How Intractability Spans the Cognitive and Evolutionary Levels of Explanation

Abstract

The challenge of explaining how cognition can be tractably realized is widely recognized. Classical rationality is thought to be intractable due to its assumptions of optimization and/or domain generality, and proposed solutions therefore drop one or both of these assumptions. We consider three such proposals: Resource-Rationality, the Adaptive Toolbox theory, and Massive Modularity. All three seek to ensure the tractability of cognition by shifting part of the explanation from the cognitive to the evolutionary level: Evolution is responsible for producing the tractable architecture. We consider the three proposals and show that, in each case, the intractability challenge is not thereby resolved, but only relocated from the cognitive level to the evolutionary level. We explain how non-classical accounts do not currently have the upper hand on the new playing field.

Theory Before the Test: How to Build High-Verisimilitude Explanatory Theories in Psychological Science

“…Second, and this is a less conventional and less explored idea, the framework can also be applied to noncognitive or nonindividual capacities of relevance to social, developmental, and evolutionary psychology and more. Preliminary explorations into computational-level analyses of noncognitive or nonindividual capacities can be found in work by Krafft and Griffiths (2018) on distributed social processes, Huskey et al (2020) on communication processes, Rich et al (2020) on natural and/or cultural-evolution processes, and van Rooij (2012) on self-organized processes.…”

“…Tractability/intractability analyses apply widely, not just to simple examples such as the ones above. The approach has been used to assess constraints that render tractable/intractable computational accounts for various capacities relevant for psychological science that span across domains and levels ( Table 1 ), such as coherence-based belief updating ( van Rooij et al, 2019 ), action understanding and theory of mind ( Blokpoel et al, 2013 ; van de Pol et al, 2018 ; Zeppi & Blokpoel, 2017 ), analogical processing ( van Rooij et al, 2008 ; Veale & Keane, 1997 ), problem-solving ( Wareham, 2017 ; Wareham et al, 2011 ), decision-making ( Bossaerts & Murawski, 2017 ; Bossaerts et al, 2019 ), neural-network learning ( Judd, 1990 ), compositionality of language ( Pagin, 2003 ; Pagin & Westerståhl, 2010 ), evolution, learning or development of heuristics for decision-making ( Otworowska et al, 2018 ; Rich et al, 2019 ), and evolution of cognitive architectures generally ( Rich et al, 2020 ). This existing research (for an overview, see Compendium C in van Rooij et al, 2019 ) shows that tractability is a widespread concern for theories of capacities relevant for psychological science and moreover that the techniques of tractability analysis can be fruitfully applied across psychological domains.…”

Why is scaling up models of language evolution hard?

“…If the latter is the case, it will not simply be a matter of waiting for more powerful computers to run the simulations. Intractable models are fundamentally impossible to compute for anything but small inputs by any system, be it digital (Arora & Barak, 2009), human (van Rooij, Blokpoel, Kwisthout, & Wareham, 2019) or evolution (Rich, Blokpoel, de Haan, & van Rooij, 2020). Hence, there is no way of knowing whether or not the properties and regularities observed for the toy models would scale up.…”

“…1b). Even if each individual neuron could evaluate a million languages per second, and we have seven billion people evolving at a rate of 1 generation per year for 20 million years, only 4.42 × use computational complexity theory, a tool which allows us to assess the tractability of computational problems in a mathematically well-specified way, and that has been applied to models of cognition, communication and evolution (Blokpoel et al, 2012;Rich et al, 2020;van Arkel, Woensdregt, Dingemanse, & Blokpoel, 2020;van Rooij et al, 2011). In this paper, we formalize a model of cultural language evolution that is abstract, yet sufficiently compatible with existing theories.…”

Formalizing Verbal Theories

“…Fitting to the aims and scope of Social Psychology, we focus on social psychological phenomena for our illustrations. That said, the approach that we adopt has wide applicability in psychology and can be used to sculpt theoretical models of cognitive, developmental, linguistic and evolutionary phenomena as well (Blokpoel et al, 2019;Otworowska, Blokpoel, Sweers, Wareham, & van Rooij, 2018;Rich et al, 2019;Rich, Blokpoel, de Haan, & van Rooij, 2020;van Rooij & Baggio, 2020). Fitting to the didactical aims of this article, we furthermore focus on "toy" social psychological phenomena that are complex enough to be interesting to model, yet simple enough to be accessible for the beginning modeler.…”