Is Chomsky's View on the Mind-Body Problem Redefining Materialism?

[apeiron]

The lack of recursion in the Piraha language is a well-known challenge to grammar innatism. This is a really fascinating article by Daniel Everett on the controversy - interesting because of the hints at what having a very simple language might have been like when it comes archaic H.sapiens.

http://edge.org/3rd_culture/everett07/everett07_index.html

But also, he is pretty blunt about Chomsky and the lack of testability of UG.

I think that the way that Chomskyan theories developed over the last 50 years has made it completely untestable now. It's not clear what usefulness there is in the notion of universal grammar. It appeals to the public at large, and it used to appeal to linguists, but as you work more and more with it, there's no way to test it—I can't think of a single experiment—in fact I asked Noam this in an e-mail, what is a single prediction that universal grammar makes that I could falsify? How could I test it? What prediction does it make? And he said, It doesn't make any predictions; it's a field of study, like biology.

 

[bohm2]

The lack of recursion in the Piraha language is a well-known challenge to grammar innatism. This is a really fascinating article by Daniel Everett on the controversy - interesting because of the hints at what having a very simple language might have been like when it comes archaic H.sapiens.

http://edge.org/3rd_culture/everett07/everett07_index.html

It's not clear that is a challenge to grammar innatism. There are papers that even question Everett's claim. For example:

Piraha exceptionality: A reassessment
http://web.mit.edu/linguistics/peop...gues_Piraha_Exceptionality_a_Reassessment.pdf

Moreover, even if accurate, Everett's exceptions (and other known exceptions) don't really impact on Chomsky's thesis or his goals for reasons that T. Fitch (who went to study the Piraha to test Everett's claims) writes:

These regularities will certainly incorporate more general aspects of cognition, including aspects of perception, motor control or conceptual structure that predated language in human evolutionary history. From this abstract perspective, UG is not reducible to a list of properties universally found in every language, nor does its existence imply such a list. As Jackendoff puts it, UG is a characterization of the toolkit the child uses in language acquisition, not a list of universal features of adult languages....It is quite unfortunate, then, that many critics have conflated UG and surface language universals, and proffered the discovery of exceptions to some broad regularity as a refutation of UG. As Roman Jakobson, a tireless defender of the search for universals, pointed out, ‘a rule requiring amendment is more useful than the absence of any rule’. The notion of UG is perfectly compatible with a very broad range of linguistic diversity, evolving via cultural processes, and indeed has developed over many decades with precisely this diversity in mind.

An analogy to the diversity and unity of languages is provided by features of our own vast phylum, the vertebrates. Universal vertebrate features are encompassed in the notion of a Bauplan: a ‘body plan’ that includes (or included during development) a notochord running down the spine, and bony vertebrae built around it. To this are attached ribs and generally appendages. A mouth at the front of the animal serves for both food and respiration, and is followed by branchial arches forming jaws, gills or other diverse structures. Many other shared traits also characterize most vertebrates, but these few suffice to make the point: each of these traits is absent or modified in one or a few species, but this does not render the notion of the body plan vacuous....Thus, when scholars cite unusual languages as a refutation of the entire concept of UG, they both overlook the nature of biological systems, which typically allow exceptions, and ignore many explicit hypotheses about UG that have been offered over the years.

I suggest that the general notion of abstract constraints, operating ubiquitously during the development of a system in time and space, provides one such framework (figure 1). Such systems are familiar: a rich body of mathematics exploring such constraints is the theory of differential equations...A differential equation like x^" =ax expresses a constraint on the movement of an object: its acceleration x^" must be proportional to its location x. In general, there are an infinite number of specific paths that could satisfy this constraint...Because there are an infinite number of solutions, we can think of this differential equation as defining a vast family of solutions, some of which may be superficially very different, but all of which have in common that they satisfy the constraint defined by the original equation. In some cases, we can discover a broader ‘general solution’ (e.g. periodic oscillation) that encompasses an entire set of specific, particular functions...The search for universals is akin to the search for a general solution that encompasses all of these particular solutions, and the goal of biolinguistics is to understand, and make explicit, the specific biological constraints that underlie this general solution...These interacting systems entail dauntingly complex systems of partial differential equations involving genes and the epigenetic control of their expression, brains and their self-wiring depending on the organism and its environment, and individuals as part of cultural systems.

See attached thumbnail for Fitche's analogy/framework.

Both top-down approaches (invoking cultural and historical factors) and bottom-up or ‘reductionist’ approaches (e.g. gene or brain-focused research) will be important for a full characterization of this complex system. No one expects such a task to be easy. Equally, no one can deny the fundamental significance of the search...Rejections of the search for universals, based on a few exceptions to some otherwise universal rule, miss the point of this endeavour.

Unity and diversity in human language
http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/366/1563/376

 

[apeiron]

Moreover, even if accurate, Everett's exceptions (and other known exceptions) don't really impact on Chomsky's thesis or his goals for reasons that T. Fitch (who went to study the Piraha to test Everett's claims) writes:

Yes exactly. One minute, UG is a genetic template with experience setting a hardwired switch in of two positions on a large number of grammatical rule settings. The next, it is a very loose claim about recursion and vague noises about genetic endowments and "third factors".

Where UG is definite, it is wrong, where it is vague, it fits just about anyone's theory of language.

I have identified what seem to me the principle blindspots in Chomsky's approach to language evolution. Have you got any response on these specific points?

- Like the belief that language IS thought, rather than scaffolds thought.

- Like that there is not abundant evidence that sociality has been a prime driver of anthropoid neural evolution and so deserves to be the default hypothesis when it comes to communicative capacity.

- Like there is a problem in the "poverty of stimulus", when there is neither any great lack of stimulus, nor a lack of models, such as generative or Bayesian neural nets, that can manage fast learning.

- Like the fact that the evolution of a vocal tract is precisely the kind of architectural constraint on the unfettered recursive abilities of the brain that would count as one of his "deep structure" principles.

- Like that there is some kind of grammatical module in the brain when current research is revealing just how distributed the syntactical machinery actually is.

 

[bohm2]

Like the fact that the evolution of a vocal tract is precisely the kind of architectural constraint on the unfettered recursive abilities of the brain that would count as one of his "deep structure" principles.

I'll start with this point. I'm doing this in between studying for my stupid, retarted exam but I''ll try...This is actually Fitch's specialty but here is a popular article of his on this point:

Let’s start with anatomy. Humans have an unusual vocal tract: the larynx (or voicebox) rests low in the throat. In most other mammals, including chimpanzees, the larynx lies at a higher point, and is often inserted into the nasal passage, creating a sealed nasal airway. In fact, humans begin life this way: a newborn infant can breathe through its nose while swallowing milk through its mouth. But as the infant grows, the larynx descends, and by the age of 3 or 4 this feat is no longer possible. The reconfigured human vocal tract allows the free movement of the tongue that is crucial to make the many distinct sounds heard in human languages.

For a long time, the descended larynx was considered unique to our species, and the key to our possession of speech. Researchers had even tried to place a date on the emergence of language by studying the position of the larynx in ancient fossils. Evidence from two different sources of comparative data casts doubt on this hypothesis. The first was the discovery of animal species with permanently descended larynges like our own. We now know that lions, tigers, koalas and Mongolian gazelles all have a descended larynx – making it a convergent trait. Since none of these species produce anything vaguely speech-like, such changes in anatomy cannot be enough for speech to have emerged.

The second line of evidence is even more damning. X-ray observations of vocalising mammals show that dogs, monkeys, goats and pigs all lower the larynx during vocalisation. This ability to reconfigure the vocal tract appears to be a widespread, and probably homologous, feature of mammals. With its larynx retracted, a dog or a monkey has all the freedom of movement needed to produce many different vocalisations (see diagram, right).The key changes must therefore have occurred in the brain instead.

The evolution of language-Fitch
http://www.newscientist.com/data/do...tant_expert_6_-_the_evolution_of_language.pdf

Like there is a problem in the "poverty of stimulus", when there is neither any great lack of stimulus, nor a lack of models, such as generative or Bayesian neural nets, that can manage fast learning.

I tried to answer this point in post #330. You might look at the link because I'm not a linguist to fully understand their arguments but personally I think the point is obvious to me. I think it's the same in science, mathematics and musical knowledge. The environment is way too poor to allow for this type of knowledge.

 

[apeiron]

Anyway, my excursion into this area is indirectly because of my obsession with the "hard" problem of consciousness and so far, I haven't made any progress which kinda sucks.

Indeed, getting back to the OP , the initial comments you cite from Chomsky seem perfectly reasonable in themselves. You simply can't have a mind~body problem if there is no definite story on what the material realm is all about. If physics is incomplete, you can't even say with any surety whether there is a hard problem or not.

Well, first thing to say is that a lot of people feel there is a mind~body causal issue. So they must feel they know enough about the truth of material reality to believe that an explanatory gap is a major difficulty.

And the justification they give is that they know the "style" of material causal explanations, and even if current physical theory is an unfinished story, further expansions of physical theory will have the same style and so will still not be able to bridge the explanatory gap.

At which point, you can reply either that the style is indeed going to be correct, and one day we may actually find the further ingredients that right now we can't even imagine. This is the panpsychist or quantum consciousness line of thought. One day, the mental will be shown to be a physical property of matter, an atomistic aspect of nature. So our view of causal style is already correct, and we simply need to keep digging to find a material basis to mental experience.

The alternative view is that causality is more complicated.

What we have been talking about here is the reductionist view of reality where everything reduces to a substance ontology, with its embedded principle of locality and its web of additive effective causality. We can already see from quantum theory that "reality is not like that". And we can also tell from biology that more complex causal concepts are needed. And there has been a larger model of causality since ancient times - Aristotle's model of the four causes.

So then comes the choice. Do you stick with a model of causality which its own proponents believe to have intractable problems (mind dualism, quantum nonlocality, epiphenomenal emergence, first causes), or switch to a larger model where all these things are features rather than bugs?

I note that you are now approvingly citing papers that talk about "bauplans" and "abstract constraints".

Both top-down approaches (invoking cultural and historical factors) and bottom-up or ‘reductionist’ approaches (e.g. gene or brain-focused research) will be important for a full characterization of this complex system.

Well yes, of course. Even if people still feel they have to use an apologetic tone when talking about downward causality, global constraints, formal principles, and such-like. It is still such a "novelty" in science. See for example this whole issue devoted to downward causality:

http://rsfs.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/current

There are differing views in science, as well as in philosophy, about the reality of top-down causation. The aim of these articles is to provide answers convincing to both scientists and philosophers. The need is for an interdisciplinary dialogue, which we hope this Theme Issue provides. The issue arises in physics (Bishop [1]; Loewer [2]), chemistry (Scerri [3]), microbiology (Jaeger & Calkins [4]), epigenetics (Davies [5]), evolutionary biology (Okasha [6]), physiology (Noble [7]), neuroscience/psychology/cognitive science (Berntson et al.[8]; Atmanspacher [9]), social science (Elder-Vass [10]) and computer science (Booch [11]). Many examples provide good evidence for top-down causation. Thus, in physiology, it is taken for granted, and it is crucial in cognitive science.

So again, the hard problem boils down to an inadequacy of an overly reduced model of causality. A material conception of nature - as just the outcome of material and effective causes - is not enough to model complexity. It doesn't even look enough to model simplicity. And once you accept the concrete reality of downward causation - of formal and final cause - is there still a hard problem of consciousness, an explanatory gap between matter and mind, information and meaning? Or just an explanatory dichotomy?

If we apply this to Chomsky's thinking in the OP, I think he is wrong to suggest that our material explanations are incomplete, as if more of the same might complete them. Instead, even our fundamental theories would need to include the complementary aspects of nature to complete them. Reductionism needs to be fixed by holism, not by even more reductionism.

And then if we apply this larger model of causality to the issue of human grammar, then I think it can lead to some pretty concrete theories about how it works. The basic story is about the construction of constraints. Syntax is the top-down construction of constrained semantics. Just as genetics is the top-down construction of constrained metabolic dynamics, or dissipative process.

Taking this view, we can even measure language production in entropy terms I think. The more constrained the semantics, the greater the number of alternative meanings that have been disposed. So grammar is a way of making our ideas precise - by the wasting of semantic degrees of freedom.

As I say about Friston's work, mind science is moving to place itself on thermodynamic foundations, much as theoretical biology has done. Thermodynamics is naturally a "four causes" or systems approach to modelling reality, so makes a better conceptual basis than the Galilean/Newtonian atomism that was the original scientific revolution, and which continues to exercise such a grip on the popular imagination.

If I wanted to get to the bottom of human language or consciousness generally, or QM for that matter, I would start from thermodynamics too. Or infodynamics, to distinguish dissipative structure theory from the kind of closed, dead, equilibrium models that are the thermo-world of classical reductionism.

 

[apeiron]

I'll start with this point. I'm doing this in between studying for my stupid, retarted exam but I''ll try...This is actually Fitch's specialty but here is a popular article of his on this point:

This is one of those he said/she said controversies in science where you have to weigh the balance of evidence. So there are a series of standard counterpoints to what Fitch just said.

For instance, what other species have the L-shaped kink which allows a fat tongue to actually separate the initial vocal cord sound production from its later fine-tuned modulation? The descended larynx is just one of a constellation of adaptations as I highlighted in post #283.

It has been pointed out that the radical modification of the hominid vocal tract involves a whole hierarchy of dichotomies in itself. So just to control the equipment demands a recursive motor capacity.

http://zimmer.csufresno.edu/~chrisg/...EvolHierar.pdf

Brown and Golston note how there is a first divide between the larynx and the supralaryngeal filter (or voice box and basically the rest), then the filter divides in turn into its oral vs nasal paths, the oral into its lips vs tongue, the tongue into its front vs back, the front of the tongue into its pointy tip vs broad blade configuration. There is a whole tree of sub-divisions.

You can always explain away some single fact, but it is the weight of facts that carries the case in these kinds of complex arguments.

Perhaps I didn't make it plain. You can see in the design of the vocal tract a physically-embodied recursive hierarchy - "a whole tree of [dichotomous] sub-divisions".

OK, if you are a Chomskyite and apparently very concerned about deep structural principles and the evolution of recursion, then right there in front of your nose is an example of something that must have evolved.

Was this likely to be the result of some blast of cosmic rays, a hopeful monster mutation, because no other standard graduationalist evolutionary hypothesis could explain such an extraordinary development?

No, the evolution of a recursive phonology looks pretty simple, doesn't it?

The radical reorganisation of the brain, or the sudden creation of a brand new functioning module, do seem a tall order for Darwinism - even with the aid of evo-devo fast-tracking. So the idea that it could be syntax first, phonology second, is a real stretch for evolutionary theories.

By contrast, "phonology first" looks an evolutionary doddle. And it then provides the concrete foundation for the subsequent fast-development of syntactical ability. You want symbolic recursion? Well, you've already got vocal recursion to piggyback on. You are way more than halfway there.

 

[bohm2]

And the justification they give is that they know the "style" of material causal explanations, and even if current physical theory is an unfinished story, further expansions of physical theory will have the same style and so will still not be able to bridge the explanatory gap.

Yes, that's Nagel's argument which Chomsky questions. I'm not exactly sure why because in other passages Chomsky quotes Russell approvingly that physics may only reveal the causal/relational properties of physical objects never allowing us to know anything about their intrinsic nature. But, we do seem to know something about the intrinsic structure of one object as Lockwood points out:

Do we therefore have no genuine knowledge of the intrinsic character of the physical world? So it might seem. But, according to the line of thought I am now pursuing, we do, in a very limited way, have access to content in the material world as opposed merely to abstract casual structure, since there is a corner of the physical world that we know, not merely by inference from the deliverances of our five sense, but because we are that corner. It is the bit within our skulls, which we know by introspection. In being aware, for example, of the qualia that seemed so troublesome for the materialist, we glimpse the intrinsic nature of what, concretely, realizes the formal structure that a correct physics would attribute to the matter of our brains. In awareness, we are, so to speak, getting an insider's look at our own brain activity.

If we apply this to Chomsky's thinking in the OP, I think he is wrong to suggest that our material explanations are incomplete, as if more of the same might complete them. Instead, even our fundamental theories would need to include the complementary aspects of nature to complete them. Reductionism needs to be fixed by holism, not by even more reductionism.

To be fair, Chomsky doesn't make a commitment on this issue. He does leave the option open. He just writes that we can't rule it out. And he never claims that it is "more of the same", I think. Still, I'm still not convinced that even the contextuality/holism implied by Bell's/QM can provide a mechanism for spitting out mental stuff, although it does seem to offer a good model for downward causation, in my opinion. I just don't think this is enough for reasons I gave before. But I'm not sure? I posted this question before in another thread as I find it very interesting and is at the heart of this thread:

Given the unification of chemistry with QM and the unification of molecular biology with chemistry (more recently), does anyone see any hope/hint of similar unification of mental phenomena with present-day physics or is this unlikely even with major changes in a future physics as Nagel claims? If such unification is conceivable, is it possible that by noting "some sort of theoretical inference from the character of phenomenal properties" where we do actually have access to its intrinsic properties, it might help/guide us of what is actually required by a future theory of physics for unification to occur? Kind of how chemistry guided the new physics (QM) in the past. Consider Eddington's remarks:

But in one case—namely, for the pointer readings of my own brain—I have an insight which is not limited to the evidence of the pointer readings. That insight shows that they are attached to a background of consciousness in which case I may expect that the background of other pointer readings in physics is of a nature continuous with that revealed to me in this way, even while I do not suppose that it always has the more specialized attributes of consciousness. What is certain is that in regard to my one piece of insight into the background no problem of irreconcilability arises; I have no other knowledge of the background with which to reconcile it...There is nothing to prevent the assemblage of atoms constituting a brain from being of itself a thinking (conscious, experiencing) object in virtue of that nature which physics leaves undetermined and undeterminable. If we must embed our schedule of indicator readings in some kind of background, at least let us accept the only hint we have received as to the significance of the background—namely, that it has a nature capable of manifesting itself as mental activity.

I think McGinn also hints at this where he writes:

I am now in a position to state the main thesis of this paper: in order to solve the mind-body problem we need, at a minimum, a new conception of space. We need a conceptual breakthrough in the way we think about the medium in which material objects exist, and hence in our conception of material objects themselves. That is the region in which our ignorance is focused: not in the details of neurophysiological activity but, more fundamentally, in how space is structured or constituted. That which we refer to when we use the word 'space' has a nature that is quite different from how we standardly conceive it to be; so different, indeed, that it is capable of 'containing' the non-spatial (as we now conceive it) phenomenon of consciousness. Things in space can generate consciousness only because those things are not, at some level, just how we conceive them to be; they harbour some hidden aspect or principle.

I'm not sure if configuration space where the wave function evolves or the non-locality implied in Bell's/QM might meet McGinn's criteria? There are even some physicists who do feel that these non-local correlations/communications do seem to happen outside space-time or at least defy spatio-temporality. Maybe we shouldn't find such stuff in physics surprising since in some ways qualia/consciousness does seem to suggest that if unification is ever possible, physics will have to involve some properties that need to go beyond locality/spatiality. I'm not sure if that, in itself, is enough. Maybe unification would require much more. Maybe Bohm is right and there really are many more sub-quantum levels that we haven't even scratched and these levels are necessary for unification to be completed? Some authors actually see this russian dolls that Bohm suspects as a positive:

What would a metaphysic of infinite descent look like? The most striking feature of an infinite descent is that no level is special. Infinite descent yields an egalitarian ontological attitude which is at home in the macroworld precisely because everything is macro. Mesons, molecules, minds, and mountains are in every sense ontologically equal. Because there can be no privileged locus for the causal powers, and because they must be somewhere, they are everywhere. So infinite descent yields an egalitarian metaphysic which dignifies and empowers the whole of nature. Treat infinite descent as a working hypothesis, and since all entities turn out to be composite, supervenient, realized, and governed, it emerges that these attributes cannot be barriers to full citizenship in the republic of being. The macroworld, once regained, is not easily lost, even should real evidence for fundamentality arrive. Here I am, a human organism, a macroentity, but in no sense unreal for that. I believe that I am both composed of and dependent on certain cells, which are in turn both composed of and dependent on certain molecules, which are in turn both composed of and dependent on certain atoms, which are in turn both composed of and dependent on certain subatomic particles, which are in turn both composed of and dependent on certain quarks and leptons. We just don’t know whether this chain stops. But from this perspective it seems obvious that my realness does not in any sense turn on whether there are preons and so on below, or not. To see that there is no evidence for fundamentality is already to regain the macroworld.

Is there a fundamental level?
http://www.jonathanschaffer.org/fundamental.pdf

 

[apeiron]

Chomsky quotes Russell approvingly that physics may only reveal the causal/relational properties of physical objects never allowing us to know anything about their intrinsic nature.

Yes, I see you are going to stick to the reductionist view and its paradoxes come what may.

But that Royal Society publication I mentioned reminds why "more is different" when it comes to causation.

The Bishop article is worth reading: http://rsfs.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/early/2011/09/02/rsfs.2011.0065.full

While most metaphysicians focus on the ‘upward’ flow of efficient causation from system components to system behaviour as a whole, complex systems such as convecting fluids present plausible examples of a ‘downward’ flow of influence and constraint on the behaviour of system components. Such behaviours clearly raise questions for a programme of discovering the factors influencing complex systems’ behaviour in the fundamental laws alone, an approach to causation championed by those who favour physical accounts of causation.

There are some interesting points, like that sensitivity to initial conditions proves that local effective cause becomes in principle unmeasurable in realistic dynamical situations. You can't measure reality with infinite precision, and coarse graining does not rescue you.

A reductionist will again protest that there are "hidden variables". Reality is actually in some definite state, infinitesimally specified, even if it is beyond our capacity to measure it. The deep answer is still "intrinsic", even if it is over the event horizon of what can be known.

This is bad ontology, and even bad epistemology, when the world can instead be measured in terms of its constraints. In chaos theory, for example, we can model the global attractors of a system. Why fuss about unmeasurable variables which are "hidden/intrinsic" when science actually can spend its time measuring something concrete?

People are recommending Deacon's new book as a systems/semiotic approach to mind/body issues, though I haven't read it yet myself...

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0393049914/?tag=pfamazon01-20

 

[bohm2]

Why fuss about unmeasurable variables which are "hidden/intrinsic" when science actually can spend its time measuring something concrete?

Primarily because as Strawson notes, consciousness/experience is "the most certainly known natural fact." And the fact that physics/neuroscience has no terms specifically for experiential/the mental (leaving aside some interpretations of QM) seems odd since we know it exists. And here, I'm not deying your arguments above, but I honestly don't think there's a hint of anything that may help us solve this gap in the stuff you cite. I also haven't read the book you linked either although I've read some of Ilya Prigogine's stuff and even went to one of his lectures just before he died. Interestingly, one reviewer of that book seems to be echoing Chalmer's arguments:

The focus then shifts to constraints. Constraints prevent things. They cause things to not happen, they cause them to remain absent and to only be what (otherwise) could have been. Incidentally they cause/allow for other, alternative things to happen. (Naturally, they play a role in organization/morphodynamics.) I have a feeling that this doesn't sound like much of a great insight. It wasn't to me. I don't see what can-in respect to the emergence of mind/consciousness-be gained through that, allegedly new, perspective. For one thing, constraints are physically there. They aren't absent/absential features. For another thing, defining things negatively (a banana is a fruit that is not any fruit other than a banana) is not a new invention. I do not see anything resembling the paradigm shift and revolution Mr. Deacon postulates (and the publisher advertises).

Chalmers makes the same point:

A low-level microphysical description can entail all sorts of surprising and interesting macroscopic properties, as with the emergence of chemistry from physics, of biology from chemistry, or more generally of complex emergent behaviors in complex systems theory. But in all these cases, the complex properties that are entailed are nevertheless structural and dynamic: they describe complex spatiotemporal structures and complex dynamic patterns of behavior over those structures. So these cases support the general principle that from structure and dynamics, one can infer only structure and dynamics.

There is one exception, I think. I do find it odd that the same type of "dualism" pervades the meaning of the wave function in QM. There seems to be this "gap" between the picture of the world provided by the wave function and the world provided by our experience and bridging the two appears just as difficult.

 

[apeiron]

And here, I'm not deying your arguments above, but I honestly don't think there's a hint of anything that may help us solve this gap in the stuff you cite.

OK, you offer no rational arguments against Bishop, you are content simply to cite your beliefs here.

Faith-based positions are indeed impregnable to reason.

 

[bohm2]

OK, you offer no rational arguments against Bishop, you are content simply to cite your beliefs here.

Faith-based positions are indeed impregnable to reason.

Sorry and you're right. I will look over that Bishop paper more closely after I write my exam Monday. I'm having trouble studying and paying attention to that crap on my exam because these discussions on the forum are so much more interesting. So you don't think I'm that close-minded, I did read the P. W. Anderson paper (More is different). I read it before also, but I forgot I read it Not a good omen because I've been forgetting a lot of stuff recently. I think those 8 years of clonazepam may have done some damage to my memory.

 

[bohm2]

I thought this was an interesting criticism of Chomsky's position on the possibility of knowledge:

The epistemological implications of Chomksy’s view of knowledge are worth pursuing in a little more detail. On this view, 'knowledge' is not really knowledge as such since it is not about anything; it expresses our nature, not the world's, since it is a fact about how our brain allows us to apprehend the world and implies nothing about what the world is really like (or even if it even exists). If the structure of the brain itself determines what we can know then there must necessarily be 'sharp limits on attainable knowledge', some problems forever remaining 'mysteries' that we are innately unequipped to solve. And yet Chomsky argues that true knowledge would be possible if biologically accessible concepts and theories happened to converge or intersect with properties of reality, although of course 'there is no particular biological reason why such an intersection should exist'. Nevertheless, Chomsky firmly believes that such incredible intersections do happen (and we can know when they do): 'The successful natural sciences, then, fall within the intersection of the scope of SFF (science-forming faculty) and the nature of the world'. This intersection 'is a chance product of human nature’, 'a remarkable historical accident resulting from chance convergence of biological properties of the human mind with some aspect of the real world' . True knowledge depends on a 'kind of biological miracle'...But where Descartes invoked God to explain the correspondence between thinking and being Chomksy claims that it is 'just blind luck if the human science forming capacity, a particular component of the human biological endowment, happens to yield a result that conforms more or less to the truth about the world'.

This author then tries to show that his position is self-defeating:

The terms he uses, such as 'real world', 'discover', 'knowledge', 'objects' etc, really need to be re-translated into the solipsistic biological idiom. ‘Discovering the real properties of objects’ should be understood to mean something like 'interpreting empirical data as instances of biologically determined categories' or, more grandly, ‘projecting a priori categories of mind onto unknowable things-in-themselves'. By his own arguments, the concepts and technical terms of his linguistic theory must be considered the product of 'SFF'. Whether such things really exist he is not in a position to say. The very theory of mind which Chomsky advocates precludes the claim that the mind as he sees it is real. The simple fact is that if you believe in innate ideas (in original or modernized variants) then you cannot be a philosophical realist. In sum, then, Chomskyan nativism, which 'wavers between an antediluvian spiritualism and a genuinely "vulgar" materialism', is a structure built on Humean and Kantian premisses. Empirical hypotheses or alleged empirical discoveries in linguistics, to the extent that they follow from such premises, are bogus. Chomsky's innate grammar is not a scientific discovery but is falsely inferred from indefensible philosophical premises.

Critical realism and scientific method in Chomsky's linguistics
http://shu.academia.edu/PeterJones/...and_scientific_method_in_Chomskys_linguistics

I'm not sure if his conclusions follow?

 

[Mr.Samsa]

As antithesis to Skinner's equally rigid thesis, it catapulted Chomsky to fame/notoriety.

How is Skinner's account of language "rigid"? Are you confusing Skinner's actual position with Chomsky's strawman which made it look like Skinner believed that language was entirely learnt?

Skinner argued that language was a result of the combination of biological hardware in the brain, and learning processes which allows us to learn specific languages and grammars (as of course Skinner was strongly opposed to blank slate accounts of behavior). How is this "rigid", given that it seems to be consistent with the current dominant theories on language?

 

[apeiron]

Skinner argued that language was a result of the combination of biological hardware in the brain, and learning processes...

What was Skinner's theory about the organisational principles of that biological hardware? Can you provide a precis?

The reason I call Skinner/Behaviourism rigid is because it goes to a methodological extreme and sticks to it. Science likes its polarities, and Chomksy does a good job of standing up for strong rationalism, while Skinner stood for its antithesis of strong empiricism.

For a scientist, strong empiricism seems the more defensible. But I believe that Behaviourism leads mind science up an a-theoretic cul de sac. It is just too simplistic to deal with a complex subject.

So what can Behaviourism actually say about the brain if it is modeling its activities in terms of chained responses? All the emphasis gets put on a link between a single act and a perception of the consequences. To get greater complexity, these individual atoms of behaviour must be chained together.

Now this is nothing like a brain with its hierarchical organisation, its networks and feedback, its anticipation-based processing. Gluing together a bunch of learned responses is not going to get you there.

This does not make Behaviourism flat out wrong. Put a rat in a very simple environment and you will reduce it to very simple behaviour. But as I say, what is wrong is believing that a full and rich theory of the brain/mind can be built from the bottom-up.

You say Skinner was not so rigid in fact. He realized there was more complexity going on. Perhaps like Chomsky, he too would have taken the evo-devo position when pressed, agreeing that biological complexity is shaped by some deep principles of self-organising development. It is not all just a reductionist bunch of lego but a much bigger story of how organisation emerges via the top-down causality of constraints.

Well, if Skinner was arguing for anything more than that the brain was implementing response chaining, I have not come across it. How far did he go in investigating the neural and structural underpinnings of verbal behaviour? Did he ever put forward some "proof of concept" argument that you would actually be able to go from operant conditioning to an account of the cognitive architecture of the brain?

As to which side I take in all this, I think the two great Russian - the psychologist, Vygotsky and the neurologist, Luria - were on the money.

Luria, talking about the history of neurolinguistics (long before Chomsky or Skinner), says the divide was between the associationists and idealists. One extreme thought everything was atomistic chains. The other extreme thought the brain had only a "mental" structure - it was a generalised organ of thought where ideas played freely according to their own rules.

But Luria said everything starts with the concept of the hierarchy. Which is a place in between all these other conceptual extremes. The hierarchy couples the bottom-up and the top-down.

In some sense, Skinner's own approach was hierarchical. Operant conditioning was built on a constrast with lower-order Pavlovian conditioning. But that wasn't really hierarchy theory because the two were not theoretically coupled. Whereas in the Russian tradition - I'm thinking here of Sokolov's brilliant investigation of the orienting response in particular - there was an interactive coupling of attentional and habitual mental processes.

You can see a historic pattern here I guess - Continental rationalism/idealism vs Anglo-saxon empiricism/associationism. With the Russians taking the more pragmatic middle ground.

But anyway, the acid test for me is who is talking hierarchical organisation here?

Chomsky is, of course, but in a confused and surprised fashion. Look, syntax is hierarchical - isn't that weird and impossible to explain in terms of neurology and evolution? Err, no. (The thing that needs explaining is the development of an epistemic cut between the hierarchical organisation of phonology and the hierarchical organisation of the semantics it supports.)

And I don't see any evidence that Skinner ever "got" hierarchies either. But maybe you can cite something to that effect?

 

[Mr.Samsa]

What was Skinner's theory about the organisational principles of that biological hardware? Can you provide a precis?

The reason I call Skinner/Behaviourism rigid is because it goes to a methodological extreme and sticks to it. Science likes its polarities, and Chomksy does a good job of standing up for strong rationalism, while Skinner stood for its antithesis of strong empiricism.

For a scientist, strong empiricism seems the more defensible. But I believe that Behaviourism leads mind science up an a-theoretic cul de sac. It is just too simplistic to deal with a complex subject.

I'm still not quite sure why you think behaviorism represents a 'methodological extreme', or why you think it was a position of strong empiricism? Why would behaviorism lead science up an 'a-theoretic cul de sac'?

So what can Behaviourism actually say about the brain if it is modeling its activities in terms of chained responses? All the emphasis gets put on a link between a single act and a perception of the consequences. To get greater complexity, these individual atoms of behaviour must be chained together.

Now this is nothing like a brain with its hierarchical organisation, its networks and feedback, its anticipation-based processing. Gluing together a bunch of learned responses is not going to get you there.

You seem to be suggesting that behaviorism believes in some kind of simplistic stimulus-response approach to psychology, where each aspect of the 'chain' needs to be linked to a particular stimulus and tied together. Skinner was strongly opposed to such a concept, hence why he dedicated much of his early career to debunking the stimulus-response psychology of the time. He'd agree with you that simplistic chains of responses cannot explain the complexity of behavior.

This does not make Behaviourism flat out wrong. Put a rat in a very simple environment and you will reduce it to very simple behaviour. But as I say, what is wrong is believing that a full and rich theory of the brain/mind can be built from the bottom-up.

But behaviorism can also put a human in a complex environment, and explain/predict their complex behavior. The vast array of complex behavior that behaviorist philosophy has explained over the years (e.g. altruism, self-control, choice, signal detection, etc) certainly adds to the strength of its validity.

You say Skinner was not so rigid in fact. He realized there was more complexity going on. Perhaps like Chomsky, he too would have taken the evo-devo position when pressed, agreeing that biological complexity is shaped by some deep principles of self-organising development. It is not all just a reductionist bunch of lego but a much bigger story of how organisation emerges via the top-down causality of constraints.

Skinner did not need to be "pressed" to accept such a position. His entire philosophy was based on the idea of evolution shaping our bodies and behaviors (not to mention the fact that behaviorism as a whole was created by an ethologist, John Watson, who spent much of his life studying innate behaviors), and he always pointed out that his ideas were an extension of evolutionary theory, not meant as a replacement. This is most evident in his book "Selection by Consequences", where he explicitly describes the comparison between the effects of evolutionary selection on phylogenetic behaviors, and the effects of environmental selection on ontogenic behaviors.

Well, if Skinner was arguing for anything more than that the brain was implementing response chaining, I have not come across it.

I'm not sure why you haven't come across it, he ardently and consistently pointed out that behaviors cannot be understood by looking at the environment alone. This was why he rejected the approach taken by the methodological behaviorists, who looked at behavior in isolation of the biological context that it occurred in. He outlines some of the misconceptions about his behaviorism, and why they're wrong, in his book "About Behaviorism". There is an entire section dedicated to the myth that behaviorists reject the influence on biology on behavior.

How far did he go in investigating the neural and structural underpinnings of verbal behaviour? Did he ever put forward some "proof of concept" argument that you would actually be able to go from operant conditioning to an account of the cognitive architecture of the brain?

He didn't go very far at all because he wasn't a neurologist. He didn't know anything about the brain really, he just knew that environment alone wasn't enough to explain the behaviors he was studying, and he knew that the brain was probably where evolved behaviors and predispositions were stored.

He was interested in learning and the environment though, so he focused on that aspect and let the neurologists figure out the rest.

As to which side I take in all this, I think the two great Russian - the psychologist, Vygotsky and the neurologist, Luria - were on the money.

Luria, talking about the history of neurolinguistics (long before Chomsky or Skinner), says the divide was between the associationists and idealists. One extreme thought everything was atomistic chains. The other extreme thought the brain had only a "mental" structure - it was a generalised organ of thought where ideas played freely according to their own rules.

But Luria said everything starts with the concept of the hierarchy. Which is a place in between all these other conceptual extremes. The hierarchy couples the bottom-up and the top-down.

In some sense, Skinner's own approach was hierarchical. Operant conditioning was built on a constrast with lower-order Pavlovian conditioning. But that wasn't really hierarchy theory because the two were not theoretically coupled. Whereas in the Russian tradition - I'm thinking here of Sokolov's brilliant investigation of the orienting response in particular - there was an interactive coupling of attentional and habitual mental processes.

I'm not sure it's accurate to describe Skinner's hierarchical ideas in terms of operant conditioning being placed on top of classical conditioning, since it's not really accurate to consider classical conditioning "lower order". The two processes run more in parallel, rather than linearly up and down. The hierarchy comes from the complex relationships that these two processes form, with interacting stimulus and response classes, generalisation effects, emergent behaviors being generated from equivalence relations, etc.

If Skinner really held to a simplistic response chain theory, with no hierarchy, then it would seem impossible for him to be able to explain novel behaviors and surely pointing that single fact out should have destroyed the entire behaviorist philosophy?

You can see a historic pattern here I guess - Continental rationalism/idealism vs Anglo-saxon empiricism/associationism. With the Russians taking the more pragmatic middle ground.

Where would Skinner fall in that dichotomy though? His theories rejected associationism, and his position held that empiricism is not the be all and end all of investigation - hence why he emphasised the idea that we needed to come up with theories to explain the unobservable entities inside our heads. If he were a strict empiricist, then why would he support theories of unobservable thoughts and feelings which cannot have any direct empirical support?

 

[apeiron]

He didn't go very far at all because he wasn't a neurologist. He didn't know anything about the brain really, he just knew that environment alone wasn't enough to explain the behaviors he was studying, and he knew that the brain was probably where evolved behaviors and predispositions were stored.

OK, my contention here is that Skinner gave no useful account of either the neuro or social aspects of cognition. And his methods never could. As a programme of science, it gave exaggerated importance to some pretty inconsequential results and its main claim to fame was its empirical rigour. It looked like science at a time when Anglo-saxon psychology was very uncertain of itself, but turned out to be just scientism - the triumph of form over substance.

I agree this is harsh criticism. But perhaps it was because for about a term back in the 1970s, I thought operant psychology was really "it". Then I woke up to the actual paucity of results and the rather cult-like approach taken to teaching the subject.

Maybe my view would be much different if my interests were applied psychology rather than mind science. But right here we are discussing the mind~body problem. And Behaviourism was a way to avoid taking either of those things seriously as the object of modelling.

You say Skinner was not just an extension of the associationist, Darwinian, tabula rasa, tradition. But then where are his theories about the structure of the mind, the architecture of the brain? He may have waved his hand in that direction - even waved it vigorously - but so what?

If Behaviourism does not believe in simplistic stimulus-response chains as the material basis of mind, then can you actually articulate what the big theory is?

I can see it might involve evolved instinctual drives and all that. But again, that is the kind of simplistic notion that evaporates as soon as you pick up a neurology textbook. Yes, you might point to the hypothalamus or reticular activating system. Yet then what? Where is the actual construct to guide your descriptions?

 

[Mr.Samsa]

OK, my contention here is that Skinner gave no useful account of either the neuro or social aspects of cognition. And his methods never could. As a programme of science, it gave exaggerated importance to some pretty inconsequential results and its main claim to fame was its empirical rigour. It looked like science at a time when Anglo-saxon psychology was very uncertain of itself, but turned out to be just scientism - the triumph of form over substance.

I can't help but feel that you're criticising behaviorism based on inconsequential grounds - why would behaviorism need to give an account of the neuro aspects of cognition? With that said, there are cross-overs of behaviorists working with neuroscientists to figure out how the two connect, for example the work of Palmer and O'Donohue (e.g. "http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0376635702000177").

But as for behaviorism not giving any useful account of the social aspects of cognition, I'm not sure how you can even attempt to claim this. Behavioral theories are the dominant explanations in psychology for things like (as I mentioned above) altruism, self-control, choice, signal detection, etc. These are massive areas of cognition. Whether behaviorism has currently explained the phenomenon of cognition as a whole or not is obviously a completely different, and more complicated question.

And this is actually the second time in two days that I've seen Skinner accused of scientism, which is such a weird claim to me. His philosophy was entirely pragmatic, he did not try to extend science to discuss what is real or true, he was just doing what was useful and productive. He attempted to extend science to areas that were previously considered to be beyond science, yes, but he did not misapply science and claim it was the only source of knowledge.

I agree this is harsh criticism. But perhaps it was because for about a term back in the 1970s, I thought operant psychology was really "it". Then I woke up to the actual paucity of results and the rather cult-like approach taken to teaching the subject.

If you gave up in the 1970s, then that might be why you think there is a paucity of results. It wasn't until 1974 that Baum introduced a quantification of choice, which allowed us to predict nearly every behavior (as all behavior is essentially choice behavior, as suggested by Herrnstein). After the mid-1970s is when the field exploded with invaluable results.

Maybe my view would be much different if my interests were applied psychology rather than mind science. But right here we are discussing the mind~body problem. And Behaviourism was a way to avoid taking either of those things seriously as the object of modelling.

The mind-body problem is not something that can be addressed by science, so it seems a little unfair to criticize Skinner's science on that basis. I only jumped into this discussion to question the mischaracterisation of Skinner's position on language.

You say Skinner was not just an extension of the associationist, Darwinian, tabula rasa, tradition. But then where are his theories about the structure of the mind, the architecture of the brain? He may have waved his hand in that direction - even waved it vigorously - but so what?

I don't understand why such a theory would be necessary? He explicitly rejected stimulus-response psychology and associationist theories, and explained why they could not account for complex behaviors. He wanted to scrap everything we thought we knew about the field and begin slowly as a descriptive science, so he wasn't going to come up with theories of the mind or brain without the evidence to support his ideas.

In other words, we can reject blank slate theories without having to create an entire philosophy of mind in its place, in the same way that we can reject creationist theories without having a working theory of abiogenesis.

If Behaviourism does not believe in simplistic stimulus-response chains as the material basis of mind, then can you actually articulate what the big theory is?

Well different behaviorists have different opinions on the matter (especially when we take behaviorism as the general philosophy of science that underpins behavioral psychology, neuroscience, cognitive psychology, ethology, etc), so I'm not sure which area you're particularly interested in. There's Gilbert Ryle's theory in the "Concept of Mind", and there are various functionalist approaches (since functionalism and behaviorism are interchangeable), and Hayes' "Relational Frame Theory" attempts to explain a number of cognitive issues like Theory of Mind, language, etc.

I think the problem is that you're viewing behaviorism as a discrete entity, rather than a broad label for a philosophy of science that spans many disciplines and researchers. Behaviorism simply states that a science of behavior is possible, and makes no real specific claims beyond that.

I can see it might involve evolved instinctual drives and all that. But again, that is the kind of simplistic notion that evaporates as soon as you pick up a neurology textbook. Yes, you might point to the hypothalamus or reticular activating system. Yet then what? Where is the actual construct to guide your descriptions?

Instinctual drives are of course too simplistic and a mistaken notion, but I'm not sure why you're trying to reduce behavioral science to a level that it doesn't attempt to explain.

 

[apeiron]

With that said, there are cross-overs of behaviorists working with neuroscientists to figure out how the two connect, for example the work of Palmer and O'Donohue (e.g. "http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0376635702000177").

Thanks for that. I've checked a few more related papers too.

http://psych.stanford.edu/~jlm/pdfs/Tryon%20Connectionism%20Selectionism.pdf
http://www.lcb-online.org/html/5.html
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1284592/pdf/9132463.pdf

It is interesting that all of them stress how out-of-favour Behaviourism still is. They say the field does indeed need to find some biological foundation to be taken seriously. And they all agree that neural network connectionism is that foundation.

From Tryon...

Skinner's functional explanation of behavior has been marginalized within psychology for the same general reason that Darwin's theory was marginalized within biology. No proximal causal mechanisms are available to explain behavioral variation and how contingent consequences can selectively reinforce or strengthen target behaviors...

...this article notes that explanation based on selection outside of PDP connectionism trend, if left unchecked, is that fewer and fewer proponents of applied behavior analysis will have less and less impact on science, clinical practice, and education. Representation and influence in professional societies will continue to wane. It is time to act in new more effective ways before extinction fully occurs.

So in fact Behaviourism is seeking salvation in associationist architectures, and even "a little bit hierarchical" architectures with the references to PDP multi-layer networks in particular.

I'm not sure why you insist that Behaviourism has no truck with associationism. It was there from the start with Thorndike and is back there again with neural nets.

 

[Mr.Samsa]

Thanks for that. I've checked a few more related papers too.

http://psych.stanford.edu/~jlm/pdfs/Tryon%20Connectionism%20Selectionism.pdf
http://www.lcb-online.org/html/5.html
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1284592/pdf/9132463.pdf

It is interesting that all of them stress how out-of-favour Behaviourism still is. They say the field does indeed need to find some biological foundation to be taken seriously. And they all agree that neural network connectionism is that foundation.

Indeed. Firstly, behaviorism still of course attracts bad press due to lingering misconceptions and misrepresentations (mostly due to the painfully bad Chomsky review, where by the end of it you're surprised that he could even spell "behaviorism" given how little he clearly knew about the subject), but this doesn't stop psychologists and ethologists using behaviorist methodology without realising it. There's a good paper on the topic ("http://top.sagepub.com/content/19/2/68.abstract") which interviewed a number of psychology students and even lecturers, and found that many of them held a number of false beliefs about Skinner and behaviorism. For example, a large number of them believed that behaviorism was a blank slate ideology. Secondly, the authors emphasise the need for a biological foundation "to be taken seriously" because that's the product they're trying to sell. You find the same thing with authors trying to promote quantitative theories in psychology, where they point out the supposed "resistance" to quantitative theories and then present their "solution" to the problem they just made up.

The results from behavioral science don't need a biological basis to be validated - the results are true, regardless of whether they can point to a structure in the brain or not. A biological basis obviously strengthens the arguments made, as science works by finding general laws which are applicable across various fields, but it's not "necessary" in that behavioral science doesn't cease to be true until it can be found.

From Tryon...

So in fact Behaviourism is seeking salvation in associationist architectures, and even "a little bit hierarchical" architectures with the references to PDP multi-layer networks in particular.

I'm not sure why you insist that Behaviourism has no truck with associationism. It was there from the start with Thorndike and is back there again with neural nets.

Maybe you're using "associationism" in a way that differs from the traditional definition. Associationism, as used in psychology at least, refers to the idea that complex behaviors and entities like the mind, can be understood as being composed of a series of simple stimulus-response pairings. The idea is that the stimulus and response become "paired" or associated as a result of occurring at the same time - that is, it emphasised the importance of contiguity in forming these relations. This is the idea that Locke, Hume and Pavlov (and even John Watson, to an extent) supported.

The (radical) behaviorists rejected the associationist beliefs of the empiricists, and suggested that there was more to it than simple contiguity. It's difficult to summarise the entire field in simple terms, but essentially what they did was that they added two important factors: 1) the intent of the organism itself, and 2) the context. This is why behaviorists spend a lot of time highlighting the fact that saying that something is a "conditioned" stimulus is incorrect. It is now referred to as a "conditional" stimulus (as Pavlov originally intended), because the implication that a stimulus and response are "paired" due to occurring at the same time is blatantly false. Instead the supposed "conditioned" stimulus simply acts as a signal or a 'sign post' that informs the organism of what it about to occur. There is no implication that the organism is compelled or forced to behave in any particular way. (There's an interesting paper on that topic here, if you were interested).

So as for describing neural nets as an associationist concept, I can only assume that you mean that various networks are formed through 'associations' (in the laymen sense), rather than the process behind the generation of neural nets is itself being associationist.

 

[bohm2]

Here's a review piece from Stanford on behaviourism that is relevant to this thread I think:

It should also be noted that Skinner's derisive attitude towards explanatory references to mental innerness stems, in part, not just from fears of explanatory regression but from his conviction that if the language of psychology is permitted to refer to internal processing, this goes some way towards permitting talk of immaterial mental substances, agents endowed with contra-causal free will, and little persons (homunculi) within bodies. Each of these Skinner takes to be incompatible with a scientific worldview (see Skinner 1971; see also Day 1976)...Finally, it must be noted that Skinner's aversion to explanatory references to innerness is not an aversion to inner mental states or processes per se. He readily admits that they exist. Skinner countenances talk of inner events provided that they are treated in the same manner as public or overt responses. An adequate science of behavior, he claims, must describe events taking place within the skin of the organism as part of behavior itself (see Skinner 1976). “So far as I am concerned,” he wrote in 1984 in a special issue of Behavioral and Brain Sciences devoted to his work, “whatever happens when we inspect a public stimulus is in every respect similar to what happens when we introspect a private one” (Skinner 1984b, p. 575; compare Graham 1984, pp. 558–9).

http://www.seop.leeds.ac.uk/archives/fall2011/entries/behaviorism/

This is quite different from Chomsky who wants to treat these mental objects as "real" as any other aspects of the world studied by science. In fact, to not pay focus on these (as Skinner's more behaviourist/instrumental approach) leads to little insight and is not what science is all about (or so he would argue, I think):

I will be using the terms "mind" and "mental" here with no metaphysical import. Thus I understand "mental" to be on a par with "chemical", "optical", or "electrical". Certain phenomena, events, processes and states are informally called "chemical" etc., but no metaphysical divide is suggested thereby. The terms are used to select certain aspects of the world as a focus of inquiry. We do not seek to determine the true criterion of the chemical, or the mark of the electrical, or the boundaries of the optical. I will use "mental" the same way, with something like ordinary coverage, but no deeper implications. By "mind" I just mean the mental aspects of the world, with no more interest in sharpening the boundaries or finding a criterion than in other cases.

There is one final issue that deserves a word of comment. I have been using mentalistic terminology quite freely, but entirely without prejudice as to the question of what may be the physical realisation of the abstract mechanisms postulated to account for the phenomena of behaviour or the acquisition of knowledge. We are not constrained, as was Descartes, to postulate a second substance when we deal with phenomena that are not expressible in terms of matter in motion, in his sense. Nor is there much point in pursuing the question of psychophysical parallelism, in this connection. It is an interesting question whether the functioning and evolution of human mentality can be accommodated within the framework of physical explanation, as presently conceived, or whether there are new principles, now unknown, that must be invoked, perhaps principles that emerge only at higher levels of organisation than can now be submitted to physical investigation. We can, however, be fairly sure that there will be a physical explanation for the phenomena in question, if they can be explained at all, for an uninteresting terminological reason, namely that the concept of “physical explanation” will no doubt be extended to incorporate whatever is discovered in this domain, exactly as it was extended to accommodate gravitational and electromagnetic force, massless particles, and numerous other entities and processes that would have offended the common sense of earlier generations. But it seems clear that this issue need not delay the study of the topics that are now open to investigation, and it seems futile to speculate about matters so remote from present understanding. (Langauge and mind, 1968)

Chomsky, has in fact, argued, that "behavioral sciences" suggests a fundamental confusion between evidence and subject matter. Psychology, for example, he claims is the science of mind; to call psychology a behavioral science is like calling physics a science of meter readings. One uses human behavior as evidence for the laws of the operation of the mind, but to suppose that the laws must be laws of behavior is to suppose that the evidence must be the subject matter. (Searle, 1972)

 

[apeiron]

The results from behavioral science don't need a biological basis to be validated - the results are true, regardless of whether they can point to a structure in the brain or not. A biological basis obviously strengthens the arguments made, as science works by finding general laws which are applicable across various fields, but it's not "necessary" in that behavioral science doesn't cease to be true until it can be found.

OK, we need to try to keep the thread on track. The basic question being discussed here is the difficulty of grounding mental experience in a materialistic description of causality.

Conventional science/philosophy does not seem to have the right kinds of causality available to it. The OP suggests that further research may eventually discover these missing "material causes". My reply all along the line is that this is the wrong way to look at the issue. The causality of reality is more complex, involving formal as well as material causes (ie: the material and effective causes in Aristotle's scheme of the four causes).

So what is in fact missing from the discourse is attention to formal and final cause. We already know what is lacking in the causal analysis. We are just not using these other aspects of causality in our modelling. Well, they are there implicitly in fact, and we need to make them explicit to get rid of that nagging sense of mystery that pervades the subject.

Now you have reacted to my ad hominen characterisation of Skinnerian Behaviourism. OK, of course nothing is ever so black and white when it comes to famous thinkers. They are always more nuanced. Their ideas were always evolving and even flip-flopping. It is only in the public eye that they get turned into a historic figure standing for a certain sharply defined thesis - to which other figures were the antithesis.

So the public view is "unfair" to Skinner, just as it is to Chomsky. But also, as generalisations, the view will not be that far off the mark. Besides, these guys were playing the same game themselves, as can be seen from Skinner's "unfair" characterisation of cogsci - http://www.skeptically.org/skinner/id9.html

Anyway, I accept that Skinner, and Behaviourism, offer more complexity once you get into the details. But so far as the OP goes, my criticism stands. Behaviourism represents a turning back towards arch-reductionism in mind science. It ended up a sterile exercise, contributing nothing worthwhile to the fundamental question of how a body makes a mind. Perhaps it is useful as an applied training technique in limited situations, but as a general philosophy of causality, as I say, it is a sterile retreat into reductionist thought.

Now Behaviourism is definitely not all bad. For instance, judging it from the systems perspective I am employing, it does stress the importance of contextual constraints. The brain is responding within the context of a world. The environment is a causal factor. The mind is not simply free to have thoughts and perceptions for no reason. All mental action is shaped by a wider context. And indeed, Behaviourism even works final cause into the story. Reward and punishment are the purpose that draw behaviour towards them. And all this is even pretty explicit in the theories.

But why do I then still feel it to be a barren subject, an intellectual cul-de-sac? And why, in studying mind science, does the operant perspective never crop up in the work of others?

It is not that Behaviourism is flat-out wrong. As a method of collecting observations, it collected what it collected. But as a way to connect body and mind, well it did not inspire any progress.

As you can see from Skinner's article on cogsci, he made some basic mistakes like deriding mental imagery. Yet the ability to manipulate mental imagery is clearly something that distinguishes humans from animals. In the effort to make things "very causally simple, very methodologically empirical", Behaviourism tried to turn attention away from a great many central issues like this. It employed a deliberate impoverishment of language to achieve this (one of the reasons why I felt I was being groomed for a cult when taking operant conditioning classes).

So while you can rightfully say that Behaviourism is a body of science, correct in its own terms, and needing no grounding in neurology or other field, my argument is that this isolationist mentality is what makes it pretty much irrelevant to the wider field of mind science, which has to be interdisciplinary.

The mind/brain as a system is not fundamentally simple but fundamentally complex. And that is how you have to approach it as a subject. What that looks like to me is a hierarchy of explanation along the lines of [systems science [infodynamics [neuroscience [anthropology]]]]. This is a way to begin with all four causes in play and then track their development towards the highest levels of complexity.

But anyway, in the context of the thread, does Behaviourism create a model of material causes that seem sufficient to account for mental experiences?

Chomsky has been put forward as someone saying "there must be further material causes, we just haven't got a clue what they might be." I have replied the actual problem is a failure to treat causality as irreducibly complex.

Most people would take Skinner as saying science should only deal with objective correlations and eschew causal talk - the arch-empiricist stance. Although speaking of "correlations" itself already presumes proximate cause - local effective causality. And formal cause, in the guise of an environment, proves to be a rather thin concept in Behaviourist thought - a hand waved towards an unspecified "everything" that makes up the prevailing context. So Behaviourism is still entangled in the question of causality, even though it relies on an impoverished theoretic language and observational methodology to push the issues into the unspoken background.

I prefer to deal with causality upfront. Our models of causality - implicit or explicit - end up grounding everything anyway. We are not really input-driven observational machines. We actually do project our ideas onto the world and measure it largely in terms of what we expect to find.

The job of scientific method is to give the empirical greater weight in shaping our ideas. But we also need rationalism - yes, philosophy - to refine our ideas too. And science turns out to be the most creative when both these parts of the process are in proper balance.

 

[Mr.Samsa]

Here's a review piece from Stanford on behaviourism that is relevant to this thread I think:

It should also be noted that Skinner's derisive attitude towards explanatory references to mental innerness stems, in part, not just from fears of explanatory regression but from his conviction that if the language of psychology is permitted to refer to internal processing, this goes some way towards permitting talk of immaterial mental substances, agents endowed with contra-causal free will, and little persons (homunculi) within bodies. Each of these Skinner takes to be incompatible with a scientific worldview (see Skinner 1971; see also Day 1976)...Finally, it must be noted that Skinner's aversion to explanatory references to innerness is not an aversion to inner mental states or processes per se. He readily admits that they exist. Skinner countenances talk of inner events provided that they are treated in the same manner as public or overt responses. An adequate science of behavior, he claims, must describe events taking place within the skin of the organism as part of behavior itself (see Skinner 1976). “So far as I am concerned,” he wrote in 1984 in a special issue of Behavioral and Brain Sciences devoted to his work, “whatever happens when we inspect a public stimulus is in every respect similar to what happens when we introspect a private one” (Skinner 1984b, p. 575; compare Graham 1984, pp. 558–9).

http://www.seop.leeds.ac.uk/archives/fall2011/entries/behaviorism/

The SEP article on behaviorism is recognised as being particularly awful when it comes to facts - or to put it more simply, the wikipedia page is better (despite having many problems itself). Importantly, Skinner had no objections to using explanations that appealed to "mental innerness", and encouraged talking of internal processes. He was afterall a "radical" behaviorist, gaining the term "radical" because he wanted to extend the behaviorist paradigm to discussing inner processes.

His objection to the kinds of explanations that he regularly discussed was that they were pseudoexplanations, giving the appearance of having explained a phenomenon when really all the 'explanation' had done was redescribe the problem in a circular manner.

The second half of the above quote is correct, although I think the author misunderstands Skinner's intention. When Skinner says internal processes should be treated in the same way as overt behaviors, he obviously does not mean that internal processes should be interpreted as overt behaviors. That is, Skinner does not argue that "sadness" is the label we apply to people crying and saying, "I'm sad!" (hence why the "Perfect actor" argument is ridiculous). Instead Skinner simply argued that internal processes should be treated as natural parts of the world - with causes and effects that can be studied by science. In other words, he simply said that we should apply the scientific method to psychology.

This is quite different from Chomsky who wants to treat these mental objects as "real" as any other aspects of the world studied by science. In fact, to not pay focus on these (as Skinner's more behaviourist/instrumental approach) leads to little insight and is not what science is all about (or so he would argue, I think):

And Chomsky's quote there is a (albeit rather naive) summary of the behaviorist position.

Chomsky, has in fact, argued, that "behavioral sciences" suggests a fundamental confusion between evidence and subject matter. Psychology, for example, he claims is the science of mind; to call psychology a behavioral science is like calling physics a science of meter readings. One uses human behavior as evidence for the laws of the operation of the mind, but to suppose that the laws must be laws of behavior is to suppose that the evidence must be the subject matter. (Searle, 1972)

Chomsky and Searle both misunderstand what is meant by "behavior" when we talk of the definition of psychology. "Behavior" has a deeper philosophical meaning than just "overt actions". Psychology, of course, is not the studying of 'jumping' or 'pulling levers' or 'pushing buttons', but when we understand what 'behavior' is (that which an organism does) we realize that behavior encompasses a range of things, including overt actions, physiological and chemical reactions in the brain, mental processes, thoughts, feelings, etc.

Behavior is thus the fundamental subject matter which is to be studied by psychologists.

Now you have reacted to my ad hominen characterisation of Skinnerian Behaviourism. OK, of course nothing is ever so black and white when it comes to famous thinkers. They are always more nuanced. Their ideas were always evolving and even flip-flopping. It is only in the public eye that they get turned into a historic figure standing for a certain sharply defined thesis - to which other figures were the antithesis.

I don't think you presented any ad hominem? It was simply an inaccurate representation of his position. Of course, the public perception of complex academic issues will be simplistic and black and white to some degree, but you seem to be presenting Skinner as a blank slatist who argued that language is entirely formed by the environment. This is as wrong as claiming that Darwin was a creationist.

Some inaccuracies or simplifications are understandable and acceptable in standard discourse. Describing a person's position as the complete antithesis of his actual stance is just wrong.

So the public view is "unfair" to Skinner, just as it is to Chomsky. But also, as generalisations, the view will not be that far off the mark. Besides, these guys were playing the same game themselves, as can be seen from Skinner's "unfair" characterisation of cogsci - http://www.skeptically.org/skinner/id9.html

No disagreements there. Skinner's handling of cognitive psychology was unfair, and this is why no other behaviorist accepted his position on that issue. That was his personal position, not one of behaviorism.

Anyway, I accept that Skinner, and Behaviourism, offer more complexity once you get into the details. But so far as the OP goes, my criticism stands. Behaviourism represents a turning back towards arch-reductionism in mind science. It ended up a sterile exercise, contributing nothing worthwhile to the fundamental question of how a body makes a mind. Perhaps it is useful as an applied training technique in limited situations, but as a general philosophy of causality, as I say, it is a sterile retreat into reductionist thought.

I'm not sure how you can say that. Do you argue that the entire fields of behavioral psychology, cognitive psychology, neuroscience and ethology have contributed nothing to our understanding of the mind? Remember, they were all made possible by the philosophy of science of behaviorism that underpin them all.

But why do I then still feel it to be a barren subject, an intellectual cul-de-sac? And why, in studying mind science, does the operant perspective never crop up in the work of others?

Firstly, behaviorism is not wedded to the idea of operant conditioning, so even if operant conditioning was not accepted by any other field and was entirely disproven, it would not affect behaviorism. Secondly, operant conditioning is discussed in every single area that deals with behavior or learning.

It is not that Behaviourism is flat-out wrong. As a method of collecting observations, it collected what it collected. But as a way to connect body and mind, well it did not inspire any progress.

I simply cannot fathom how you can conclude this, unless you are taking the position that science itself cannot answer the fundamental questions of the mind (i.e. arguing for a 1st person perspective of mind that cannot be accessed by third person methodology). If that's the case, then I of course agree but that is not a criticism of behaviorism or science. If not, then again I point out the results of behavioral and cognitive psychology, neuroscience and ethology.

As you can see from Skinner's article on cogsci, he made some basic mistakes like deriding mental imagery. Yet the ability to manipulate mental imagery is clearly something that distinguishes humans from animals. In the effort to make things "very causally simple, very methodologically empirical", Behaviourism tried to turn attention away from a great many central issues like this. It employed a deliberate impoverishment of language to achieve this (one of the reasons why I felt I was being groomed for a cult when taking operant conditioning classes).

Behaviorism didn't turn away from mental imagery, as it has always studied it. Skinner personally rejected it as an explanation for behavior when there was no evidence to support it. That is, when asked why it takes so long for people to solve mental rotation tasks, it is not appropriate to point out that it takes "time" to rotate it in the mind. This explanation is useless and tells us nothing new - hence why it is not the accepted explanation in psychology. Instead the explanation that is accepted is the behaviorist explanation that appeals to the research on stimulus generalisation.

Behaviorists simply cautioned us to be careful of believing we had an explanation when really we didn't. They didn't reject talk of mental imagery, and even used it as fundamental evidence for various theories, but the point is that the introspection used to generate such observations are to be treated as verbal reports which are subject to their own contingencies. (You might find such an explanation familiar, as it is this behaviorist approach which underpins cognitive psychology).

So while you can rightfully say that Behaviourism is a body of science, correct in its own terms, and needing no grounding in neurology or other field, my argument is that this isolationist mentality is what makes it pretty much irrelevant to the wider field of mind science, which has to be interdisciplinary.

There is no isolationist mentality, you've misunderstood what I've said. Behaviorism does not need to ground itself in other sciences to be valid, in the same way that chemistry does not need to ground itself in physics or mathematics to be valid. Mixing certain chemicals will still produce consistent and observable results. However, grounding it can produce useful predictions for us.

With that said, behaviorism is obviously already grounded in various areas. It's closest relationship is with cognitive psychology, where researchers usually work with each other all the time. This is easy to do because they both use the same methodology, study the same phenomena, and reach the same conclusions. But it also has ties to other areas, like neuroscience, which relies solely on behaviorist methodology to conduct much of its research.

But anyway, in the context of the thread, does Behaviourism create a model of material causes that seem sufficient to account for mental experiences?

It certainly has accounted for a number of mental experiences. Whether it has accounted for the entire topic of how the body creates mind, then of course not, as nobody has.

Most people would take Skinner as saying science should only deal with objective correlations and eschew causal talk - the arch-empiricist stance.

Indeed, and those people have probably never read a book by Skinner, otherwise how could they have so badly misread Skinner as saying that science should only deal with objective correlations?

Although speaking of "correlations" itself already presumes proximate cause - local effective causality. And formal cause, in the guise of an environment, proves to be a rather thin concept in Behaviourist thought - a hand waved towards an unspecified "everything" that makes up the prevailing context.

...How can you argue that? Behavioral psychology is the study of context. It's not a hand wave, it's an entire field with journals upon journals filled with data on what constitutes context in any given situation, and what variables are important when considering specific phenomenon.

The job of scientific method is to give the empirical greater weight in shaping our ideas. But we also need rationalism - yes, philosophy - to refine our ideas too. And science turns out to be the most creative when both these parts of the process are in proper balance.

And this is why Skinner argued that we should not rely only on objective measures, because this would cause us to rule out cognition and thoughts. Instead we need to study things as objectively as possible, and when we create hypothetical entities to explain certain things, we need to support them with logical arguments.

This is why he was "radical" - he rejected the methodological behaviorist thought that we can only study the objective, observable behaviors.

This discussion just keeps confusing me more and more. You keep saying that you find the behaviorist position barren, and that it doesn't cover this or that, but the more you describe your position, the more consistent it appears to be with behavorism.

 

[bohm2]

Chomsky and Searle both misunderstand what is meant by "behavior" when we talk of the definition of psychology. "Behavior" has a deeper philosophical meaning than just "overt actions". Psychology, of course, is not the studying of 'jumping' or 'pulling levers' or 'pushing buttons', but when we understand what 'behavior' is (that which an organism does) we realize that behavior encompasses a range of things, including overt actions, physiological and chemical reactions in the brain, mental processes, thoughts, feelings, etc...Behavior is thus the fundamental subject matter which is to be studied by psychologists.

Chomsky's criticism of Skinner's behaviourism is below. I'm sure you read it. Which part do you think Chomsky misunderstands:

A Review of B. F. Skinner's Verbal Behavior
http://www.chomsky.info/articles/1967----.htm

 

[Mr.Samsa]

Chomsky's criticism of Skinner's behaviourism is below. I'm sure you read it. Which part do you think Chomsky misunderstands:

A Review of B. F. Skinner's Verbal Behavior
http://www.chomsky.info/articles/1967----.htm

MacCorquodale's "On Chomsky's Review of Skinner's Verbal Behavior" analyses it quite well:

The fact that the review has never been systematically
replied to (although partial replies
have appeared in Wiest, 1967 and Katahn and
Koplin, 1968) has become the basis for an apparently
wide-spread conclusion that it is in
fact unanswerable, and that its criticisms are
therefore essentially valid, a belief which
Chomsky shares (Jakobovits and Miron, 1967,
p. 142). There are, in truth, several sufficient
reasons for the lack of rejoinder and none of
them have anything to do with the merits of
either Chomsky's or Skinner's case. First, because
not all S-R psychologists are sympathetic
to Skinner's version many of them felt themselves
out of Chomsky's range and were not
moved to defend themselves or Skinner. This
is somewhat ingenuous of them, however, since
Chomsky's actual target is only about one-half
Skinner, with the rest a mixture of odds and
ends of other behaviorisms and some other
fancies of vague origin. No behaviorist escaped
untouched. On the other hand, most Skinnerians
correctly concluded that their behaviorism
was not particularly the focus of the review,
much of which they frankly did not
understand. For example, the review devotes
six utterly bewildering pages (Chomsky, 1959,
pp. 39-44) to yet another refutation (they must
number now in the hundreds) of the drive-reduction
theory of reinforcement, which has
long since disappeared from everyone's behaviorism,
I believe, and which never characterized
Skinner's (Wiest, 1967, makes the same
observation). Finally, and it must be said,
probably the strongest reason why no one has
replied to the review is its tone. It is ungenerous
to a fault; condescending, unforgiving,
obtuse, and ill-humored. For example, the
perfectly well-defined word "response" is consistently
called a "notion" which creates, in
time, an overwhelming atmosphere of dubiety
with respect to the word. The review's one
kind word is in a footnote (Chomsky, 1959,
p. 32). It is almost impossible to reply to whatever
substantive points the review might have
made without at the same time sounding either
defensive and apologetic, or as truculent
as the reviewer.

(Apologies for the awkward PDF formatting).

MacCorquodale deals with the only three relevant criticisms that he can salvage from Chomsky's review, but I found the above excerpt to be quite a good summary of the issues with Chomsky's review. The fact that he spends a lot of his time attacking S-R psychology, and drive-reduction theorists, just goes to show that he didn't know anything about Skinner or his behaviorism. If he did, then he would have realized that Skinner had already dismantled those positions 20 years earlier.

Chomsky's severe misunderstanding of Skinner, behaviorism and "Verbal Behavior" are why his review is given little-to-no weight in academia. And obviously it, despite popular opinion, did not affect the continual growth and work of behaviorism.

 

[apeiron]

This discussion just keeps confusing me more and more. You keep saying that you find the behaviorist position barren, and that it doesn't cover this or that, but the more you describe your position, the more consistent it appears to be with behavorism.

The only reason for the confusion is that you keep switching the level of your definitions. Sometimes its Skinner's radical Behaviourism, sometimes it is Behaviourism as a field that includes Watson, Thorndike, Tolman and others who believed there are rules of learning that generalise directly from animals to humans, and then there is behaviourism with a small "b", which is what really everyone apparently does.

It is interesting that there is a lot of negative feeling about Behaviourism, and Skinnerism in particular.

It seems a lot of people are wishing it dead...
http://www.baam.emich.edu/baammiscpages/baamdeathwatch.htm

Behaviorism, founded in 1913 by John B. Watson, is almost a century old. For almost as long, behaviorism has been declared "dead," "dying," "moribund," or at least not in good health. Behaviorists know different, of course.

But I thought this APS editorial gave a balanced summary...
http://www.psychologicalscience.org/observer/getArticle.cfm?id=1540

Particularly this comment...

Another framing to the previous answer (owing to Endel Tulving) is that there are several valid sciences of psychology. He wrote to me in an e-mail comment on an earlier draft of this column that: "It is quite clear in 2004 that the term 'psychology' now designates at least two rather different sciences, one of behavior and the other of the mind. They both deal with living creatures, like a number of other behavioral sciences, but their overlap is slim, probably no greater than psychology or sociology used to be when the world was young. No one will ever put the two psychologies together again, because their subject matter is different, interests are different, and their understanding of the kind of science they deal with is different. Most telling is the fact that the two species have moved to occupy different territories, they do not talk to each other (any more), and the members do not interbreed. This is exactly as it should be."

I think this makes it clearer what divides people. Some of us want to understand the general architectural principles of the mind. Others want to be able to predict and control its manifestations.

So one wants to have a general systems theory of mind of the kind that is explicitly causal - that presents the deep principles in a way that is philosophically satisfactory, and can be used to actually make mind-like machines.

The other says philosophical satisfaction is not the business of science (the familiar logical positive position). And second, the desired pay-off in terms of application is the repair or control of systems with minds. It does not actually matter how the minds work. But because they seem to be quite good at learning and adapting, you just need precise descriptions of the environmental variables you have to control to achieve control over the minds.

OK, no reason why you can't not want to do everything in the one package. But I think this explains a lot about the social dynamics. Cogsci took off largely because of the promise of artificial intelligence. You could get big bucks from Darpa for investigating the systems principles by which mind-like devices could be mass produced.

(This, by the way, I have to mention because it is so funny - Skinner's pigeon guided missiles - http://historywired.si.edu/object.cfm?ID=353).

Likewise, Behaviourism continues, even thrives, as applied remedial learning. And applied behavioural control. That is the kind of technology that results from the field's focus, and it pays its way.

But it is not about the generalised principles of mind. Maybe Skinner thought it might be. Yet I don't see anything that Behaviourism invented that has been of any note.

I haven't actually read Skinner's own writings such as mentioned here...
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1389767/

Thirty-six years later in a chapter on “What is Inside the Skin?” in About Behaviorism (1974, pp. 207–218), Skinner reaffirmed the importance of a reductionist framework, and again rejected attributing the cause of a behavior to a single neurobiological entity, whether it was a synapse, an anatomical structure, an emotion, or a motivation. The possible exception he noted was appealing to neural events to fill inevitable gaps in an operant account. For example, because behavioral accounts of reinforcement are “necessarily historical,” they leave gaps between events that might be filled in by neural processes related to memory. It was clear, though, that any large-scale integration remained far in the future, following the establishment of comprehensive and independent behavioral and neural sciences.

But also nothing that has been said so far has changed my opinion that operant concepts don't create a natural bridge to theories of cognition.

This is in interesting contrast to orienting reflexes and other post-Pavlovian work. I think the difference there is that the step is quite small between reflexive behaviour and the brain organisation needed to make it happen.

Whereas for operant level behaviour, you are now into the high level brain stuff, which is very plastic and memory/attention/anticipation/goals based. You are into the complexity, and need to come at it in terms of theories about processing architectures rather than observed patterns of behavioural contingencies.

 

[Mr.Samsa]

The only reason for the confusion is that you keep switching the level of your definitions. Sometimes its Skinner's radical Behaviourism, sometimes it is Behaviourism as a field that includes Watson, Thorndike, Tolman and others who believed there are rules of learning that generalise directly from animals to humans, and then there is behaviourism with a small "b", which is what really everyone apparently does.

It changes depending on what the discussion requires. Generally when I mention behaviorism in reference to what I view as currently valid arguments, ideas or conclusions, I'll be referring to radical behaviorism as all other forms are dead or have been replaced.

And the idea that the rules of learning generalise directly from animals to humans is not limited to any particular philosophy, it's just a scientific fact.

It is interesting that there is a lot of negative feeling about Behaviourism, and Skinnerism in particular.

It seems a lot of people are wishing it dead...
http://www.baam.emich.edu/baammiscpages/baamdeathwatch.htm

Haha yeah, it's interesting how often behaviorism is declared dead. I think that's mostly due to people not understand what behaviorism is (like those in the article I linked to earlier, that tested students' knowledge of Skinner and behaviorism).

But I thought this APS editorial gave a balanced summary...
http://www.psychologicalscience.org/observer/getArticle.cfm?id=1540

Indeed, Roediger's article is brilliant - I've linked to it a few times in the past to correct people's misconceptions of behaviorism.

Particularly this comment...

Another framing to the previous answer (owing to Endel Tulving) is that there are several valid sciences of psychology. He wrote to me in an e-mail comment on an earlier draft of this column that: "It is quite clear in 2004 that the term 'psychology' now designates at least two rather different sciences, one of behavior and the other of the mind. They both deal with living creatures, like a number of other behavioral sciences, but their overlap is slim, probably no greater than psychology or sociology used to be when the world was young. No one will ever put the two psychologies together again, because their subject matter is different, interests are different, and their understanding of the kind of science they deal with is different. Most telling is the fact that the two species have moved to occupy different territories, they do not talk to each other (any more), and the members do not interbreed. This is exactly as it should be."

I think this makes it clearer what divides people. Some of us want to understand the general architectural principles of the mind. Others want to be able to predict and control its manifestations.

I'm not sure I accept that explanation, but maybe I'm misunderstanding. When behaviorists study mental imagery, dreams, signal processing, thoughts, etc, what are they studying if not the mind? Using self-reports and introspection to determine what the person is perceiving inside their mind, is surely a study of the mind?

I prefer the following explanation that Roediger gives:

Perhaps the most radical answer to the question I posed is that behaviorism is less discussed and debated today because it actually won the intellectual battle. In a very real sense, all psychologists today (at least those doing empirical research) are behaviorists. Even the most cognitively oriented experimentalists study behavior of some sort. They might study effects of variables of pushing buttons on computers, or filling out checklists, or making confidence ratings, or patterns of bloodflow, or recalling words by writing them on sheets of paper, but they almost always study objectively verifiable behavior. (And even subjective experiences, such as confidence ratings, can be replicated across people and across conditions). This step of studying objectively verifiable behavior represents a huge change from the work of many psychologists in 1904. Today the fields of cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience are highly behavioral (if one includes neural measures of behavior). True, there is nothing necessarily inherently interesting about pushing buttons on computers, but on the other hand, the basic laws of behavior in the animal lab were worked out on rats pushing levers and navigating runways, or pigeons pecking keys - not exactly riveting behaviors in their own right. In all these cases, the scientist's hope is to discover fundamentally interesting principles from simple, elegant experimental analyses. The cognitive researcher goes further and seeks converging evidence from behavioral observations on internal workings of the mind/brain systems. But as experimentalists, both cognitive and behavioral researchers study behavior. Behaviorism won.

So one wants to have a general systems theory of mind of the kind that is explicitly causal - that presents the deep principles in a way that is philosophically satisfactory, and can be used to actually make mind-like machines.

The other says philosophical satisfaction is not the business of science (the familiar logical positive position). And second, the desired pay-off in terms of application is the repair or control of systems with minds. It does not actually matter how the minds work. But because they seem to be quite good at learning and adapting, you just need precise descriptions of the environmental variables you have to control to achieve control over the minds.

I can't understand which one is which in these explanations. The former appears to be referring to behaviorism, since the progress in areas like creating "mind-like machines", and finding causal theories of mental processes, is largely led by behaviorist theorists. The cognitive scientists tend to lag behind because they took a while to reject Fodor's mistaken computational theory of mind.

OK, no reason why you can't not want to do everything in the one package. But I think this explains a lot about the social dynamics. Cogsci took off largely because of the promise of artificial intelligence. You could get big bucks from Darpa for investigating the systems principles by which mind-like devices could be mass produced.

I think cogsci took off because behaviorism paved the way for it. It developed the experimental method for studying behavior, and then highlighted how this methodology could be applied to cognition and other mental processes. From there, the cognitive scientists followed on. This is why psychologists reject the idea of a "cognitive revolution", as there was no real revolution. There was nobody to overthrow, everybody accepted that the mental world should be studied, and they all agreed on the method to do so.

(This, by the way, I have to mention because it is so funny - Skinner's pigeon guided missiles - http://historywired.si.edu/object.cfm?ID=353).

Indeed. It was hugely successful, and apparently if computer guidance hadn't been developed around the same time, they would have actually been dropping pigeons with their missiles.

Likewise, Behaviourism continues, even thrives, as applied remedial learning. And applied behavioural control. That is the kind of technology that results from the field's focus, and it pays its way.

But it is not about the generalised principles of mind. Maybe Skinner thought it might be. Yet I don't see anything that Behaviourism invented that has been of any note.

I'm not sure why you keep saying this though. My area of research is purely in the experimental side of behaviorism. I don't do any applied stuff, and I'm not interested in overt physical behaviors. I study mental processes and cognition. Where do I fit in your picture here?

I haven't actually read Skinner's own writings such as mentioned here...
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1389767/



But also nothing that has been said so far has changed my opinion that operant concepts don't create a natural bridge to theories of cognition.

But again you're confusing operant conditioning with behaviorism. Behaviorism is the general philosophy which resulted in the science that discovered operant conditioning. It's not vital or important to behaviorism as a philosophy. It's only important to science as a whole, due to it repeatedly being demonstrated as a fundamental aspect of how all animals (including humans) function.

With that being said, I can't think of any theory of cognition which could possibly exclude operant processes.

This is in interesting contrast to orienting reflexes and other post-Pavlovian work. I think the difference there is that the step is quite small between reflexive behaviour and the brain organisation needed to make it happen.

Whereas for operant level behaviour, you are now into the high level brain stuff, which is very plastic and memory/attention/anticipation/goals based. You are into the complexity, and need to come at it in terms of theories about processing architectures rather than observed patterns of behavioural contingencies.

You understand that the principles of memory, attention and goal generation (and probably 'anticipation' if defined more concretely) are driven by operant contingencies, right? That is, you can't discuss things like memory in any level of detail without discussing operant processes.

 

[bohm2]

Chomsky's severe misunderstanding of Skinner, behaviorism and "Verbal Behavior" are why his review is given little-to-no weight in academia. And obviously it, despite popular opinion, did not affect the continual growth and work of behaviorism.

I'm not qualified enough to comment in detail on that review/criticism, but at least with respect to cognitive science (where I do arguably, have some qualifications) his works (e.g. Syntantic Structures, etc.) are arguably among the most important (if not the most important overall) papers influencing cognitive science in the 20th century:

The one hundred most influential works in cognitive science from the 20th century
http://www.cogsci.umn.edu/OLD/calendar/past_events/millennium/final.html

Even his review of Skinner's verbal behaviour ranks 19th on this particular list. So I'm not sure what you mean his work is "given little-to-no weight in academia"?

 

[apeiron]

Using self-reports and introspection to determine what the person is perceiving inside their mind, is surely a study of the mind?

This is not a study of how mind - conscious experience - arises. A description of the apparent contents is not the same thing as a description of the production of the contents. Which again, to remind, is what the OP is about.

So the cognitive paradigm is based on the belief that an "internal processing architecture" can account for the mind as a material phenomenon.

It would seem that a behaviourist description of the mind would apply even if minds were immaterial souls. If I say I see red or have a toothache because my verbal behaviour is being reinforced by a social community in the presence of an inner qualia, then that qualia could equally well be the product of a complexity of neural activity, or some immaterial soul-field.

That is why Behaviourism seems detached from the questions that cognitive science returned to.

Of course, behaviourism with a small "b", would correctly point out that architecture-based approaches to mind need to be ecologically valid, embodied, evolutionary-rooted, etc. And with computationalism and functionalism, cogsci strayed away into abstract, disembodied and otherwise unrealistic thinking.

Thinking about it this way, I can see a big part of my objections to Skinnerian Behaviourism is that its idea of behavioural context was so shallow. This was why in the 1970s I went off looking for the way that the brain adapts to its contexts over multiple temporal scales, from the evolutionary through the developmental and habitual right up to the anticipatory.

The cognitive scientists tend to lag behind because they took a while to reject Fodor's mistaken computational theory of mind.

Yes I agree that Fodor was a wrong turn and modularity did appear to dominate the conversation. But it is interesting how many on Bohm2's millenium list were hierarchical and distributed architecture thinkers. This list makes cogsci look much more balanced and reasonable than I remember.

Again, this seems to be social dynamics at play. Fields become remembered for their extremes. They become generalised in the academic memory so that what was asserted as "right" can be then definitely rejected as wrong, so allowing paradigms to shift, "progress" to be made.

And I don't think cogsci ever really recovered and took the right turn. A belief in strong modularity has persisted into evolutionary psychology and cognitive neuroscience.

In mind science, there are still the unresolved tensions caused by some deep polarities. Is the brain's architecture distributed or modular, computational or dynamic, material or informational, nature or nurture, hardwired or learnt?

The reasonable view is that it is always somehow both. But reductionist logic does not allow that answer. The law of the excluded middle must apply. One proposition must be true, the other false.

Which is why I focus on more complex models of causality - hierarchical or systems causality - where dichotomies are not a bug but a feature. They are the process by which hierarchies naturally arise.

Again, this was explicit in Luria's classic, The Working Brain. His first law of brain organisation was that it is a functional hierarchy. His second and third laws were then about the fundamental dichotomies in this organisation - plasticity~stability and fringe~focus.

I study mental processes and cognition. Where do I fit in your picture here?

Great, then you should have no problem offering specific examples of Behaviourism in practice.

Is it a reasonable question to ask how operant constructs like mands and tacts have fruitfully led to new neurolinguistic insights? How have they guided us in investigating functional brain architecture, in making sense of the brain's complexity.

 

[Mr.Samsa]

I'm not qualified enough to comment in detail on that review/criticism, but at least with respect to cognitive science (where I do arguably, have some qualifications) his works (e.g. Syntantic Structures, etc.) are arguably among the most important (if not the most important overall) papers influencing cognitive science in the 20th century:

The one hundred most influential works in cognitive science from the 20th century
http://www.cogsci.umn.edu/OLD/calendar/past_events/millennium/final.html

Even his review of Skinner's verbal behaviour ranks 19th on this particular list. So I'm not sure what you mean his work is "given little-to-no weight in academia"?

I said that his review is given little-to-no weight in academia, not his work in general. And yes, it was an influential piece of work but that wasn't quite what I was getting at - I was more highlighting the fact that the ideas contained within it have mostly been rejected and discredited (obviously with Skinner's ideas coming out trumps in a lot of areas).

So the review was definitely influential, in that it's viewed as being one of the works that sparked the "cognitive revolution", and it also resulted in a massive amount of research in areas of language - like the language acquisition device, etc. Most of his ideas in the review were found to be poorly thought out and ruled out pretty quickly, or they were wrong and unproductive, and ruled out after research came back negative.

This is not a study of how mind - conscious experience - arises. A description of the apparent contents is not the same thing as a description of the production of the contents. Which again, to remind, is what the OP is about.

So the cognitive paradigm is based on the belief that an "internal processing architecture" can account for the mind as a material phenomenon.

Except the behaviorist account also discusses the internal processing architecture, just using different terminology. That's what is confusing me here. You seem to be presenting cognitive science and behavioral psychology as conflicting paradigms, and promoting the cognitive perspective, but ignoring the fact that cognitive science and behavioral psychology are interchangeable. They both study the same phenomena.

And this is ignoring the fact that cognitive psychologists use behaviorism as their philosophy of science.

It would seem that a behaviourist description of the mind would apply even if minds were immaterial souls. If I say I see red or have a toothache because my verbal behaviour is being reinforced by a social community in the presence of an inner qualia, then that qualia could equally well be the product of a complexity of neural activity, or some immaterial soul-field.

That is why Behaviourism seems detached from the questions that cognitive science returned to.

I'm not sure behaviorism could apply to immaterial minds because it studies the inner workings of the mind, and if the entity is immaterial, then it wouldn't be able to study it. Remember, behaviorism isn't a black box approach - it studies what goes on inside the mind in the exact same way cognitive scientists do.

If it helps, keep in mind that there is no practical reason for having separate labels for cognitive science and behavioral psychology. They are the same field (hence why behavioral psychologists and cognitive scientists hop between the fields with ease, no particularly new training, or changing their methods or subject matter). The only reason there are separate labels is for political and historical reasons.

Of course, behaviourism with a small "b", would correctly point out that architecture-based approaches to mind need to be ecologically valid, embodied, evolutionary-rooted, etc. And with computationalism and functionalism, cogsci strayed away into abstract, disembodied and otherwise unrealistic thinking.

Thinking about it this way, I can see a big part of my objections to Skinnerian Behaviourism is that its idea of behavioural context was so shallow. This was why in the 1970s I went off looking for the way that the brain adapts to its contexts over multiple temporal scales, from the evolutionary through the developmental and habitual right up to the anticipatory.

Shallow in what sense? Since behaviorism includes neuroscience, how does investigating the brain constitute escaping behaviorism?

And I don't think cogsci ever really recovered and took the right turn. A belief in strong modularity has persisted into evolutionary psychology and cognitive neuroscience.

In mind science, there are still the unresolved tensions caused by some deep polarities. Is the brain's architecture distributed or modular, computational or dynamic, material or informational, nature or nurture, hardwired or learnt?

The reasonable view is that it is always somehow both. But reductionist logic does not allow that answer. The law of the excluded middle must apply. One proposition must be true, the other false.

But didn't you accuse behaviorism of being reductionistic? How can it be both reasonable (in that it balances nature and nurture, hardwired and learnt, etc), but also reductionistic (which you claim doesn't allow that)?

Great, then you should have no problem offering specific examples of Behaviourism in practice.

What particular area are you interested in?

Is it a reasonable question to ask how operant constructs like mands and tacts have fruitfully led to new neurolinguistic insights? How have they guided us in investigating functional brain architecture, in making sense of the brain's complexity.

Well Verbal Behavior led directly to Relational Frame Theory. This article discusses some of its findings in relation to neuroscientific findings. And obviously, the fact that Skinner's approach resulted in us understanding how language is learned and made it possible for us to develop language therapies - surely a fairly impressive neurolinguistic insight.

 

[bohm2]

Just to add some more papers on this off-topic detour (which is fine since it's forcing me to read and learn something), I came across this paper. The author discusses this whole issue including MacCorquodale’s paper and Chomsky's response (or really dismissal) to it.

On Chomsky’s Appraisal of Skinner’s Verbal Behavior:A Half Century of Misunderstanding
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2223153/pdf/bhan-29-02-253.pdf