Philosopher Alex Rosenberg's actions are incomprehensible until you realize that he believes and desperately desires to convince us that there are no such thing as human beliefs or desires. Also: That Henry Kissinger is a bad man. You see the problem? The neurology level is useless if you want a better theory than the folk theory of mind. The behavioral economics level may be becoming useful. But for the life of me I do not see what Rosenberg has to add here. His book begins with a big song-and-dance about how narrative military history is useless because the Germans' opponents were flummoxed all four times the Germans attacked at Sedan between 1870 and 1940, thus—he claims—proving that it is impossible to learn lessons from narrative military history. It's clear why one might think the French (and their allies) failed to learn anything useful from narrative military history. It is much less clear why Rosenberg is so sur his example shows that the Germans- failed to learn from narrative military history: Alex Rosenberg: _How History Gets Things Wrong: "The Kaiser wasn’t thinking about anything at all when he gave the 'blank-check' to the Austrians. He didn’t have any desires about how matters should turn out, or any beliefs about how to organize things to make them turn out that way. He didn’t because no one has such thoughts...
...Thoughts [are] mostly non-conscious and not available to introspection... neural processes that drive behavior (without having any content...), including what the Kaiser did. But trying to locate what he believed and wanted, even roughly and inexactly, in contentless neural circuitry firing, is a fool’s errand.... Kissinger doesn’t help us grasp anything, because he thought he could get into the heads of the Talleyrand, Metternich, Castlereagh, and the Tsar, to understand what went on at the Congress of Vienna, and use the knowledge to craft American foreign policy for Richard Nixon and his successors. The results were predictably awful: he got most things wrong and the result was untold human suffering. Chalk it up at least as much to the theory of mind as to Henry Kissinger’s hubris....
Our whole culture and every civilization that we have any record of is constructed on the rickety foundations of the theory of mind.... My book is a plea that when we try to mitigate the worst features of human interaction, to design better institutions, control an uncertain future, we try to use theories that have a chance of being on the right track instead of the theory of mind...
#shouldread #cognitive
