Download How History Gets Things Wrong The Neuroscience of Our Addiction to Stories Audible Audio Edition Alex Rosenberg Mikael Naramore Brilliance Audio Books
Download How History Gets Things Wrong The Neuroscience of Our Addiction to Stories Audible Audio Edition Alex Rosenberg Mikael Naramore Brilliance Audio Books
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How History Gets Things Wrong The Neuroscience of Our Addiction to Stories Audible Audio Edition Alex Rosenberg Mikael Naramore Brilliance Audio Books Reviews
- Prof Alex Rosenberg all but states that historical narrative explanation suffers from the kind of anthropocentrism that once situated the earth at the center of the universe. [The example of Ptolemy's epicycle theory did make predictions, but was not an explanatory theory.]
The reader willing to stick to the precise definition of historical narrative will be rewarded with the one of the strongest intellectual corrosives available in analytic philosophy. The sense in which Professor Rosenberg understands "historical narrative" is a story in which the intentions, desires and beliefs of the historical actors in the story play (or purport to play) a crucial, ineliminable explanatory or interpretive role. Some readers forget the definition as soon as they encounter it.
Such stories may be satisfying, but they exceed the limits of human reason. In a sense, the ingrained impulse to storify is analogous to the role assigned to the pure concepts of the understanding in Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, only Prof Rosenberg arrives at the cognitive filter of storification a posteriori.
The ability to guess the desires, beliefs and intentions of other people to predict their behavior is called the folk theory of mind, a theory that "...continues to work today in dealing with people face-to-face and hour-to-hour over limited periods." Findings in anthropology and neuroscience place limits on the capacity of the folk theory of mind to guess the intentions of more than a handful of actors over short distances and over time periods too brief to be of historical use hours at most. Not only is the folk theory of mind inadequate to the demands placed on it by historical narrative, it cannot meet the demands of commerce, to name one obvious example where human institutions take up where the folk theory of mind ends. Businesses don't simply rely only on the folk theory of mind to do business -- they draw up contracts, take out insurance and so on.
Professional academic historians won't recognize themselves in Rosenberg's account, which isn't directed at them. Some professional historians claim that Rosenberg's only says he isn't writing about them, but writes as if the story is about them (De te fabula narratur - Horace).
Despite Rosenberg's care in distinguishing narratives which rely on the folk theory of mind (or attempts to improve upon it, none of which have been successful) from other kinds of stories, Rosenberg has been taken to mean any narrative at all. At least one critic insists that Rosenberg's criticism of narrative history fails because Rosenberg wants to eliminate narrative altogether, not just historical narrative. But this misses the point that the criticism of narrative history based on limitations inherent in the folk theory of mind stands on its own. The larger attack on narratives altogether relies on additional assumptions that aren't necessary for the critique of narrative history. There is no Modus Tollens argument, but that critic remains undeterred.
Other critics seem not to understand that equations and scientific models aren't stories with characters in which the folk theory of mind plays a crucial explanatory or interpretive role. Where equations are concerned, there is no need to invoke the folk theory of mind to explain or interpret the behavior of characters in some story. In fact, different brain networks are involved, as Professor Rosenberg points out. The folk theory of mind is subserved by the Default Mode Network (DMN). Mathematical reasoning and reasoning about physical objects is subserved by the Task Positive Network (TPN). Moreover, these networks are antagonistic when the TPN is active, the DMN is inhibited, and conversely. So the idea that mathematical equations are stories is not at all supported by neuroscience.
Rosenberg is concerned with historical narratives that provide moral cover for ideological belief. Such narratives make essential, ineliminable use of the folk theory of mind to guess the intentions of historical (or mythological) actors to make moral points, significantly about who deserves access to material resources, and who should be excluded.
Proponents of identity politics may be unwilling to give up historical narrative explanation. Those sympathetic to Rosenberg's argument against overextending the folk theory of mind may find themselves "called out" for apparent insensitivity to historical oppression. But such accounts can be made without invoking the folk theory of mind at all. Eliminating the folk theory of mind separates history from ideology. In fact, it is the presumption of ideology to apply the folk theory of mind against its perceived enemies that leads to intractable disagreement--or worse.
Couldn't we just identify those "bad" "ideological" narratives and rule them out? Aren't we throwing the baby out with the bathwater?
Rosenberg argues persuasively against relying on historical narrative explanation at all. Sticking to historical narrative explanation is analogous to asking for accurate weather forecasts a year from now. (As distingushed from the global circulation models of climate science.)
Chaos overwhelms the numerical analysis of the best weather forecasting models running on the lastest supercomputers for more than two weeks -- and this is a situation in which the theory of mind plays no role at all. A kind of epistemological chaos overwhelms historical narrative explanation. If any have been accurate, it is entirely by accident.
GIven the cognitive role that narratives play in making sense of the world, and in making the world far more dangerous than it needs to be, Rosenberg might have spent more time on the evolutionary bind the human mind finds itself in, at the present state of its development. The folk theory of mind begins operating at a very early age in humans, and is essential in language acquisition and socialization. It would be one thing if humans outgrew it after it served its developmental function. But this is not the case--we're stuck with it. Our institutions, to the extent that they depend on human interaction, depend on the theory of mind--the question is, to what extent. Given that the theory of mind cannot meet the demands placed on it by narrative history, one might ask how human institutions can function at all. Institutions, social objects such as money, the Supreme Court, social groups of various kinds, etc., persist over longer time spans, often involve many more individuals and can operate over greater geographical distances than the folk theory of mind can encompass--surely they cannot "ground out" only in the desires, beliefs and intentions of individuals. [For more on the relation of groups and institutions to the individuals that (partially) comprise them, see The Ant Trap by Brian Epstein. Whether one agrees with Epstein's ontology of social objects, and his metaphysics of anchoring and grounding (at least one critic suggests grounding is enough), Epstein is critical of the view that the folk theory of mind is adequate to completely characterize social objects; e.g., mobs, money, the Federal Reserve, the Supreme Court, and so on.]
Rosenberg mentions game-theoretic models (the stag hunt, the ultimatum game) of survival problems (whether to share a kill and how much, etc) that would have confronted early humans. The successful solution of those recurring problems would have created selective pressure in favor of the folk theory of mind.
Rosenberg might have presented a game-theoretic argument that history involves arms races that make prediction useless. This is possible, though perhaps I am being unfair--there is room for development of the subject elsewhere. There is still the question of interpretation (that is, the interpretive, as opposed to predictive role that history is said to play)-- though again, a general formal argument is available with recently developed tools of mathematical social science, which are now capable of proving impossibility theorems formalizing Rosenberg's philosophical points. - This is a very interesting and well argued treatise or a polemic perhaps, and I highly recommend it for the intellectual ride. The author has his premise and keeps hammering away at backing it up in a most entertaining, provocative and deeply researched manner. The author's desire in this book is to dynamite what he considers our last illusion, which is The Theory of Mind and how this human mind trait has led us to love narrative history. He also wishes to stick some dynamite under the entire edifice of history itself and make history.... history. The author wants to be in the ranks of Copernicus and Darwin, who upended established theories and changed everything. A very ambitious book indeed.
What is this dynamite? It is the empirical findings of neuroscience, primarily from studying the brains of rats, which explode the illusion of historians having any idea of what was going on in the minds of historical figures. The book tells us that Rat brain Neuroscience is increasingly showing that the neurons in their tiny brains are firing away and have no relationship to any actions of the rat. (Oh yes, rat brains are really just tiny versions of our brains). Human neurons are the same and have not content that can be understood and It follows from this that History is all bunk, as Henry Ford said. No one can claim any true knowledge of history because neurons have no content we can understand. We can hardly figure out what the guy next to us on the train believes or desires, so how can we know what Julius Caesar was thinking? We can't know anything because the neurons of that guy and Julius's neurons have not content. We are totally lost in utter ignorance. Thus history is just a romp of the Theory of Mind and once we realize from rat neuroscience that the theory of mind is an illusion, we can burn all our history books or make them into Hollywood movies.
My final verdict is that this book is very interesting and thought provoking. It very well may be on the correct path with its neuroscience based critique of Theory of Mind, but neuroscience still has a long way to go. As for claiming history has nothing to say and really is dangerous and should be ignored as a result of neuroscience, that is a claim that would need another book to cover. I look for a follow up.
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