As I mentioned in two previous posts (here and here), I recently had the opportunity to attend several of the sessions of the “Future Directions in Genetic Studies” workshop at Washington University in St. Louis. One of the speakers was Carl Craver of Washington University. Craver's talk was titled, "The…
We do many inefficient things. Why don’t we simply do those things differently, in a more efficient way? Often, we don’t change things because we’ve done them a certain way for so long that it would take too much time and psychological effort to do them in new ways, even though the new ways would be easier and more inefficient in the long run.
The QWERTY keyboard is a great example. We could rearrange our keyboards, which would cause us to struggle with our new configurations for a few months or years, but then we’d all be better for the change. We don’t do this, however. It would take too much initial effort.
Scientific theories are quite often strained by the discovery of new evidence that doesn’t fit the theory, yet we cling to the old inadequate theories. This is another tendency toward path dependence. For example, until the 17th century, “epicycles” were used to explain the perceived retrograde motion of planets and stars. Epicycles were finally discarded in response to Kepler’s work. Philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn pointed out that scientific progress does not occur smoothly, but rather in the form of periodic revolutions that that he termed paradigm shifts. The fact that scientists tend to hold onto old unworkable theories longer than they should can be seen as another manifestation of path dependence.
It would make a lot of sense to simplify the spellings of many words used in the English language. We don’t do …
All my life I’ve been suspicious of the alleged power of syllogisms. Here is an often-cited syllogism:
• All men are mortal
• Socrates is a man
• Therefore Socrates is mortal
Syllogisms can be expressed in this logical form:
• All B’s are C
• A is a B
• Therefore, A is C
The above example is a perfect syllogism: the conclusion naturally follows from the premises. Syllogisms constitute deductive reasoning (from a given set of premises the conclusion must follow).
Many excellent thinkers and writers have stressed the need to present one’s arguments in terms of syllogisms. For example, in his excellent book on legal writing, The Winning Brief, Bryan Garner advises lawyers to frame every legal issue as a syllogism (see p. 88).
But what is really behind the power of syllogisms? It turns out that they are actually based on a metaphor—the metaphor of objects in a box. Consider this diagram in tandem with the classic syllogism (“All men are mortal; Socrates is a man; therefore, Socrates is mortal”)
As Judge Posner points out (in “The Jurisprudence of Skepticism,” 86 Mich L. Rev 827, 830 (1988)), the first premise presents a box labeled “all men,” in which each of the contents are each labeled “mortal” and one of those objects is labeled “Socrates.” Posner notes,
…“The second premise tells us that everything in the box is tagged with a name and that one of the tags says “Socrates.” When we pluck Socrates out of the