Specialist versus Generalist Decision Making

A number of scholars argue that human and animal decision making, at least to the extent that it is driven by representational mental states, should be seen to be the result of the application of a vast array of highly specialized decision rules. By contrast, other scholars argue that we should see human and animal representational decision making as the result of the application of a handful general principles—such as expected utility maximization—to a number of specific instances. This chapter shows that, using the results of chapters 5 and 6, it becomes possible to move this dispute forwards: the account of the evolution of conative representational decision making defended in chapter 6 together with the account of the evolution of cognitive representational decision making defended in chapter 5, makes clear that both sides of this dispute contain important insights, and that it is possible to put this entire dispute on a clearer and more precise foundation. Specifically, I show that differentially general decision rules are differentially adaptive in different circumstances: certain particular circumstances favor specialized decision making, and certain other circumstances favor more generalist decision making.

The Evolution of Cognitive Representational Decision Making

This chapter develops a new account of the evolution of cognitive representational decision making—i.e. of decision making that relies on representations about the state of the world. The core idea behind this account is that cognitive representational decision making can—at times—be more cognitively efficient than non-cognitive representational decision making. In particular, cognitive representational decision making, by being able to draw on the inferential resources of higher-level mental states, can enable organisms to adjust more easily to changes in their environment and to streamline their neural decision making machinery (relative to non-representational decision makers). While these cognitive efficiency gains will sometimes be outweighed by the costs of this way of making decisions—i.e. the fact that representational decision making is generally slower and more concentration- and attention-hungry than non-representational decision making—this will not always be the case. Moreover, it is possible to say in more detail which kinds of circumstances will favor the evolution of cognitive representational decision making, and which do not.

A Moderate Evolutionary Psychology

This chapter defends a moderate, evidential form of evolutionary psychology that is not prey to the concerns raised by the critics of other forms of evolutionary psychology, and which can still add much of value to discussions in psychology, social science, and philosophy. This moderate form is arrived at, on the one hand, through scaling back the aims of the project—namely, towards providing only partial evolutionary biological analyses of a given psychological phenomenon—and, on the other, through showing how a compelling but moderate form of evolutionary psychology can be gotten off the ground—namely, by using all of the relevant pieces of information about a given psychological trait.

The Psychological Underpinnings of Helping Behaviors

What motivates an organism to help another? This is still very much an open question, despite being quite widely discussed. Given this lack of a settled account of the psychological structures underwriting helping behavior, a number of authors have tried to assess the evolutionary pressures on different cognitive architectures with a view to their ability to lead to helping behavior. As I try to make clearer in this chapter, there is much that can be said in favor of this evolutionary biological take on the psychology of helping behavior. However, as I also try to make clearer, making this evolutionary biological approach fully plausible requires shifting the focus of the analysis away from the reliability of different mind designs to lead organisms to help others—which is what existing analyses have tended to concentrate on—and towards the cognitive efficiency of different mind designs for helping others—i.e. the kind of perspective that this book has been concentrating on.

Extended Representational Decision Making—A Synthesis

Defenders of the extendedness of cognition often contrast their view with a representationalist view of cognition. They argue that (a) extended cognition and representational cognition are opposed to each other, and that (b) most of cognition is extended and non-representational. However, as I show in this chapter, these claims, at least as they stand, should not be seen to be plausible. This is so for two reasons. First, using the account of the evolution of cognitive and conative representational decision making laid out in the previous two chapters, I show that there is no reason to think that internal mental representations are in any way a needless cognitive addendum, or that reliance on them is extremely rare. Second, on this basis, I show that there are in fact good reasons to think that a number of organisms will, at least sometimes, rely on decision making mechanisms that are both embedded in the environment and representational. In fact, seeing cognition as representational may be a prerequisite to fully understanding how and why it is sometimes extended.

The Nature and Reality of Representational Decision Making

The chapter first makes clearer how the difference between representational and non-representational decision making is to be understood. It then provides more precise characterizations of “reflexive,” non-representational decision making and of representational decision making. Next, it supports the reality of representational decision making by appeal to a wide range of literatures from a number of different disciplines. The chapter ends by bringing out several widely accepted features of representational decision making.

Investigating the Evolution of Representational Decision Making

The chapter begins by making clearer what the central question is that drives the rest of the book: why would organisms rely on mental representations to make decisions about what to do? It then goes on to address two preliminary questions. First, there is the question of why investigating the evolution of representational decision making is useful and interesting. Second, there is the question of what kind of project investigating the evolution of representational decision making is.

Conclusions

The conclusion draws together the different aspects of the book. It then elaborates on three further aspects of the overall upshots of the book: their differences to existing work on the topic, their methodological foundations, and their implications for the nature of representational decision making.

The Evolution of Conative Representational Decision Making

This chapter defends a cognitive-efficiency-based account of the evolution of conative representational decision making. The core idea behind this account is that, similarly to cognitive representational decision makers, conative representational decision makers can, in some circumstances, adjust more easily to a changed environment and streamline their neural decision making machinery. However, as I also make clearer, the origins of these benefits are different here than in the case of cognitive representational decision making: they center on patterns in the way the organism reacts to the world, and not on patterns in the states of the world that the organism can react to. This has some important implications for the situations in which conative representational decision making is adaptive relative to when cognitive representational decision making is adaptive. The chapter ends by combining the picture laid out here with that laid out in the previous chapter to develop a clearer account of the relationship between the evolution of conative and the evolution of cognitive representational decision making.

The Need for a New Account of the Evolution of Representational Decision Making

This chapter discusses in some detail three of the key accounts of the evolution of representational decision making in the literature: (a) Ruth Millikan’s specialization-based account, (b) causality-based accounts, and (c) Kim Sterelny’s flexibility-based account. It shows that while this work makes some very important suggestions that should not be overlooked, by itself, it fails to provide a detailed and well-grounded account of the evolution of representational decision making.