Smart abducers as violent abducers: Hypothetical cognition and "military intelligence"

Abstract

I will describe the so-called coalition enforcement hypothesis, which sees humans as self-domesticated animals engaged in a continuous hypothetical activity of building cooperation through morality, incorporating punishing policies at the same time: morality and violence are seen as strictly intertwined with social and institutional aspects, implicit in the activity of cognitive niche construction. Hypothetical thinking (and so abduction) is in turn very often embedded in various linguistic kinds of the so-called fallacious reasoning. Indeed, in evolution, coalition enforcement works through the building of social cognitive niches seen as new ways of diverse human adaptation, where guessing hypotheses is central and where guessing hypotheses is occurring as it can, depending on the cognitive/moral options human beings adopt. I will also stress the moral and violent effect played by human natural languages, focusing on the analysis of the relationships between language, logic, fallacies, and abduction. This "military nature of abductive hypothetical reasoning in linguistic communication (military intelligence) is intrinsically "moral" (protecting the group by obeying shared norms), and at the same time "violent" (for example, harming or mobbing others - members or not of the group - still to protecting the group itself). However, the "military" power can be considered also active at the level of model-based cognition: taking advantage of the naturalistic perspective on abductive "hypothesis generation" at the level of both instinctual behavior and representation-oriented behavior, where nonlinguistic features drive a "plastic" model-based cognitive role, cognition gains a fundamental semiotic, eco-physical, and "military" significance, which nicely furnishes further insight into a kind of "social epistemology". © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.