How History Gets Things Wrong: The Neuroscience of Our Addiction to Stories | Reviews |... - 1 views
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In this book, Rosenberg elaborates further such arguments to take issue with historical narratives and, more generally, with the way in which we most pervasively make sense of people's actions and motivations through narratives.
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His main contention is that such narratives are always wrong or, to put it differently, that they can't possibly be right.
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Rosenberg argues that neuroscience itself, our only reliable method to study psychological capacities, shows that theory of mind's posits do not exist
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The reason is that the best available evidence on how the brain works shows that the brain does not deal with the kind of things that beliefs and desires are supposed to trade with: contents.
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When we believe or desire, something is believed or desired: that I have bread, that it rains, that the Parliament passes the bill, etc. Beliefs and desires are about something.
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. After being presented with the assassin and the crime, the book moves on to explain why, even if always wrong, narratives in general, and historical narratives in particular, are so compelling for us. Even if we have no claim to truth or correctness for our narratives, narratives seem to be highly convincing in moving us to act
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Furthermore, we cannot but think in terms of them. Rosenberg's explanation for this 'addiction to stories' is that it has been entrenched in us by evolutionary processes that took place over the last million years of natural history
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Narrative explanations emerged out of Darwinian processes of natural selection -- or "environmental filtration", in the less purposive parlance Rosenberg prefers -- that allowed our ancestors to coordinate efforts, collaborate and flourish, moving from the bottom to the top of the Pleistocene's food chain. Rosenberg argues that while the basic mechanisms of mindreading pervasive in the animal kingdom, based on mutual tracking and monitoring of animals' behavior, are a sound method for getting agents to coordinate behavior, these mechanisms' more recent successor, the theory of mind, crafted by the use of co-evolved languages, turned those mindreading abilities into a theory with empirical hypothesis about agents' beliefs and desires but no facts to match them.
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The error historians allegedly make lies in mistaking stories for real explanations, surmising that behind our behavior there are purposes, rational motivations.
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Historians -- in particular narrative historians -- make a pervasive use of folk psychological explanations, i.e., explanations that describe events in terms of the beliefs and desires of historical agents, including individuals and groups.
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In order for folk psychological and historical narratives to be right there have to be facts of the matter about what sentences in such explanation refer to that make them true.
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Folk psychological explanations of actions in terms of platitudes about beliefs and desires pairings evolved in natural history closely related to mind-reading mechanisms that allowed our ancestors to deal with cooperation and coordination problems.
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There are no interpretative mechanisms in the brain (at any level of description) that can vindicate the attribution of contents to beliefs and desires.
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There are no facts of the matter that allow us to select belief/desire pairings as those actually operating 'behind' an agent's behavior.