Dump Dennett's inuition pumps!

 Qualia are 'introspectively accessible, phenomenal aspects of our mental lives'- stuff like what I feel when I see an apple when I'm in a certain mood. Dennett employed no less that 15 intuition pumps to deny they exist. All were shit.

In a chapter titled 'Quining Qualia' he explains-

Which idea of qualia am I trying to extirpate? Everything real has properties,

Nothing really real- i.e. the Noumenal 'Nirguna Brahma'- has properties save in the manner that wholly unreal things- e.g. flying unicorns which fart rainbows- have properties- viz. by arbitrary ascription for some specific purpose. 

and since I don't deny the reality of conscious experience, I grant that conscious experience has properties. I grant moreover that each person's states of consciousness have properties in virtue of which those states have the experiential content that they do. That is to say, whenever someone experiences something as being one way rather than another, this is true in virtue of some property of something happening in them at the time, but these properties are so unlike the properties traditionally imputed to consciousness that it would be grossly misleading to call any of them the long-sought qualia.

I often claim that it is grossly misleading to say that the whiskey in your drink's cabinet is your property. Surely, it belongs to he who very kindly breaks into your house and drinks it for you? 

It is easy to say that an ascription of a property is mendacious or defeats the purpose of the exercise or something of that sort. But this is merely an arbitrary assertion backed up by sophistry 

Qualia are supposed to be special properties, in some hard-to-define way.

All sorts of properties are hard to define. So what? Let them be 'Tarskian primitives'. It may be that, most of the time or in most contexts there is nothing special about a particular property. But it may turn out to be important or special in some other context. 

My claim--which can only come into focus as we proceed--is that conscious experience has no properties that are special in any of the ways qualia have been supposed to be special. The standard reaction to this claim is the complacent acknowledgment that while some people may indeed have succumbed to one confusion or fanaticism or another, one's own appeal to a modest, innocent notion of properties of subjective experience is surely safe. It is just that presumption of innocence I want to overthrow. I want to shift the burden of proof, so that anyone who wants to appeal to private, subjective properties has to prove first that in so doing they are not making a mistake. This status of guilty until proven innocent is neither unprecedented nor indefensible (so long as we restrict ourselves to concepts).

But it applies to itself. We could say any philosophical attack on any other philosophical argument is in bad faith and guilty till proven innocent.  

A scientific argument, e.g. one based on the existence of the aether- may be arbitrary and may be refuted by a crucial experiment. It may be that a philosophical argument against the aether motivated the experiment. The result was to show the 'extension' of 'aether' was empty in the real world. But such is not currently the case with 'qualia'.

Today, no biologist would dream of supposing that it was quite all right to appeal to some innocent concept of elan vital.

The term wasn't used by biologists at any time.  Still, there may be something like a 'constructor theory' in the Life Sciences.

Of course one could use the term to mean something in good standing; one could use elan vital as one's name for DNA, for instance, but this would be foolish nomenclature, considering the deserved suspicion with which the term is nowadays burdened. I want to make it just as uncomfortable for anyone to talk of qualia--or "raw feels" or "phenomenal properties" or "subjective and intrinsic properties" or "the qualitative character" of experience--with the standard presumption that they, and everyone else, knows what on earth they are talking about.

Why stop there? Why not try to shame all philosophers into giving up their utterly useless lucubrations? Suggest to them that everybody else is laughing at them behind their backs. Also, they are all serial killers and must prove their innocence with respect to any murder in the vicinity.

Intuition pump #1: watching you eat cauliflower. I see you tucking eagerly into a helping of steaming cauliflower, the merest whiff of which makes me faintly nauseated, and I find myself wondering how you could possible relish that taste, and then it occurs to me that to you, cauliflower probably tastes (must taste? ) different. A plausible hypothesis, it seems, especially since I know that the very same food often tastes different to me at different times. For instance, my first sip of breakfast orange juice tastes much sweeter than my second sip if I interpose a bit of pancakes and maple syrup, but after a swallow or two of coffee, the orange juice goes back to tasting (roughly? exactly?) the way it did the first sip. Surely we want to say (or think about) such things, and surely we are not wildly wrong when we do, so . . . surely it is quite OK to talk of the way the juice tastes to Dennett at time t, and ask whether it is just the same as or different from the way the juice tastes to Dennett at time t', or the way the juice tastes to Jones at time t. This "conclusion" seems innocent, but right here we have already made the big mistake. The final step presumes that we can isolate the qualia from everything else that is going on--at least in principle or for the sake of argument.

No it doesn't. We just need to distinguish it or infer it is a distinguishable causal factor. We don't need to presume we can isolate it anymore than we think we can isolate our nose from our face.  

 ...the mistake is not in supposing that we can in practice ever or always perform this act of purification with certainty, but the more fundamental mistake of supposing that there is such a residual property to take seriously, however uncertain our actual attempts at isolation of instances might be.

You can't separate your nose from your face even if you pull it really hard. Your fundamental mistake was to think you have a nose. Also, you got no dick and everybody is making fun of you. 

intuition pump #2: the wine-tasting machine. Could Gallo Brothers replace their human wine tasters with a machine? A computerbased "expert system" for quality control and classification is probably within the bounds of existing technology... Such a machine might well perform better than human wine tasters on all reasonable tests of accuracy and consistency the winemakers could devise  but surely no matter how "sensitive" and "discriminating" such a system becomes, it will never have, and enjoy, what we do when we taste a wine: the qualia of conscious experience!

I suppose a computerized system for quality control on juices or even beer might already have been implemented. Fine wines, however, are not beverages simply. We believe that to appreciate them, we need to develop a discerning palate. The expert wine-taster educates the oenophile community in the same way that the leading art critic explains to why the ghastly daubings of heroin addicts are actually aesthetic masterpieces. 

The fact that our 'qualia' when drinking expensive champagne change suddenly when we are told it is a cheap and cheerful Prosecco suggests that there is no simple supervenience on chemistry or biology here. There is some added cognitive factor of a subjective and perhaps 'dialectical' type. Qualia are 'intensions' which have unknown, perhaps unknowable, extensions. But perhaps this is also true of every other phenomena we can name.  

Whatever informational, dispositional, functional properties its internal states have, none of them will be special in the way qualia are. If you share that intuition, you believe that there are qualia in the sense I am targeting for demolition. What is special about qualia? Traditional analyses suggest some fascinating second-order properties of these properties

Qualia are themselves 'second order properties' ascribed to some imputed activity of the brain or nervous system.  

First, since one cannot say to another, no matter how eloquent one is and no matter how cooperative and imaginative one's audience is, exactly what way one is currently seeing, tasting, smelling and so forth, qualia are ineffable

only in the sense that everything is. What matters is whether for any given purpose you can convey useful information accurately enough. I can't tell the optician what I'm seeing but I can read off the chart as she swops lenses. The same is true of qualia. 'I feel sad when I see this apple- well, maybe not sad exactly- it's more a sort of sharp stab of remorse for lost innocence...but, no, that isn't it either. I am reminded of what Pushkin wrote about the Countess Anastasia whose misfortune it was to have been married off at a young age to a homosexual potato.' 

--in fact the paradigm cases of ineffable items. According to tradition, at least part of the reason why qualia are ineffable is that they are intrinsic properties--

ascribed to imputed, but equally intrinsic, brain functions.  

which seems to imply inter alia that they are somehow atomic and unanalyzable.

If atoms can be analysed into more elementary particles, why not anything else? Even if the thing itself is not irreducible, it might be simulated well enough for some specific purpose 

Since they are "simple" or "homogeneous" there is nothing to get hold of when trying to describe such a property to one unacquainted with the particular instance in question.

Simple things- like snow- may be easy to name. They are difficult to describe to people with no experience of them. 

Moreover, verbal comparisons are not the only cross-checks ruled out. Any objective, physiological or "merely behavioral" test--such as those passed by the imaginary wine-tasting system-- would of necessity miss the target (one can plausibly argue), so all interpersonal comparisons of these ways-of-appearing are (apparently) systematically impossible.

Interpersonal comparisons of utility are impossible but, for any useful purpose, they can be made easily enough. That's why the Economy works well enough. But the same is true of language. I suppose one could invoke a result by Chichilnisky which shows why if preference and endowment diversity doesn't meet a Goldilocks' condition, there will be no market or language game for the thing in question. Thus, some qualia are things we do talk about or which marketing guys have focus groups to discover. Other qualia may not be- at least for the moment.  

In other words, qualia are essentially private properties.

like our feelings- till the moment seems right to reveal them and you find out to your chagrin that the camel just wants to be friend. It is actually in this crazy complicated relationship with Barbara Streisland. What? I am not speaking of myself here.  Back in the Seventies, it was the sort of thing which could have happened to anybody. Anyway, I never resented Barbara for stealing my role in 'Hello Dolly'. But Yentl? Gimme a break!

And, finally, since they are properties of my experiences (they're not chopped liver, and they're not properties of, say, my cerebral blood flow--or haven't you been paying attention?), qualia are essentially directly accessible to the consciousness of their experiencer (whatever that means) or qualia are properties of one's experience with which one is intimately or directly acquainted (whatever that means) or "immediate phenomenological qualities" (Block, 1978) (whatever that means).

Nothing essential need be predicated of a property you ascribe to something imputed to brain functions. It is perfectly possible that there are possible worlds where that property might have a wholly different spectrum.  

They are, after all, the very properties the appreciation of which permits us to identify our conscious states.

Only by imputation. Scientists may discover an actual mechanism or, at least, a useful Structural Causal Model which will 'close' some of these philosophical problems.  

So, to summarize the tradition, qualia are supposed to be properties of a subject's mental states that are (1) ineffable (2) intrinsic (3) private (4) directly or immediately apprehensible in consciousness

So they are like having a crush on this really cool Drama instructor you have who also happens to be a camel who may or may not have had an on-off relationship with Barbara Streisland. 

Thus are qualia introduced onto the philosophical stage.

As a way for philosophers to say mean things about each other.  

They have seemed to be very significant properties to some theorists because they have seemed to provide an insurmountable and unavoidable stumbling block to functionalism, or more broadly, to materialism, or more broadly still, to any purely "third-person" objective viewpoint or approach to the world (Nagel, 1986).

You don't need to be a philosopher to reject crude types of reductionism. Just because I once asked out a camel doesn't mean I think I am Omar Sharif. I could be Barbara Streisland.  

Qualia seem to many people

especially in Sub-Saharan Africa 

to be the last ditch defense of the inwardness and elusiveness of our minds, a bulwark against creeping mechanism.

Minds can go fuck themselves. It is my immortal soul which will get me into a Paradise where all the camels have low self-esteem and are grateful for any smidgeon of attention. It is important that souls be unique- otherwise some other camel-fucker might get my spot- but minds don't matter because, truth be told, they are full of shit.  

They are sure there must be some sound path from the homely cases to the redoubtable category of the philosophers, since otherwise their last bastion of specialness will be stormed by science.

Their special place is their bum-hole. Dennett is saying the Scientists will fuck the philosophers in the ass.  

This special status for these presumed properties has a long and eminent tradition. I believe it was Einstein who once advised us that science could not give us the taste of the soup.

because it was a 'gestalt'- a whole bigger than its parts. I suppose we would speak of an 'emergent'. 

Could such a wise man have been wrong? Yes, if he is taken to have been trying to remind us of the qualia that hide forever from objective science in the subjective inner sancta of our minds.

Nope. Gestaltism was big back then. Reichenbach was a pal of Kurt Lewin.  

There are no such things. Another wise man said so-- Wittgenstein (1958, esp.pp.91-100). Actually, what he said was: The thing in the box has no place in the language-game at all; not even as a something; for the box might even be empty. --No, one can 'divide through' by the thing in the box; it cancels out, whatever it is. (p.100)

Schrodinger's cat was in the box. Witlesstein was babbling nonsense.  

and then he went on to hedge his bets by saying "It is not a something, but not a nothing either! The conclusion was only that a nothing would serve just as well as a something about which nothing could be said." (p.102)

Nothing good can be said about a shithead who didn't get that only game-theory can explain language games.  

Both Einstein's and Wittgenstein's remarks are endlessly amenable to exegesis, but rather than undertaking to referee this War of the Titans, I choose to take what may well be a more radical stand than Wittgenstein's.  Qualia are not even "something about which nothing can be said"; "qualia" is a philosophers' term which fosters nothing but confusion, and refers in the end to no properties or features at all.

Why not just embrace logical positivism and say Philosophy is just semantic confusion? The trouble is a lot of philosophers have tenure. Also, the thing is cheap to teach so maybe the thing can cross-subsidize the football team.  

The original version of intuition pump #3: the inverted spectrum (Locke, 1690: II, xxxii, 15) is a speculation about two people: how do I know that you and I see the same subjective color when we look at something?

We don't. But, if we were brought up in the same culture and have good eyesight, there are some complicated way to confirm that we are pretty similar in this respect for any particular purpose.  

Since we both learned color words by being shown public colored objects, our verbal behavior will match even if we experience entirely different subjective colors. The intuition that this hypothesis is systematically unconfirmable (and undisconfirmable, of course) has always been quite robust, but some people have always been tempted to think technology could (in principle) bridge the gap.

It does- if the thing matters enough commercially or for some other such purpose.  

Suppose, in intuition pump #4: the Brainstorm machine, there were some neuroscientific apparatus that fits on your head and feeds your visual experience into my brain (as in the movie, Brainstorm, which is not to be confused with the book, Brainstorms). With eyes closed I accurately report everything you are looking at, except that I marvel at how the sky is yellow, the grass red, and so forth. Would this not confirm, empirically, that our qualia were different? But suppose the technician then pulls the plug on the connecting cable, inverts it 180 degrees and reinserts it in the socket. Now I report the sky is blue, the grass green, and so forth. Which is the "right" orientation of the plug? Designing and building such a device would require that its "fidelity" be tuned or calibrated by the normalization of the two subjects' reports--so we would be right back at our evidential starting point. The moral of this intuition pump is that no intersubjective comparison of qualia is possible, even with perfect technology.

The problem with this argument is that it can be easily refuted thus 'You have just told us you eat your own shit. I don't know why you did so. We were actually discussing qualia. Still, it must be said, your confession of coprophagy explains so much about your personality'. You may deny that you admitted coprophagy. But how can you be sure that what you said wasn't only receivable by me as an admission that you eat your own shit? In other words, the moment you start saying you can't make interpersonal comparisons of utility or qualia, your interlocutor is at liberty to act as if no interpersonal semantics is possible. Everybody hears something different. 

The solution is easy. For some specific purpose, we can always do good enough interpersonal comparisons unless preference or endowment diversity is too great. 

So matters stood until someone dreamt up the presumably improved version of the thought experiment: the intra-personal inverted spectrum. The idea seems to have occurred to several people independently (Gert, 1965, Putnam, 1965, Tayler, 1966, Shoemaker, 1969, 1975, Lycan, 1973). Probably Block and Fodor (1972) have it in mind when they say "It seems to us that the standard verificationist counterarguments against the view that the 'inverted spectrum' hypothesis is conceptually incoherent are not persuasive." (p.172.) In this version, intuition pump #5: the neurosurgical prank, the experiences to be compared are all in one mind. You wake up one morning to find that the grass has turned red, the sky yellow, and so forth. No one else notices any color anomalies in the world, so the problem must be in you. You are entitled, it seems, to conclude that you have undergone visual color qualia inversion (and we later discover, if you like, just how the evil neurophysiologists tampered with your neurons to accomplish this). Here it seems at first--and indeed for quite a while--that qualia are acceptable properties after all, because propositions about them can be justifiably asserted, empirically verified and even explained. After all, in the imagined case, we can tell a tale in which we confirm a detailed neurophysiological account of the precise etiology of the dramatic change you undergo. It is tempting to suppose, then, that neurophysiological evidence, incorporated into a robust and ramifying theory, would have all the resolving power we could ever need for determining whether or not someone's qualia have actually shifted. 

Actually, our two eyes see colours slightly differently. We don't notice this till we have to use one eye only for a period and then only the other eye for a period.  

But this is a mistake.

No. 

It will take some patient exploration to reveal the mistake in depth, but the conclusion can be reached --if not secured--quickly with the help of intuition pump #6: alternative neurosurgery. There are (at least) two different ways the evil neurosurgeon might create the inversion effect described in intuition pump #5: (I) Invert one of the "early" qualia-producing channels, e.g., in the optic nerve, so that all relevant neural events "downstream" are the "opposite" of their original and normal values. Ex hypothesi this inverts your qualia. (II) Leave all those early pathways intact and simply invert certain memory-access links--whatever it is that accomplishes your tacit (and even unconscious!) comparison of today's hues with those of yore. Ex hypothesi this does not invert your qualia at all, but just your memory-anchored dispositions to react to them. On waking up and finding your visual world highly anomalous, you should exclaim "Egad! Something has happened! Either my qualia have been inverted or my memory-linked qualia-reactions have been inverted. I wonder which!" The intrapersonal inverted spectrum thought experiment was widely supposed to be an improvement, since it moved the needed comparison into one subject's head.

But we don't know if the thing is 'compossible'. We do know that our two eyes see colour slightly differently and there is a incrementally improving Structural Causal Model of this.  There are some serious illnesses which cause different eyes to see different colours. 

But now we can see that this is an illusion,

This guy tells us stupid fairy stories and then talks about seeing some nonsense is an illusion.  

since the link to earlier experiences, the link via memory, is analogous to the imaginary cable that might link two subjects in the original version. This point is routinely--one might say traditionally--missed by the constructors of "intrasubjective inverted spectrum" thought experiments, who suppose that the subject's noticing the difference--surely a vivid experience of discovery by the subject--would have to be an instance of (directly? incorrigibly?) recognizing the difference as a shift in qualia.

which is all it is. By definition 'qualia' belong to the brain able to report on them. Nothing else matters. 

But as my example shows, we could achieve the same startling effect in a subject without tampering with his presumed qualia at all.

If he sees something different his qualia have changed. Tampering does not matter.  

Since ex hypothesi the two different surgical invasions can produce exactly the same introspective effects while only one operation inverts the qualia, nothing in the subject's experience can favor one of the hypotheses over the other.

This is irrelevant. Either you notice a change in how you see colour or no change in qualia has occurred no matter what tampering may have gone on. It is a different matter that specific qualia may be multiply realizable 'emergents' or 'gestalts' with different degrees of 'redundancy' or 'robustness'. But that doesn't alter the fact that we can say they change when people say they are seeing colours differently 

So unless he seeks outside help, the state of his own qualia must be as unknowable to him as the state of anyone else's qualia.

Similarly, if somebody cut off his dick, he would not know this unless he got outside help because he would just assume his brain had been hooked up to some dickless person's body. True his peeing or wanking qualia may have seemed to change for him but how the fuck would he know if this were actually the case?  

Hardly the privileged access or immediate acquaintance or direct apprehension the friends of qualia had supposed "phenomenal features" to enjoy! The outcome of this series of thought experiments is an intensification of the "verificationist" argument against qualia.

Sadly, you have to a fucking scientific experiment to verify if sciencey things like the aether exist. Qualia however are like Utility of feelings of various sorts.  

If there are qualia, they are even less accessible to our ken than we had thought.

So what? They could be like 'inaccessible cardinals' which exist in most types of math we do.  

Not only are the classical intersubjective comparisons impossible (as the Brainstorm machine shows), but we cannot tell in our own cases whether our qualia have been inverted--at least not by introspection. It is surely tempting at this point--especially to non-philosophers--to decide that this paradoxical result must be an artifact of some philosophical misanalysis or other, the sort of thing that might well happen if you took a perfectly good pre-theoretical notion--our everyday notion of qualia--and illicitly stretched it beyond the breaking point. The philosophers have made a mess; let them clean it up; meanwhile we others can get back to work, relying as always on our sober and unmetaphysical acquaintance with qualia.

The problem is that we don't really need the word or the underlying concept. Why? We don't greatly care about minds. Bodies matter and souls might matter even more but mind stuff does not matter save in so far as it relates to mental health. But we'd rather take a pill for that. 

Philosophy of Mind like the Philosophy of language has proved useless and stupid. Dennett's 'intuition pumps' confirm this view. But it doesn't go far enough. Why not just say that Philosophy is shit? Engrams may be useful to scientists. Qualia aren't useful to man nor beast. But, if you have to have stupid and useless people to teach useless and stupid people as part of a Credentialist Ponzi Scheme, why not just turn a blind eye to the Philosophy Department? After all, there is plenty of other types of more actively evil craziness running amok on Liberal Arts Campuses.

John Allen Paulos's potty party game theory

15 years ago, 3 Quarks published a post titled

From Dreams And Delusions To Wars And Wiretapping
POSTED ON WEDNESDAY, AUG 6, 2008 4:46AM BY S. ABBAS RAZA

John Allen Paulos in his excellent Who’s Counting column at ABC News

It appears Paulos thought that the recent amendment to the FISA act permitting more wiretapping of people abroad would have bad consequences.

Earlier this week 3 Quarks published another post from the same author which once again claims that we can understand the world better by paying attention to a 'party game' thought-experiment. 

This post is titled-

Dreams, Stories, And Self-Revelation

POSTED ON MONDAY, NOV 20, 2023 1:15AM BY JOHN ALLEN PAULOS

I'm not sure what prompted this particular, nearly identical piece. Still, it is worth drawing attention to what may be a popular misconceptions regarding game theory which some mathematicians might subscribe to. To begin, I need to explain that, in Econ, a 'money pump' is a thought experiment designed to show it is irrational to hold intransitive preferences- i.e. to prefer a over b and b over c but then choose c over a. Sadly, such preferences are rational because, where Knightian Uncertainty exists, it is regret minimizing to do 'discovery'.  Moreover, where there is information asymmetry it is irrational to think there will be only one extended game form or (equivalently) that all information can be captured in the pay-off matrix (because of impredicativity, intensional fallacy etc.) This means you have to be very scrupulous in how you use game theory or, indeed, any type of inductive reason.

Turning from 'money pumps' to 'intuition pumps' or 'persuasion machines' which are, in the words of their inventor 

'A popular strategy in philosophy (involving the construction of) a certain sort of thought experiment. (They) are cunningly designed to focus the reader's attention on "the important" features, and to deflect the reader from bogging down in hard-to-follow details. There is nothing wrong with this in principle.'

Nor is it wrong for a magician to 'force a card' on a member of the audience. But it is merely a trick done for the purpose of entertainment.

 'Indeed one of philosophy's highest callings is finding ways of helping people see the forest=

the forest is useful, sciencey, stuff or else things which improve our decision making in economics and politics. 

 and not just the trees. 

Only philosophy bothers with Smullyan truth trees. 

'But intuition pumps are often abused, though seldom deliberately.'

So, philosophers are so stupid they don't know they are abusing things they invent. Still, if they aren't raping their students, perhaps we should just let them get on with such shenanigans. 

Paulos's current article begins thus-

Philosopher Daniel Dennett’s new book, I’ve Been Thinking, just came out, and I was reminded of a party game he’s written about. A variant of the child’s game of twenty questions, it is relevant to an increasingly pressing question: How do different social bubbles, media subcultures, or cults develop.

This is something we know a great deal about. To simplify matters, we begin with certain 'uncorrelated asymmetries'- i.e. arbitrary differences, e.g. that of race or gender or age- and consider what 'coordination' and 'discoordination' games they give rise to. These correspond to 'cheap talk' pooling equilibria and 'costly signal' based separating equilibria. There is arbitrage- involving hedging and income effects between coordination and discoordination games and this can affect what is or isn't in the 'core' (or contract curve) of the relevant Political Economy. 

Some game theoretic concepts- e.g. 'Shapley Values'- can be useful but they may not be robust. There can be 'topological holes' in the decision space. Things can change in the blink of an eye.  Math can be misleading even if it appears to be 'paying for itself'.  

Let me start with the game, generalized versions of which are ubiquitous. It’s probably one of Dennett’s most compelling intuition pumps; that is, thought experiments with made-up, but plausible outcomes.

Will Paulos supply a game theoretic account of the game? My contention is that if he did so he would soon see the thing is misconceived. It would end abruptly after a couple of iterations. The guy who suggested it would be looked upon as a fool.  

Imagine a group of people at a party who choose one person and ask him (throughout, or her) to leave the room. The “victim” is told that while he is out of the room one of the other partygoers will relate a recent dream to the group. He is also told that on his return to the party, he must try, asking Yes or No questions only, to do two things: describe the dream and possibly figure out whose dream it was.

His first question is 'is there really any dream that was described? Yes or No.'  If the answer is No, the game terminates immediately. If it is 'Yes', it must terminate on the next round if rational expectations obtain- i.e. the correct economic theory (which is game theoretic) is held by all participants. 

The big reveal is that no one relates any dream.

The thing is a 'gotcha'. You tried to be super-smart and Freudian but you ended up looking a shmuck.  

The party-goers decide to respond either Yes or No to the victim’s questions according to chance or, perhaps, according to some arbitrary rule.

In which there is a 50 percent chance the game terminates immediately. Even otherwise, the guy is at liberty to say he doesn't believe there was any dream unless for his own reasons he wants to embarrass guests by asking whether the dreamer enjoyed having sex with her granny while her Daddy jizzed on her face.  

Any rule will do and may be supplemented by a non‑contradiction requirement so that no answer directly contradicts an earlier one.

But the guy asking the questions can use any rule he likes- e.g. ask the most embarrassing possible question- or, if he can't be bothered, adamantly insist that there was no dream. The other guests just wanted him out of the room so as to display their puny genitals to each other. 

What might happen is that the victim, impelled by his own obsessions, constructs a phantasmagoric, or at least a, weird dream in response to the random answers he elicits.

Which is only interesting because we think dreams might themselves be weird 'narratives' imposed on some sort of brain activity to do with memory updating and conservation during sleep. In a sense, the 'victim' is like a Freudian analyst imposing his own psychic pathology on the sub-consciousness of the supposed dreamer. It doesn't matter if there was no dream. By refusing to recognize you fucked your granny in your dream you are displaying 'resistance' which proves you do nothing but lust after granny save when you take a break to imagine decapitating Dad and shitting down his neck. You need therapy. Lots of therapy- unless you are poor in which case you can just fuck off.  

He may even think he knows whose dream it was, but then the trick is revealed to him. The dream, of course, has no author, but in a sense the victim himself is.

There was a time when Freud was considered a great healer, not a charlatan. It was in that context that this gedanken had salience. 

His preoccupations dictate his questions, which even if answered negatively at first, frequently receive a positive response when slightly reformulated. These positive responses are then pursued.

We are familiar with situations where the interlocutor is trying to steer you to a pre-determined outcome- e.g admitting guilt to the detective or agreeing with the salesman that buying a Time Share in Atlantis will definitely make you the envy of your neighbouring fishes. 

We can relax the rules of the party game. It’s not hard to develop more realistic generalizations that can be presented informally, say as a quiz on a slyly programmed website.

This sounds like 'click-bait' unless you are paying people to play. But, if it is 'click-bait' surely it will be used for some more remunerative purpose? There may be ways to buy votes using such techniques but the techniques themselves don't matter because those with lots of cash, or time on their hands, could use that technique to advance their own agenda. But this type of competition 'cancels out'. Maybe there is a little more 'noise-to-signal' but nothing really changes.  

Instead of inducing the victim to describe a dream, for example, he can be tasked to elaborate on a generic story or parable (for example, boy meets girl, or person overcomes obstacles, or man tricks his boss) he’s given. Let’s also assume that the party-goers are somewhat more uniform, say university students, or race car fans, or pediatric nurses, a collection of bots, or whatever, and that they are told that their answers should be generally random, but coherent and loosely relevant to the generic story. The story elicited by the victim’s questions in this case might be likely to reflect a worldview similar to the party-goers, albeit perhaps more self-revelatory and extreme.

It is likely to be less so. This is because we think of dreams as less structured and more bizarre than narratives we construct. 

Or we can go much further and assume that the victim himself chooses the party-goers. Assume these people belong to a loose association of more or less like-minded people, either online or in real life, and that they subscribe to a party line that jibes roughly with his outlook on many matters.

This is irrelevant. The fact is, the guy looks a fool if he doesn't first establish there really was a dream. Assuming asking questions is costly (it uses up valuable drinking time), the way to go is to ask 'was there really a dream?' and then say 'I don't believe you' if the answer is 'yes'. 

There is a kind of 'a priori' reason why there can be no dream. This has to do with the difficulty of describing a dream or even a personal experience with such high accuracy that other people can answer more and more detailed 'yes/no' questions about it. In physics there is a 'constructor theory of information'. What is the 'constructor' such that a dream can be accurately described? Surely it doesn't exist. You remember things about your dream (though they may be confabulations) the more you talk about it.  But even a person who spent hours listening to you gassing on about the dream can't add details you did not mention because it wasn't their dream, it was yours. You can't answer 'Yes/No' honestly. You have to say 'I don't know. Please ask the person who had that dream.' True, you can tell random lies, but there are statistical ways to test for inconsistency though, in this case, there would be no point to going down that laborious road. Just trust to the maximal uncertainty principle and declare there was no dream.

The group (or even an app or a collection of bots) is also told (programmed) to give answers that are somewhat random,

by Razbarov-Rudich we can't distinguish pseudo-random from random 

but coherent and generally relevant to their take on the generic story given to the victim. Because of the victim’s existing but perhaps nascent predilections and his similarity to the party-goers he has chosen, the group’s simple Yes-or-No answers to his questions are more likely to lead him down a political, psychological, or even hallucinatory rabbit hole.

But, from the sound of things, he was already away with the fairies. The rational response is to say there can't be a dream because no description can reproduce its every detail and thus some members of the party will have to answer 'I don't know' to a finer-grained question. True, they may tell random lies but it would be little fun to catch them out by some laborious process of statistical analysis.

 There are some games which look 'symmetric' but can't possibly be so because of an uncorrelated asymmetry of an arbitrary type- e.g. who actually had the dream. Consider the Monty Hall problem. The Game Show host will only open the door behind which there is nothing. He has knowledge the contestant does not. Thus the contestant's expected distribution changes and so it is rational for her to change her choice.  In this case, there is no rational reason not to go with the 'pure strategy' of saying there was no dream. The thing was a 'gotcha'. 

Again the author of the resultant story is the victim, whose obsessive questions guide its development, but here the party-goers obviously have a much stronger supporting role.

Not if the victim is rational. He explains to them why the game was fundamentally flawed. Suppose the party goers agree on a fabricated dream as a 'back up' just in case the guy raises the obvious objection to it. He can then grill the party-goers and detect their deceit because there is a suspicious unanimity in some responses, but random fluctuations on others. Fraud investigators look for such patterns all the time. The trouble with lying is that the list of things you can affirm is much smaller than it is for the truth teller who can always come up with additional information consistent with his basic story. 

Moreover, in this latter case when the victim chooses his party-goers, matters can easily become incestuous enough to further shape the group as well as the victim.

So, we are now speaking of a maniac who has carefully chosen a bunch of similarly crazy collaborators. They are all wearing tin-foil hats and whispering about the Jewish Lesbians who have taken over the Papacy.  

Over time, their inchoate inclinations can be mutually cultivated, repeated, and exaggerated to allow them to settle on those they endow with halos and those they endow with horns. The distinction between victim and party-goers dissolves and a cult is born.

No. Cults require a charismatic leader. There has to be a 'buck stopping' mechanism even for paranoid nonsense. The Pope, it is true, is a Jewish Lesbian, but this doesn't mean we can't get milkshakes from McDonald's because my cousin works there and, anyway, it is actually a front for the Muslim Brotherhood.  

These extensions of the party game are not such unrealistic scenarios as common critiques of the algorithms governing various platforms show.

3Quarks very quickly bans comments from people like me. Do they bother with an algorithm? Who cares?  

Not just parties, but many everyday interactions in close-knit social groups easily give rise to similar situations as well. Tweaking the game in these and other ways can lead a victim to a lockstep submission to groupthink.

This guy is a Professor at Temple University which appears to be deeply divided on Hamas's atrocities. There certainly does seem to be a lot of 'lockstep' submission to 'groupthink' on campuses. But campuses may be ceasing to matter. China may already have overtaken the US in certain strategic STEM subjects. By the end of the decade, the West may have no say in what happens not just in the MENA but also Mexico and Latin America.  

His hypothesis-generating ability can remain intact even if the ability to test or falsify hypotheses is undermined by misinformation, sensory deprivation, societal unrest, or interpersonal stress.

Not to mention being sodomized by the Lesbian Pope.  

He rejects nuance and uncertainty and unencumbered by any critical reality checks, spews out dreams, absurdities, and extreme political views.

What is this Math Professor spewing here? Dennett's 'intuition pump' is obviously shit. Why? Either this is an interesting game because there is something like a 'Harsanyi Transformation' (if everybody is rational) or else there is a 'gotcha' element to it. In the former case, there is some convoluted mathematical method to extract noise from signal. But that isn't really very amusing- is it? Thus the thing has to be a 'gotcha' situation. 

The principle of maximum uncertainty dictates a pure strategy of terminating the game after one or two iterations  because it is not rational to think that a dream can have an accurate description. (This does not mean Statistical analysis can't be helpful in weeding out non-dreamers but you would need additional assumptions).

I suppose what the Professor is getting at is the notion that right-wing people are crazy and evil and they get together and start ranting and raving. But this may be even more true of left-wing academics. 

Similar remarks may help clarify why silly I Ching sayings,

Chinese literary culture solves many coordination and discoordination problems for very smart people spread across the globe. The same is true of traditional Hindu astrology. There are screening and signalling aspects to such civilizational artefacts. Moreover, they create ontologically dysphoric goods and services of a positional or prudential kind. 

astrological predictions, ethnic and religious differences,

which are the basis of nationality in many parts of the world. They are 'uncorrelated asymmetries' which dictate eusocial 'bourgeoise strategies' though, sadly, some ethnicities or religious sects may currently be unable to create viable states.   

or even QAnon conspiracies seem to so many to be so apt.

3Quarks has its own political slant. So what? We understand that different people have different affiliative needs. Pakistanis are bound to have sympathy for Palestinian Muslims. Sadly, they are currently having to deport a lot of Afghan refugees. Affiliation is all very well, but the Economy comes first. 

Their aptness is self‑provided and often bolstered by the group with whom they gradually choose to align ourselves.

Some people at Temple University are aligning themselves with Hamas. How long before some guy runs amok with a knife?  

To one degree or another we’re all prone to the party game of life.

Not if we know game theory. Scratch that. You need common sense to get what you want out of cocktail parties and political parties and other affiliative mechanisms.  

As F. Scott Fitzgerald famously wrote, “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.”

Socrates said this was the mark of a philosopher. But a 'lover of wisdom' isn't necessarily wise and a lover of super-models, like myself, remains a sad and lonely virgin.  

Difficult as it may be, we have to forswear simple questions and answers,

No. We should stick to simple questions like 'how does this benefit me?' and settle for  answers which are 'good-enough' approximations or 'buck stopped' solutions to concurrency problems.  

be wary of the people with whom we associate,

be wary of certain types of associations. The trouble with cheering for 'pay for slay' terrorists is that they may want you to do a bit of knifing yourself. If you refuse, they laugh very loudly after they frame you for their own crimes and watch you rot in prison.  

and restrain our tendency to be seduced by just-so stories,

Jews did not immigrate to Palestine and buy land there. They invaded the place with their mighty air-force and colonized it. Then they instituted 'apartheid'. It became illegal for a Jew to marry an Arab. This is a 'just-so' story. Is this Professor going to come out against it? Not if he wants to continue to publish in 3Quarks. The people who run it may be pretty humane and liberal (the founder, who is Pakistani, personally re-posted an article showing UNRWA as complicit in Hamas's atrocities)  but they don't want to go the way of Salman Taseer, not to mention Salman Rushdie.  

our own and those of others. Voltaire was dead-on: believing absurdities can lead to committing atrocities.

Absurdly, he believed that a Jesuit text was actually an ancient Hindu text. But he committed no atrocities. Hamas has done so because it wants unconditional support from the get-go. So far, it has achieved its aim. Sadly, this may mean more misery for the Palestinians while Shia' Iran dominates the Fertile Crescent. What matters is that billionaires in Doha and TV stations in Erdogan's Turkey, not to mention the Ikhwan's position in the Iraqi administration, are secured for at least the next couple of years. 

Still, it is brave of this Math Professor to suggest that crazy 'pay for slay' nutters believe in an absurd creed. 

The Normative status of Logic

A Logic is a set of rules yielding valid inferences provided the conditional tautologies on which they are based are themselves true. Such rules are not value judgments. We don't say the 'excluded middle' rule is very naughty coz it is excluding the middle from its snobby playgroup. We might say, as the Intuitionists do, that it permits illegitimate inferences and thus should be discarded. But that is not because the rule is naughty but because the inferences it permits are defective.

Can a Logic have a 'normative status'? If so, why not a particular number system- Arabic rather than Hindu- or an alphabet- Latin against Devnagari?

Currently, we think 'Logical Pluralism' is 'normative'- in the sense of being useful and conforming to real world doxastic reasoning- and, moreover, that Dialethia & paraconsistent logics can permit superior pragmatics.

Given these considerations, it seems strange that there are some academics who still think it worthwhile to go on gassing on about the soi disant 'normative status of logic'.

Consider the following introductory paragraph from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy on this subject-

We consider it to be a bad thing to be inconsistent. Similarly, we criticize others for failing to appreciate (at least the more obvious) logical consequences of their beliefs.

Is this really true? No doubt, as small children we accuse our parents of being inconsistent because the want us 'to do as they say, not do as they do'. However, we soon outgrow such childishness. By the time we are in High School, we have learned to feel contempt for the kid who is constantly putting his hand up to show he is smarter than the teacher coz of some supposed inconsistency in what she is saying.
But, the thing is puerile. We understand that the 'Structural Causal Model' being invoked is merely heuristic; it is deliberately under-specified for reasons of communicative economy, and thus applying Logic to it won't get us to valid inferences.  Instead, they will make us stupider and more obstreperous than our ignorance would otherwise militate for.

It is not the case that we act inconsistently when our SCM is underspecified and our 'cheap talk' reasoning does not conform to any 'logical structure' upon that model simply because it would be too cognitively costly to bother.

The Stanford article, takes the opposite view-

In both cases there is a failure to conform one’s attitudes to logical strictures.

 Logical structures only exist upon a fully specified SCM which may itself not be effectively 'computable'- i.e. have an accessible mathematical representation. Still, they can give us an idea of the direction in which a Schelling focal solution to a coordination problem exists. Attitudes orient us towards those focal points and have mimetic value. There is no great metaphysical 'scandal' or epistemological 'failure' here. The thing is economic simply.

We generally take agents who fall short of the demands of logic to be rationally defective.

Nonsense! I can't put my wife in a lunatic asylum just because I think her to be 'rationally defective' in preferring to sleep with much  uglier and poorer men than myself, protesting all the while that she cares about me deeply and wants us to work on our marriage.

This suggests that logic has a normative role to play in our rational economy; it instructs us how we ought or ought not to think or reason.

 This is the suggestion of our bad angel who will cause us to fuck up every relationship we get into. A sociopath or paranoiac may be able to 'reason' much more logically than we can. A Computer may be wholly logical in its operations and yet come to crazy conclusions.

The test of how we ought or ought not to think or reason is empirical. If we are successful in pursuing the sort of aims a Court would find it 'reasonable' for us to have, then we are not 'rationally defective' even if we claim that our actions are based upon Astrology or Numerology or some other such 'rationally defective' belief system.

The notion that logic has such a normative role to play is deeply anchored in the way we traditionally think about and teach logic. To consider just two examples, Kant characterizes what he calls “pure general” logic as embodying the “absolutely necessary rules of thought without which there can be no employment whatsoever of the understanding” (A52/B76), which instruct us not “how the understanding is and thinks” but “how it ought to proceed” (Kant 1974 [1800]: 16).

But Kant came to crazy conclusions- e.g. slavery was cool but wanking was a terrible violation of Human Freedom.

How thought ought to proceed is something we can only decide by looking at the likely outcome of actions based on that thought.

Of course, Logic could be normative, if we live in an Occasionalist Universe (i.e. one where everything is pre-ordained) governed by a crazy God who will punish us horribly in the after-life if we don't think the way He has decided we ought to.

Similarly, Frege, in his vehement opposition to the psychologistic tendencies of his time, classifies logic, “like ethics” as a “normative science” (Frege 1897/1979: 228), one whose laws “prescribe universally how one should think if one is to think at all” (Frege 1893/1903/2009: xv).

But Frege's project collapsed because of Godel & Tarski & Turing and so forth. Logic is not a 'normative science' because it can't include its own metalanguage and thus attach a normative label to its own operations.

This entry is concerned with the question as to whether the tradition and the intuitions that appear to underwrite it are correct. In other words, it is concerned with the question as to whether logic has normative authority over us? And if so, in what sense exactly it can be said to do so?

The  question is a foolish one. The answer is no; logic has no 'normative authority' over us. No logician has ever claimed it does or can do. Logic itself can't contain its own meta-language- i.e. it isn't normative even with respect to itself.

Let us see how a worthless branch of the Academy can continue to pretend otherwise.

Before we can hope to make any headway with these questions a number of clarifications are in order. First and foremost, in asking after the normative status of logic, we had better get clearer on what we mean by “logic”. For present purposes, I will take a logic to be a specification of a relation of logical consequence on a set of truth-bearers.

Since 'a truth-bearer is an entity that is said to be either true or false and nothing else' and if propositions are 'modally neutral'- i.e. don't differentiate between possible worlds and thus have no description as a probability distribution- they are themselves the output, or logical consequence, of the operation of a system of logic.

What is the point of defining something in terms of itself?  If I say- 'I will take a boojandi to be a specification of a relationship of boojandiness on a set of boojandis' - in what manner have I clarified the nature of a boojandi? 

By contrast, if we say that a Logic specifies the set of valid inferences that can be made from a given Structural Causal Model which has an axiomatic representation, then though my statement is defeasible, it is not self-referential or, practically, meaningless.

 Furthermore, because, an Intuitionist or Fuzzy Logic, or Bayesian approach, can be 'observationally equivalent' to one which features 'truth bearers', it is foolish to 'take Logic to be' something it doesn't necessarily have to be.

Moreover, I will assume consequence relations to necessarily preserve truth in virtue of logical form.

Why assume that paradoxes, fallacies, or cases of undecidability never arise? The history of mathematics shows the opposite to be the case.

For simplicity, I will use “⊨$\models$” to denote such a consequence relation. My default assumption will be to take the double turnstile to denote the semantic consequence relation of the classical first-order predicate calculus. But not much hangs on this. Partisans of other types of non-classical consequence relations may read “⊨$\models$” as referring to their preferred consequence relation.

So, the 'default assumption' here is that we are dealing with a set of truths- some of which are given, others of which are logically inferred- valid in all possible worlds.

But, if we lived in a world where we had access to such truths, why would we need a concept of 'normativity'? Consider the story of Moses and Al Khidr. The former sees the latter doing 'bad' things. But the latter know the truth about everything. What appears to 'bad' is actually 'good' because Al Khidr knows the future. Indeed, he is univocal with the Occasionalist God of Ghazali.

Presumably, if logic is normative for thinking or reasoning, its normative force will stem, at least in part, from the fact that truth bearers which act as the relata of our consequence relation and the bearers of other logical properties are identical to (or at least are very closely related in some other way) to the objects of thinking or reasoning: the contents of one’s mental states or acts such as the content of one’s beliefs or inferences, for example.

How can 'the normative force' of anything stem from something impossible- viz. truth-bearers existing as 'objects of thinking or reasoning'? Why think or reason about something true in all possible worlds? It is a waste of cognitive resources.

Norms exist because of Uncertainty, Information asymmetry & the Stochastic nature of 'regret minimization'.

What is the point of assuming none of these exist? Can anything more foolish be asserted? Yes- look at this next sentence-

For present purposes I will assume the identity between truth-bearers and the contents of our attitudes, and I will assume them to be propositions.

Wow! My attitude of contempt towards this article arises because I somehow have access to 'truth-bearers' which assert that Philosophy is shite in all possible worlds!

However, no such 'truth-bearers' can exist. Still, there is a sense in which Logic is normative. There are 'focal point' solutions to coordination games- things like Courts of Law where disputes can be adjudicated- and protocol bound 'juristic' reasoning is normative in such places. People have to show that they acted as a 'reasonable person' would do and this necessarily entails casting their assertions in a coherent logical form.

Academic Philosophy, it seems, takes a different view-

.. let us ask what it is that logic is normative for, if indeed it is normative. The paradigmatic objects of normative appraisal are actions, behaviors or practices. What, then, is the activity or practice that logical norms apply to?
2.1 Logic as normative for reasoning
One response—perhaps the most common one—is that logic sets forth norms for (theoretical) reasoning.

 'Norms are concepts (sentences) of practical import, oriented to effecting an action, rather than conceptual abstractions that describe, explain, and express.'
A logic- i.e. a set of rules for valid inference- can't cause us to do theoretical reasoning instead of watching Kung Fu videos. By contrast, Mom hitting you with a rolling pin and threatening to break your legs if you fail your exams and don't go off to College, is setting forth a norm- viz. watching Kung Fu videos is naughty. You ought to be studying instead.

Unlike thinking, which might consist merely of disconnected sequences of conceptual activity, reasoning is presumably a connected, usually goal-directed, process by which we form, reinstate or revise doxastic attitudes (and perhaps other types of states) through inference.

Not necessarily. Reasoning can be wholly mimetic. Indeed, in its origins, it always is. Furthermore, it always has a strategic aspect.

Consider the following two examples of how logic might give rise to norms. First, suppose I am trying to find Ann and that I can be sure that Ann is either in the museum or at the concert.

If you are trying to find Ann, you must think you ought to find Ann. That is a norm. But it has nothing to do with any system of logic.

I am now reliably informed that she is not in the museum. Using logic, I conclude that Ann is at the concert.

This is not a safe conclusion. Ann may be planning to leave the concert and teleport to the museum the moment she is reliably informed that you have been reliably informed that she is not in the museum.

Thus, by inferring in conformity with the valid (by the standards of classical logic) logical principle of disjunctive syllogism, I have arrived at a true belief about Ann’s whereabouts.

No you haven't.

Second, if I believe that Ann is either at the concert or the museum, while at the same time disbelieving both of the disjuncts, it would seem that there is a tension in my belief set, which I have reason to rectify by revising my beliefs appropriately.

Tension in one's belief set is not a good reason to do something foolish. 'Rectifying and revising my beliefs' w.r.t something which does not concern me at all is foolish. It involves an opportunity cost. Suppose I skip work coz I'm rectifying and revising my beliefs about the ancient Aztecs, I'll get fired and end up a homeless bum.

There is a norm for not thinking about stupid shite. There is none which forbids me having incompatible beliefs- e.g. that we evolved by Natural Selection and also possess immortal souls endowed by a Divine Creator.  Why? Normativity can only exist if Dialethia prevails.

Logic may thus be thought to normatively constrain the ways we form and revise doxastic attitudes.

No. If Logic can normatively constrain its own operations then Godel & Tarski & Turning an so forth must have been wrong- i.e. Logic must be wrong.

And it does so, presumably, in our everyday cognitive lives (as in our example), as well as in the context of more self-conscious forms of theoretical inquiry, as in mathematics, the sciences, law, philosophy and so on, where its normative grip on us would seem to be even tighter.

Sheer nonsense. Bayesian Decision, or Learning, theory, not Logic, explicates such 'normative constraints' which can lead to cognitive biases. What matters is getting to a better specified Structural Causal Model rather than making inferences on the basis of a foolish caricature of one.

Thought may have an algorithmic expression. But, most often, to achieve robustness, it is likely to be non-linear, use 'oracles', and have a stochastic 'regret minimizing' representation.

It simply can't be logical for purely mathematical reasons well known since the early Seventies. Yet, academic philosophers, pretending otherwise, can write of-

 Logic as constitutively normative for thought

 In other words, if a thought has a logical form then it quite properly becomes action guiding. Thus, if you have the thought- cake exists to be eaten, there is a cake in the fridge- then you should eat the cake even if Mom will beat you for ruining her dinner party.

Other philosophers have taken the normativity of logic to kick in at an even more fundamental level. According to them, the normative force of logic does not merely constrain reasoning, it applies to all thinking. The thesis deserves our attention both because of its historical interest—it has been attributed in various ways to Kant, Frege and Carnap[6]—and because of its connections to contemporary views in epistemology and the philosophy of mind. 

To get a better handle on the thesis in question, let us agree to understand “thought” broadly as conceptual activity. Judging, believing, inferring, for example, are all instances of thinking in this sense. It may seem puzzling at first how logic is to get a normative grip on thinking: Why merely by engaging in conceptual activity should one automatically be answerable to the strictures of logic? After all, at least on the picture of thought we are currently considering, any disconnected stream-of-consciousness of imaginings qualifies as thinking. One answer is that logic is thought to put forth norms that are constitutive for thinking. That is, in order for a mental episode to count as an episode of thinking at all, it must, in a sense to be made precise, be “assessable in light of the laws of logic” (MacFarlane 2002: 37). Underlying this thesis is a distinction between two types of rules or norms: constitutive ones and regulative ones.
The distinction between regulative and constitutive norms is Kantian at root. Here, however, I refer primarily to a related distinction due to John Searle. According to Searle, regulative norms “regulate antecedently or independently existing forms of behavior”, such as rules of etiquette or traffic laws. Constitutive norms, by contrast create or define new forms of behavior. The rules of football or chess, for example, do not merely regulate playing football or chess but as it were they create the very possibility of playing such games. 

Logic can be neither constitutive nor regulative of itself- at least, that is its own verdict on itself. Thus either it isn't 'thinking' or else it can't regulate or constitute even thinking about itself- let alone anything else.

Take the case of traffic rules. While I ought to abide by traffic rules in normal circumstances, I can choose to ignore them. Of course, rowdy driving in violation of the traffic code might well get me in trouble. Yet no matter how cavalier my attitude towards traffic laws is, my activity still counts as driving. Contrast this with the rules governing the game of chess. I cannot in the same way opt out of conforming to the rules of chess while continuing to count as playing chess; in systematically violating the rules of chess and persisting in doing so even in the face of criticism, I forfeit my right to count as partaking in the activity of playing chess.

Yet we know that a rigid designation of 'chess playing' must have featured chess players- probably the greatest ones of their time- who did precisely that without 'forfeiting' the right to 'count as partaking in the activity of playing chess'.

If I am asked to play chess with a 5 year old child, I insist the little fellow handicap himself by removing those horsy things which frighten me. Since little kids enjoy humiliating elderly Uncles, they comply and win anyway, though I cheat incessantly.

Unless one’s moves are appropriately assessable in light of the rules of chess, one’s activity does not qualify as playing chess.

They may do, if you are a 5 year old kid determined to show that the boring old Uncle is completely stupid.

According to the constitutive conception of logic’s normativity the principles of logic are to thought what the rules of chess are to the game of chess: I cannot persistently fail to acknowledge that the laws of logic set standards of correctness for my thinking without thereby jeopardizing my status as a thinker (i.e., someone presently engaged in the act of thinking).
Two important clarifications are in order. For one, on its most plausible reading, the thesis of the constitutive normativity of logic for thought must be understood so as to leave room for the possibility of logical error: an agent’s mental activity may continue to count as thinking, despite his committing logical blunders.
That is, although one may at times (perhaps even frequently and systematically) stray from the path prescribed by logic in one’s thinking, one nevertheless counts as a thinker provided one appropriately acknowledges logic’s normative authority over one’s thinking. Consider again the game of chess. In violating the rules of chess, deliberately or out of ignorance, I can plausibly still be said to count as playing chess, so long, at least, as I acknowledge that my activity is answerable to the rules; for example, by being disposed to correct myself when an illegal move is brought to my attention. Similarly, all that is necessary to count as a thinker is to be sensitive to the fact that my practice of judging, inferring, believing, etc., is normatively constrained by the laws of logic. It is not easy to specify, in any detail, what the requisite acknowledgment or sensitivity consists in. A reasonable starting point, however, is provided by William Taschek who, in his interpretation of Frege, proposes that acknowledging the categorical authority of logic will involve one’s possessing a capacity to recognize—when being sincere and reflective, and possibly with appropriate prompting—logical mistakes both in one’s own judgmental and inferential practice and that of others. 

So what? With hindsight, one could do the same for the 'categorical authority' of Astrology or Numerology or the I Ching or the Grand Wizard or the Great Leader or anyone or anything real or imaginary that can be named or alluded to.

A second point of clarification is that the agent need not be able to explicitly represent to herself the logical norms by which she is bound.

So, if captured by ISIS, I can show that I've always acted as true adherent of their abhorrent creed though I can't say what it is.

For instance, it may be that my reasoning ought to conform to disjunctive syllogism in appropriate ways. I may be able to display the right kind of sensitivity to the principle by which I am bound (with the right prompting if need be), without my having to possess the conceptual resources to entertain the metalogical proposition that ¬A,A∨B⊨B¬A,A∨B⊨B. Nor must I otherwise explicitly represent that proposition and the normative constraint to which it gives rise.
With these clarifications in place, let us turn to a central presupposition of the approach I have been sketching. What is being presupposed, of course, is a conception of thinking that does not reduce to brute psychological or neurophysiological processes or events. If this naturalistic level of description were the only one available, the constitutive account of the normativity of logic would be a non-starter.

It is a non-starter iff Godel, Tarski, Turing et al were bag logicians. Watering down what 'constitutive' means turns it into a 'use as you like' word.  Anything at all can be said to be constitutive of anything else.

What is being presupposed, therefore, is the permissibility of irreducibly normative levels of descriptions of our mental lives.

Why not 'irreducibly Catholic', or 'irreducibly Freudian', or 'irreducibly Marxian' levels of descriptions of our mental lives?

These things are 'impermissible' because they are the stuff that cults and totalitarian dictators use to turn people into amoral robots.

In particular, it is assumed that the boundary between the kinds of mental activity that constitute thinking and other kinds of mental activity (non-conceptual activity like being in pain, for instance) is a boundary best characterizable in normative terms.

Why make such a foolish assumption? What is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. If there is a boundary 'best characterizable in normative terms', then there can be another boundary some one with superior autocritas (derivable, perhaps, in a coercive manner) between who can use those normative terms to direct others and those who must hear and obey.

This is not to deny that much can be learned about mental phenomena through descriptions that operate at different, non-normative levels—the “symbolic” or the neurological level of description, say—the claim is merely that if we are interested in demarcating conceptual activity from other types of mental phenomena, we should look to the constitutive norms governing it.

If the information set can be usefully enlarged by looking on the other side of the boundary, then the boundary can't be 'normative'. A Judge can't say 'this evidence is not admissible but we should listen to it anyway'.

If we are interested in demarcating phenomena, we take an extensional approach- i.e. accumulate data and develop Structural Causal Models. We don't look for intensional 'constitutive norms'- unless we are monks living in the Dark Ages.

Davidson (1980, 1984), Dennett (1987), and Millar (2004) all hold views according to which having concepts and hence thinking requires that the agent be interpretable as at least minimally sensitive to logical norms.

'Minimally sensitive' is not a term useful to Logic. A fallacy may be minimally or even moderately, or indeed hyper, sensitive to logical norms but it is still a fallacy.

Also, certain contemporary “normativist approaches” according to which accounts of certain intentional states involve ineliminable appeals to normative concepts may advocate the constitutive conception of logic’s normativity (e.g., Wedgwood 2007, 2009; Zangwill 2005).

Yes. If you are talking bollocks, it is helpful to believe something false and foolish. You can then exploit -Ex falso quodlibet- to give the appearance of logical consistency to your stupid shite.

2.3 Logic as normative for public practices
So far the answers to the question “What is logic normative for?” we considered had in common that the “activities” in question—reasoning and thinking—are internal, mental processes of individual agents. But logic also seems to exert normative force on the external manifestations of these processes—for instance, it codifies the standards to which we hold ourselves in our practices of assertion, rational dialogue and the like. While much of the literature on the normativity of logic focuses on internal processes of individuals, some authors have instead emphasized logic’s role as a purveyor of public standards for normatively regulated practices.

'Public practices'- e.g. the practice of Law or Medicine or the conduct of a Business Enterprise- do involve a duty to act, and to show you have acted, in a reasonable manner and in keeping with established epistemic protocols in the relevant field.

However, hiring a logician, rather than an expert in the relevant field, to tell you what you should or shouldn't do would be very foolish. This is because evidence of what is normative is wholly empirical or extensional.

Take the practice of asserting. Assertion is often said to “aim at truth” (or knowledge, Williamson 2000: Ch. 11) as well as being a “matter of putting forward propositions for others to use as evidence in the furtherance of their epistemic projects” (Milne 2009: 282). Since I take the asserted propositions to be true and since truths entail further truths, I am “committed to standing by” the logical consequences of my assertions or else to retract them if I am unable to meet challenges to my assertion or its consequences.

Nonsense! No assertion has any 'logical consequences' whatsoever unless it is a 'truth-bearer'. But if it is, and if Logic has been perfected, then all 'truth-bearing' propositions can be algorithmically derived. We would have a Mathesis Universalis. History would end because we'd have a Theory of Everything and could change the Multiverse in any manner we pleased.

Similarly, if the set of propositions I assert is inconsistent at least one of my assertions must fall short of being true and the set as a whole cannot be regarded as part of my evidence.

Is this true? Suppose there is an inconsistency in a witnesses testimony. Would it necessarily cause the whole of it to be dismissed? No. What matters is if the inconsistency was 'material' or it threw into question the good faith or cognitive or other capacity of the witness.

Plausibly, therefore, logic does have a normative role to play in governing the practice of assertion.

If it 'governs' the practice of assertion- i.e. assertions are valid inferences from 'truth makers'- nobody in history has ever asserted anything. What sort of 'normative role' is this?

Peter Milne takes an interest in assertion mainly in order to “work back” from there to how logic constrains belief. He concludes that logic exerts normative force at least on the stock of beliefs that constitute the agent’s evidence (Milne 2009: 286).

Milne and his colleagues are counter-evidence. Their 'stock of beliefs' are wholly incompatible with modern Logic- or, indeed, common sense.
What constrains them is the desire to hang on to their salary checks and professorial prestige.
In any case, it is cognitive dissonance, not logic, which causes people to prune their stock of beliefs.

Other authors explicitly prioritize the external dimension of reasoning, conceived of as a social, inter-personal phenomenon.

This is either 'process monitoring'- which has to do with information asymmetry- or 'error checking'. It has nothing to do with logic whose inputs are 'truth-makers'- i.e. error free and unequivocal.

According to them, it is reasoning in this external sense (as opposed to intra-personal processes of belief revision, etc.) that is the primary locus of logical normativity (MacKenzie 1989). The norms govern our rational interactions with our peers. For instance, they might be thought to codify the permissions and obligations governing certain kinds of dialogues.

But, these are essentially defeasible dialogues- not logical at all.

Viewed from this perspective, logic’s normative impact on the intra-personal activity of reasoning is merely derivative, arrived at through a process of interiorization. A view along these lines has been advanced by Catarina Dutilh Novaes (2015).

This view can be given an economic description. However, it doesn't have any great utility. Vide http://socioproctology.blogspot.com/2013/01/this-is-great-mathematician-terry-tao.html

In a similar vein Sinan Dogramaci (2012, 2015) has proposed a view he calls “epistemic communism”. According to epistemic communism our use of “rational” applied to certain deductive rules has a specific functional role. Its role is to coordinate our epistemic rules with a view to maximizing the efficiency of our communal epistemic practices. On the basis of this view, he then elaborates an argument for the pessimistic conclusion that no general theory of rationality is to be had.

This is perfectly reasonable. That is why, for this academic availability cascade to trundle on, the 'bulk of the literature' must ignore it and carry on regardless.

We will here follow the bulk of the literature in asking after the normative role logic might play in reasoning understood as an intra-personal activity. Yet, much of the discussion to follow applies mutatis mutandis to the other approaches.

The Encyclopedia article next takes up Gilbert Harman's sensible assertion that reasoning is wholly distinct from deductive logic. It is stupid to pretend otherwise.

The author takes a typically perverse view-

saying that deductive logic and theories of reasoning are distinct is one thing, affirming that there could not be an interesting normative connection between them is quite another.

'Interesting normative connections' can be made between anything and everything. By refusing to make these connections, we save ourselves from talking or listening to shite.

As a first stab at articulating such a connection, we might try the following simple line of thought: theoretical reasoning aims to provide an accurate representation of the world.

Nonsense! Theoretical reason may be wholly ontologically dysphoric. Practical reason aims at a more useful representation of the world.

We accurately represent the world by having true (or perhaps knowledgeable) beliefs and by avoiding false ones.

Rubbish! A Cartographer who produces a better map might also have absurd beliefs. There is no necessary connection between 'representation' and doxastic states. I may not be able to accurately paint this beautiful sun-set whereas you might be able to do so, yet consider the result to be trashy kitsch.

But our doxastic states have contents—propositions—and these contents stand in certain logical relations to one another.

Quite false! I believe my Mom to be the best cook in the world though I acknowledge that she used less salt than is proper because my father's side of the family had a history of high blood pressure.

Having an awareness of these logical relations would appear to be conducive to the end of having true beliefs and so is relevant to theoretical reasoning.

It does not so appear to anyone with even the slightest knowledge of the history of philosophy.

In particular, the logical notions of consequence and consistency seem to be relevant. If I believe truly, the truth of my belief will carry over to its logical consequences.

And you will be truly damned.

Conversely, if my belief entails a falsehood it cannot be true.

So what? Beliefs only have strategic, that is survival, value if they aren't true. All our loving relationships are based on it being common knowledge that we think the other to be the bestest Mommy or Baby or Cutie-pie ever. We may not know the exact weight and height of the other- indeed, it is possible to love a person for many years without being able to say what color their eyes are- but that is irrelevant. Beliefs are a first step to, not Truth, but Faith.

Similarly, if the set of propositions I believe (in general or in a particular domain) is inconsistent, they cannot possibly afford an accurate representation of the world;

If you believe this then you can't believe a set of propositions accurately represents what you believe because this belief would be a member of that set and it says that some other member of the set isn't a member of the set.
The author doesn't get this. He says-

at least one of my beliefs must be false.

Not necessarily- the world may be inconsistent. However, you are still in trouble because at least one of your beliefs is that you don't believe something you do believe.

Harman may be able to agree with all of this. His skepticism pertains also (and perhaps primarily) to the question whether logic has a privileged role to play in reasoning; that the principles of logic are relevant to reasoning in a way that principles of other sciences are not (Harman 1986: 20). However, I want to set this further issue to one side for now.
Notice that this simple reflection on the connection between logic and norms of reasoning leads us right back to the basic intuitions at the beginning of this entry: that there is something wrong with us when we hold inconsistent beliefs or when we fail to endorse the logical consequences of our beliefs (at least when we can be expected to be aware of them). Let us spell these intuitions out by way of the following two principles. Let S
S be an agent and P
P a proposition.[13]
Logical implication principle (IMP): If S
S’s beliefs logically imply AA, then S
S ought to believe that AA.
Logical consistency principle (CON): S
S ought to avoid having logically inconsistent beliefs.
Notice that on the face of it IMP and CON are distinct. IMP, in and of itself, does not prohibit inconsistent or even contradictory beliefs, all it requires is that my beliefs be closed under logical consequence.

This can't happen if logically inconsistent beliefs are possible- i.e. if CON is not empty- because then you have a belief about your beliefs- a meta-belief- so 'closure under logical consequence' is off the table.

CON, on the other hand, does not require that I believe the consequences of the propositions I believe, it merely demands that the set of propositions I believe be consistent.

In which case, if you believe your belief set can be closed under logical consequence, then you can't have a logically consistent belief system for reasons Godel, Tarski etc clarified long before I was born.

What happens if you assume something necessarily, logically, false- viz. that Set theory is immune to Russell's paradox- is that you get ex falso quodlibet an explosion of nonsense. As witness-

However, given certain assumptions, IMP does entail CON. Against the background of classical logic, the entailment obtains provided we allow the following two assumptions: (i) one cannot (and, via the principle that “ought” implies “can”, ought not) both believe and disbelieve one and the same proposition simultaneously; and (ii) that disbelieving a proposition is tantamount to believing its negation.

 For let 
{A1,…,An}$\{A_1,\dots ,A_n\}$ be S$S$’s inconsistent belief set. By classical logic, we have A1,…,An−1⊨¬An$A_1,\dots ,A_{n-1}\models \mathrm{\neg }{A}_n$. Since S$S$’s beliefs are closed under logical consequence, S$S$ believes ¬An$\mathrm{\neg }{A}_n$ and hence, by (ii), disbelieves An$A_n$. So, S$S$ both believes and disbelieves An$A_n$.

There is no great scandal in both believing and not believing a proposition. We do so all the time. The thing has survival value.  What is utterly pointless is appealing to Set theory and forgetting Russell's paradox or invoking Logic and forgetting Godel & Tarski.

Still, if that's what you are paid to do, then, I guess, it is normative.