Conceptual versus Factual Premises
A lot's being written now with titles such as "Why do humans reason?" and "Arguments
for an argumentative theory." Interesting but as usual no-one is looking at our system's deeper evolutionary purpose. The points they are missing in a nutshell are these:
Our predictive systems are using probabilistic logic in one sense, but not necessarily as in Bayesian or other factual premise driven systems. Because what we in our subconscious processing are looking for are familiar patterns, and we assess them not so much for consequences of expected behaviors but for past purposes that those patterns must (from historical assessments) represent.
The problem then becomes one of how those predicted or predictive purposes might help us to anticipate the tactical natures of apposing learned or inherited strategies.
The probabilities depend on the perceived purposes, hence the premises involved are not so much factual as conceptual.
The concept of conceivable purposes.
