Constant, I agree that we can often be unsure, but the distinction I draw in my mind is so sharp that I would always separately keep track of the two hypotheses, rather than having a single vague hypothesis. They just seem to me like such tremendously different ideas, with such different consequences! (Consider the original debate about whether you can be “agnostic” to have a single vague state of mind that encompasses theism and atheism.)
Robin, I’m happy to use “expect” to blend together conscious and subconscious expectation, because on a basic level, the structure of consciously and subconsciously signaling something is very similar. The only difference is the degree to which you can report something by introspection, and the degree to which you can make deliberate plans as opposed to taking advantage of opportunities that appear within your other plans. Even on a moral level, there’s a distinction worth drawing, but it’s not nearly as sharp. On the other hand, I have real, basic difficulty filing an evolutionary and a cognitive explanation into the same mental bucket.
I guess if I had to use a single word, the only word I could use would be “optimize”—if I said “I hypothesize that rudeness is optimized to signal high status”, that would indeed leave me agnostic about who or what did the optimizing. But how would you test this hypothesis, or derive any predictions from it—even a question like “Will rudeness go up or down with increased anonymity?”—without saying at least something about how status signaling created rudeness?
Constant, I agree that we can often be unsure, but the distinction I draw in my mind is so sharp that I would always separately keep track of the two hypotheses, rather than having a single vague hypothesis. They just seem to me like such tremendously different ideas, with such different consequences! (Consider the original debate about whether you can be “agnostic” to have a single vague state of mind that encompasses theism and atheism.)
Robin, I’m happy to use “expect” to blend together conscious and subconscious expectation, because on a basic level, the structure of consciously and subconsciously signaling something is very similar. The only difference is the degree to which you can report something by introspection, and the degree to which you can make deliberate plans as opposed to taking advantage of opportunities that appear within your other plans. Even on a moral level, there’s a distinction worth drawing, but it’s not nearly as sharp. On the other hand, I have real, basic difficulty filing an evolutionary and a cognitive explanation into the same mental bucket.
I guess if I had to use a single word, the only word I could use would be “optimize”—if I said “I hypothesize that rudeness is optimized to signal high status”, that would indeed leave me agnostic about who or what did the optimizing. But how would you test this hypothesis, or derive any predictions from it—even a question like “Will rudeness go up or down with increased anonymity?”—without saying at least something about how status signaling created rudeness?