue – better than are wild animals in

their natural habitats.

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We can imagine a lens as an extension of sight, a telephone as an extension for speech. Can we

follow through with this practice for gaining insight about an observed behavior, or a modern cultural

artifact? Some behaviors are more transparent than others in that regard: fight, hunger, the sight of erotic

imagery, some visual illusions; some effects like the obviously biased attention for human faces, etc.

Others are more troubling, the interactions between mental machinery described above are one

complicating factor; noisy environments are another. Yet another is our sense of normalcy: for those that

try to study human nature, it is the constant struggle with the obvious. The late discovery of

proprioception, a sense, is an indication of our instinct blindness.

We defined the first problem of approaches to fallacies as a selective observation that often has

the unfortunate result of inferring a rule. Fallacy naming as seeing patterns where there are none. But

there are, at least, the “classical” bad arguments that are established and for which a Google search

returns millions of results. It is those that we think are also a byproduct of well calibrated heuristics. Our

evolved computational machinery subconsciously does the trimming of search spaces for us. Gigerenzer

(2008) resumes the real-world utility of heuristic use: “We simplify search though a decision problem

space by limiting the amount of information processed”. An ecological approach for the study of

heuristics is well under way at the Adaptive Behavior and Cognition (ABC) research group in Berlin.

Two key concepts introduced by them interest us, the adaptive toolbox and ecological rationality.

The adaptive toolbox refers to the capacities that we humans already have that can be easily accessed for

problem solving, e.g. very good memory and recognition of visual patterns, language instinct, ease in

visually tracking moving objects11. Ecological rationality refers to a match between mind and

environment. The theory of natural selection only predicts that organisms will be adapted to problems

raised by their environments, thus, even if somehow technically possible, there would be no general

problem-solvers. As we said at the beginning, the slow process of testing billions of designs against each

other implies that most complex machinery in the biological world (organs) are adaptations. There is no

11
See Shaffer et al., 2004, for the elegantly simple gaze heuristic.
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reason to think that this functional organization somehow ends at neck level. Therefore ecological

rationality (Tooby & Cosmides, 1996; Gigerenzer, 1999) is the realist benchmark for the reasoning and

decision-making of a biological creature like ourselves; we are nature‟s designs for nature‟s problems.

Marr‟s (1982) computational theory or task analysis distinguishes between different levels of

description of a problem. The detailed models of heuristics as studied by the ABC group have the

additional advantage of being testable all the way: there is no black box where the researchers compare

only the fit and prediction with some statistical model, but the search rule can be tested separately from

the stopping rule, and the stopping rule from the decision rule (Newell, Weston and Shanks, 2003). We‟ll

show some examples later on, for now it is important to stress that this approach has the added benefit

that it specifies a behavior not only at computational level, but also at the algorithmic level, thus enabling

researchers to test different components of a theory12. The computational level specifies evolved function,

goals and constraints while representation and algorithm specifies implementation of inputs and outputs.

For heuristics, the latter means we can have more detailed predictions of a search rule (the way that the

mind samples cues), a stopping rule and a decision rule. In nature, decision speed often – but not always13

– counterbalances decision accuracy.

As it stands now, one of the closest theories to the view of fallacies that we are advocating here is

error management theory (Haselton & Buss, 2000; Haselton & Nettle, 2006). Organisms will tend to

avoid the costly mistakes, often at the cost of many less costly ones. It “applies the principles of signal

detection theory (Green & Swets, 1966) to judgment tasks to make predictions about evolved cognitive

design. […] Crucially, the consequences for the organism of making the two types of error may not be the

same. Fleeing from an area that contains no predator may be inconvenient but is much less costly than the

failure to detect a predator that really is close by. EMT predicts that an optimal decision rule will

minimize not the crude rate of error, but the net effect of error on fitness.” (Haselton, 2005, pp. 731)

12
That means less “just so storytelling” and more opportunities for falsification.
13
The less-is-more effect (Goldstein, 1994; Gigerenzer & Goldstein, 1996) refers to the situations where
decision accuracy gets worse if subjects have more information rather than less.
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EMT proposes a view that errors are not the result of simplifying heuristic shortcuts but of

evolved evolutionary biases (Haselton & Buss, 2000).

Demonstrating ecological rationality for a behavior can also point into the opposite direction: if

the mind is rational in particular environments, this is an intermediary step on the path to a demonstration

of adaptation (Gigerenzer, 2008).

By using the evolutionary informed work on human behavior, argumentation theorists can bypass

the huge time costs of hypothesizing as if there are no constrains on possible goals of us humans. Vertical

integration allows us the reasonable prior belief that the search space of hypotheses about “mindless”

arguments is much smaller than once thought.

An ecological analysis helps avoid just that: an external criterion that has no connection with

why a behavior is produced in the first place.

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Case studies

Fitting

- E un prim pas, inainte de predictii. Sunt explicatiile, cam ce face toata lumea. Oricum, idea e

sa vezi daca rezultatele altora “accout” si predictiile teoriei tale. Data fitting in statistica – sau

“training models on past data”. (if a competing theory explains the same pattern of results

more parsimoniously, or at a lower level of description)

Lately, even normative argumentation theories have been put to the test. Ad hominem, as

relevance fallacies – or red herrings (Copi, 1982):

Woods & Walton […]

Van Eemeren and Grootendorst. Pragma-dialectics is a normative theory for critical discussion. It

provides an ideal model. The ad hominem attacks, like other informal fallacies, frustrate the advancement

from one step of the discussion stages by violating one of the “ten commandments” (ten rules of critical

discussion). The three types of ad hominem distinguished by XX-th century logicians, abusive,

circumstantial si tu quoque (Copi, 1953; Kahane 1969, 1971; Rescer, 1964) do violate the first stage,

named by them the confrontation stage on which the “first commandment” is the freedom rule (parties

must not prevent each other from advancing standpoints).

An experiment was constructed in which subjects were asked to score the reasonableness to 48

small dialogue sequences. Those 48 were further divided in lumps (stacks?) of 12 dialogues that involved

each of the three ad hominem types and the remaining 12 (12*3+12=48), the control dialogues, did not

have ad hominems. Their normative theory being about critical discussions, we cannot compare the

reasonableness of the ad hominem with non-critical discussions, such as, say, warnings, confrontations

between rivals, or quarrels, verbal exchanges about which our ecological account predicts that the ad

hominem is harder to detect (feels more natural or appropriate or reasonable). We need to test that

separately.
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Ipoteza lor 1

Ipoteza lor 2

Ipoteza lor 3

…si apoi: but of course this only explains the same data. The test case for a new theory is in the

differentiating predictions!

Despre autoritate (the reverse of the ad hominem)

In a way, the most reliable figures of authority aren‟t humans, but instruments: we trust a

thermometer or a measure tool almost blindly, because they are by definition “expert systems”. Also,

good and poor expert performance has been observed (Shanteau, 1992).

Ad hominems

A species with good memory of social exchange violations should also be better at iterated

prisoner’s dilemma games by having a means to mark defectors.

Also, error management logic would be a natural framework to deduce predictions on the Ad

hominem14: as a communication device for avoiding being cuckooed, the ad hominem argument seems

less morally scandalous. It might be an extremely useful rhetorical device precisely because negative

traits are far easier to confirm and remember than positive traits from positive observations (Rothbart &

Park, 1986).

14
Scientists tend to calibrate their inquiries and statistical analyses as to reduce Type I errors (false
positives) by allowing more Type II (false negative) errors (Haselton & Buss, 2000). The loss of préstige by
proposing a spurious effect is the greatest in the error-hunting world of science. Conversely, a firewall or an
existential threat for an organism is best served by a strategy of avoiding the Type II errors, the false negatives –
even at a cost of more errors of the first type.
THE ECOLOGICAL RATIONALITY OF FALLACIES

Also, via EMT we predict that we should find ad hominem arguments that sound perfectly

reasonable when there is risk of hazard (“don‟t buy on his financial decision advice, he‟s the early-

adopter type of guy”).

- The ad hominem as a fallacy can be derived by the correlation between the negative trait of the

accused and the topic… well, that‟s trivial; but most of the time our decisions are made under uncertainty,

so we can only guess that correlation. Thus we predict, via error management theory, that we should find

more ad hominem logic when subjects face a social decision that potentially has an error of greater

consequence.

- hazard management theory syntax: Hazard (present/absent), countermeasure for hazard (in

effect, not in effect)

- the risk detection subsystem not only functionally links “innate” countermeasures (e.g.,

washing) to ancestral hazards (e.g., disease exposure), but also links evolutionarily novel

countermeasures (e.g., backing up) to evolutionary novel dangers (e.g., hard disk crashes) (tooby si

Cosmides, anul)

- error management theory like: “A selectively significant set of detrimental events (threats)

will be sufficiently harmful (e.g., disease, predation, ambush, social disgrace) to make it potentially cost-

effective to take countermeasures even when their incidence is low.”

- “Observations gathered by multiple conspecifics provide more accurate estimates of actual

threat magnitudes – the adaptationist rationale for circuits that reset threat indices partly based on

observed fear reactions in others (Cook & Mineka, 1987).”

The testable prediction here would be that an Ad Hominem argument will be more convincing

when there is a social exchange violation (Cosmides & Tooby, 1989, 1992), a cheater to catch, than when

there is some other bad information about the arguer. As Ybarra, Chan, and Park (2001) found – that

adults were faster to identify trait words connoting interpersonal social costs (e.g., hostile, cruel, disloyal)
THE ECOLOGICAL RATIONALITY OF FALLACIES

than words connoting poor skill (e.g. stupid, weak, clumsy) – we should find that the number and

“vulgarity” of ad hominem arguments detected by lay people will be substantially higher if the negative

information isn‟t a social exchange violation. Random negative traits should be more kindly regarded

than those traits that indicate a cheat.

The experimental design can be rather simple. For internal validity, the use of Wason selection

task15 should be appropriate, because it was used to settle the debate over the modularity of mind and

context-dependent rationality (Cosmides, 1989; Tooby, Cosmides & Barrett 2005; Cosmides and Tooby,

2008). It is versatile: it can be modified to be used with nonliterate subjects for cross-cultural studies

(Sugiyama, Tooby & Cosmides, 2002).

Applied to ad hominem argumentation [modifica wason task pentru ad hominem pentru cele trei

tipuri de ad hominem, abusive, circumstantial si tu quoque (Copi, 1953; Kahane 1969, 1971; Rescer,

1964)]

Another prediction would be that the social exchange violation will be perceived as more

worrisome if the target of the Ad hominem has more social power then when he does not. A politician or

a banker vs. a kid or a worker: If norms are content-independent, there should be no difference.

- behavioral reaction time tests (one of which is called the Implicit Association Test or IAT

- maybe manipulations of cognitive load

1. aceeiasi fallacy in context complex si in context mundan. aici, pt control, verificam cu mai

multe fallacies.

2. ad hominem in context de social exchange si in context abstract. pt control, participantii trebuie

sa raspunnda la mai multe variante, mai multe exemple generate de noi.

[…] students have to judge how skeptical they would be about someone‟s recommendation if

they are to find different negative information about him. Some of the bad news will imply social

15
Wason selection task (n.d.). In Wikipedia. Retrieved in 06.25.2014 from
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wason_selection_task
THE ECOLOGICAL RATIONALITY OF FALLACIES

exchange violations (he is stingy or unreliable), while others are just undesirable traits (he is ugly or

violent with puppies

A heuristic model

Detailed models of heuristics, not rule-of-thumb in the after-the-fact label sense. Cummings sau

noi initial asa am facut si nu e hard science. Programul H&B asa face inca – si e pe toate

gardurile.

These are generalizable beyond our species, as ecologically rational decision rules used by

animals (eg. Real, 1990). That is, the same reasoning format works in processing visual clues,

auditory, in making natural language inferences – it even works similarly when different species

are facing choices. We can assess both the predictive power and economy via fast and frugal

heuristic methods.

Three building blocks: a search rule, a stopping rule, and a decision rule.

The search rule can and should be tested independently, because it is not all that clear that it is

relevant for research to always have subjects facing all the options at once. One can test for the way a

subject samples the environment for information. For some heuristic and animal models sequential

sampling – very rare in decision research – has been shown (citat!)

Take-the-Best (as a simpler, testable heuristic model for Imitate the majority):

1. Search by validity: Search through cues in order of their validity. Look up the cue values of

the cue with the highest validity first.

2. One-reason stopping rule: If one object has a positive cue value (1) and the other does not (0

or unknown), then stop search and proceed to Step 3. Otherwise exclude this cue and return to Step 1. If

no more cues are found, guess.

THE ECOLOGICAL RATIONALITY OF FALLACIES

3. One-reason decision making: Predict that the object with the positive cue value (1) has the

higher value on the criterion.

Three pertinent aspects of environment structure that take-the-best can exploit are (i)

noncompensatory information or large variability of cue weights as the general case; (ii) scarce

information; and (iii) redundancy, that is, moderate to high positive correlation between cues (Hogarth &

Karelaia, 2005, 2006; chap. 2). If cues show many negative correlations with each other, a weighted

linear model tends to perform better (Johnson, Meyer, & Ghose, 1989; Shanteau & Thomas, 2000).

“Unlike as-if models, which predict outcomes only, these models of heuristics predict process and

outcome and can be subjected to a stronger test. In Newell, Weston and Shank‟s study (2003), each of the

three building blocks was tested independently” (Gigerenzer, 2004)

THE ECOLOGICAL RATIONALITY OF FALLACIES

Conclusions

What new insights would this type of process analysis suggest?

What would psychology and argumentation theory gain by the elucidation of proximal and distal

causes for informal fallacies? Behaviors, especially those of modern humans, can be very hard to

understand for reasons of noise and complexity and the alien modern ecology: we are often satisfied with

pseudo-explanations, the pop-psychology of the day. If this research is successful, it should give us the

most probable candidate explanation for many fallacious arguments. Also, maybe, it could dissolve the

question of “informal fallacies” as a misleading concept that surfaces only when one needs it as a

rhetorical device.

- If the agent entertaining fallacious arguments wins the more relevant resources in the given

situation than the „informal logician‟ (that doesn‟t fall for these childish arguments), than we

are not in the ecology where the informal logician hopes to be. Even if the informal logician

is epistemically correct, this suggests that the whole situation was about something else:

group cohesion maybe, testing for trust and reliability, something else.

- Another, and a direct consequence of the above, would be that in the „interesting‟ situations

where fallacies are usually detected, they tend to be indeed wrong. The structure of the

environment in academia, policy debates, religious epistemic debates, subtle moral dilemmas,

healthy diets or macroeconomics should be such that it cannot be exploited by the fast and

frugal heuristics. That seems to be the case in such historically unresolved questions, where

the type of problem may be new, or is alien to our intuition, and may require controlled

experiments or entirely new types of knowledge to settle.

Yet another insight would be that people use the appropriate heuristics based on the contextual

cues in many situations. We may fall for appeals to novelty or tradition in advertising, but I doubt that we

mix them up. If we talk whiskey, tradition is a cue of greater validity; if smartphones, then novelty is a
THE ECOLOGICAL RATIONALITY OF FALLACIES

very good rule to stop search. One has to sample representatively the vast area of situations that require

decision-making, and not build artificial demos of fringe and unnatural environments where irrationality

can be shown. A cat is not an irrational piano player.

Which, finally, leads us to the issue of design. It seems easier to change the environments than to

change the minds. “Our modern skulls house a stone age mind”, write Cosmides and Tooby in the

evolutionary psychology primer. Indeed, just look at the relative success of interface design and „killer

apps‟ relative to critical thinking agenda or rationality training.

THE ECOLOGICAL RATIONALITY OF FALLACIES

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