One or the other of the Modeled Behavior writers said on Twitter that he found Robin Hanson’s post questioning whether the human capacity of reason genuinely exists for the purpose of uncovering the truth depressing. This is a bit of a fussy philosophical point, and a controversial one at that, but what I thought reading Hanson’s post was that it lacked an appropriate conception of what “the truth” is. In my view, “truth” and “reason” are intimately linked concepts such that it’s difficult to form adequate conceptions of them such that they fail to lead to one another. “True” views are the ones that are held by people who’ve reasoned appropriately about the issue at hand. “The truth” is what, in principle, the process of human reasoning is converging to at the limit. “Reasoning” is the kind of discourse human beings engage in when they’re pondering the truth.
Hanson is raising a very interesting point about the causal/evolutionary origins of the human reasoning process. One might think that reason is adaptive because it’s truth-tracking, but there are plausible alternative accounts. What I’d say is that this is a good thing, because the concept of an independent truth that our rational faculties might or might not be tracking is much less coherent than it seems at first blush. If you think about the typical human being living circa 500 AD, virtually all of his views about the fundamental operations of the natural world were (as best we know today) totally false. He had wildly inaccurate notions about why stones fall if you drop them, what stones are made out of, why a stone falling on your foot causes a sensation of pain, etc. Attempting to “translate” his beliefs about geology, gravity, and neurology into our current understanding of these matters would be nearly impossible and poses all kinds of Kuhnian dilemmas about incommensurability. And yet it’s not as if this caused people to be constantly dropping stones on each other by accident. After all, pigeons navigate the world just fine notwithstanding a complete inability to formulate true beliefs about it. We reason because we socialize, as Hanson says, but the quest for truth isn’t some conceptually separate thing. The non-reasoning pigeons don’t have false beliefs anymore than they have true ones.
(Ideas poached from Richard Rorty, Hilary Putnam, etc.)