Abstract
The prediction error minimization framework (PEM) denotes a family of views that aim at providing a unified theory of perception, cognition, and action. In this paper, I discuss some of the theoretical limitations of PEM. It appears that PEM cannot provide a satisfactory explanation of motivated reasoning, as instantiated in phenomena such as self-deception, because its cognitive ontology does not have a separate category for motivational states such as desires. However, it might be thought that this objection confuses levels of explanation. Self-deception is a personal level phenomenon, while PEM offers subpersonal explanations of psychological abilities. Thus, the paper examines how subpersonal explanations couched in the PEM framework can be thought of as related to personal level explanations underlying self-deception. In this regard, three views on the relation between personal and subpersonal explanations are investigated: the autonomist, the functionalist, and the co-evolutionary perspective. I argue that, depending on which view of the relation between the personal and subpersonal is adopted, the PEM paradigm faces a dilemma: either its explanatory ambitions should be reduced to the subpersonal domain, or it cannot provide a satisfactory account of motivated reasoning as instantiated in self-deception.
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Notes
Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for advising me to foreground this issue.
Formally, a generative model is a joint probability relating variables and state parameters. These variables and parameters are typically called “beliefs” because they represent different aspects of internal and external environments. However, given that they are probability distributions representing subconscious states, they should not be confused with beliefs construed as propositional attitudes (Dewhurst, 2017).
To keep things simple, I will refer to these motivational states as desires, which should be understood as an umbrella term for various pro-attitudes that play the functional role of goals or ground goals in commonsense psychological explanations (see, e.g. Smith, 1987).
Here the “inappropriateness” of weighting is determined with respect to how the optimal Bayesian agent would weigh the precisions of priors and incoming stimuli (see, e.g. Kuzmanovic & Rigoux, 2017). From the perspective of the PEM framework, belief updating always approximates optimality. The only way for the PEM framework to capture irrational or inadequate belief updating is in terms of the suboptimal generative models (see, e.g. Gadsby & Hohwy, 2021; Schwartenbeck et al., 2015). The significance of this claim will be discussed in Sects. 3.2 and 3.3.1.
In the only discussion so far on the relation between personal and subpersonal explanations within the context of PEM, Colombo and Fabry (2021) opt for the co-evolutionary model on independent grounds. However, in the present paper, my goal is not to adjudicate the plausibility of the different views of the relation between personal and subpersonal levels. Granted their initial plausibility, my goal is instead to investigate whether any of these views can be used to defend the PEM paradigm from the criticism that it cannot explain crucial features of self-deception.
Thanks to an anonymous referee for pressing me to be clearer about the purpose of this example.
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank two anonymous reviewers for Synthese who provided critical and constructive comments that helped to improve the paper. Special thanks go to Luca Malatesti for reading and commenting on previous versions of the manuscript. Different versions of the paper were discussed and presented at numerous places. Most notable are the EPSA 2019 conference (Geneva) and Contemporary Philosophical Issues PhD 2021 (Rijeka). Thanks to Joe Dewhurst, Niccolò Aimone Pisano, Zdenka Brzović, and Matteo Colombo for giving valuable comments on those occasions. Part of the paper was written at the Institute of Philosophy of the University of Graz, where I was a visiting researcher supported by a scholarship from the Austrian Academy of Sciences (the JESH program). I would like to thank Norbert Paulo, Thomas Pölzler, and Lucas Meyer for supporting my grant application and for providing an ideal working environment in Graz.
Funding
This paper is an outcome of project Harm, intentions, and responsibility (HIRe) that is financed by the Croatian Science Foundation (grant number UIP- 2017-05-4308). Work on this paper is also supported by project KUBIM (University of Rijeka, grant Uniri-human-18-265).
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Jurjako, M. Can predictive processing explain self-deception?. Synthese 200, 303 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-022-03797-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-022-03797-6