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

[apeiron]

What science? I thought there is very little science in this area.

Why do you think that? There are journals, conferences, turf battles over whether you belong to paleolinguistics, biolinguistics or historical linguistics. Every semblance of an active academic domain

If his papers and that of people like Ian Tattersall, Hauser, etc. aren't convincing then it's unlikely that a non-expert like myself can do justice to their arguments but two very good papers giving these arguments are the following:

OK, what is it that Tattersall is claiming here in your view? I'm not sure where the significant dispute might be?

Apparently the major biological reorganization at the origin of Homo sapiens involved some neural innovation that “exapted” the already highly evolved human brain for symbolic thought. This potential then had to be “discovered” culturally, plausibly through the invention of language. Emergence rather than natural selection is thus implicated in the origin of human symbolic consciousness, a chance coincidence of acquisitions having given rise to an entirely new and unanticipated level of complexity. This observation may undermine claims for “adaptedness” in modern human behaviors.

So as I argue, the brain is exapted for grammar/syntax. And then this possibility had to be "discovered" culturally.

Tattersall's gloss is in error I would say for not treating cultural evolution as an actual form of evolutionary change (he calls this second stage emergence rather than evolution).

But really, he is not addressing the points that I was raising. He does not deal with the vocal tract (though elsewhere he has said he is more swayed by the evidence that an articulate tract arose only in sapiens - something that is quite possibly true, indeed what I would prefer to believe, and doesn't change anything here except the timings).

And so far as "major brain reorganisation" goes, Tattersall is not presenting any evidence of such.

He says...

What exactly this change was, is beyond my expertise to speculate, although numerous suggestions have been made: one intriguing suggestion is that a neural system linking the basal ganglia and other subcortical structures with the cortex, and initially adapted for motor control,
was coopted to cognitive functions (Lieberman, 2006, 2007); another possibility is of a mutation affecting working memory or phonological storage capacity in the prefrontal cortex (Coolidge and Wynn, 2005).

He then goes on to say that this change was like the keystone of an arch - a small but significant change. So not in fact anything major in morphology, just retrospectively major in consequence.

At this point, it would be worth turning to a better authority like Lieberman - the original vocal tract theorist! Whose "intriguing suggestion" is precisely that the critical shift was from a low-level autonomic control over the vocal tract to a high-level one, setting up the ability to actually plan complex and novel vocalisations.

Vocalisation became more complex because of considerable change to the vocal tract. And because of the fine-tuning of top-down neural connectivity that created more "oversight" of the motor control of that tract.

It does pay to understand brain evolution in some detail here. The top-down connections already existed. So you could say the brain was exapted - but then it has connections in every direction so it is exapted to do just about anything on this score. All that had to actually happen was an adjustment of ratios. More widespread top-downness, more plasticity of motor control.

That is not to say a whole lot of other fine-grain twiddling of neurodevelopmental settings were not going on. Rather than a single hopeful monster genetic change, you would expect many millenia of fine-tuning that continued even for the next 40k years after symbolic speech definitely existed.

So did you see something critical in the Tattersall paper that I've missed? It's certainly not an argument against the possible importance of the vocal tract as a new constraint on expressive communication, or the likely fine-grain and cumulative nature of any related "brain reorganisation", or the need for the later cultural evolution of language itself, as far as I can see.

 

[Albuquerque]

...the advantage in the evolution of vocal communication in relation to say gestural communication is probably related with the constant use of hands either to gather to hunt or to work...curiously face mimics can be considered the only exception to this situation...no wonder our complex array of facial expressions is so important in communication specially considering that baby´s could not resort to complex vocalizations while very young...for that very same reasons it is currently believed women are far better prepared to interpret facial signs regarding states of mind then man...

 

[bohm2]

So did you see something critical in the Tattersall paper that I've missed? It's certainly not an argument against the possible importance of the vocal tract as a new constraint on expressive communication, or the likely fine-grain and cumulative nature of any related "brain reorganisation", or the need for the later cultural evolution of language itself, as far as I can see.

I think the key difference can be framed around a modern version of the Darwin-Wallace debate. Maybe you can expand on it because your background is far more extensive than mine in this area. Consider these points by Chomsky but also repeated by Tattershall and the others:

The language faculty is one component of what the cofounder of modern evolutionary theory, Alfred Russel Wallace, called ‘‘man’s intellectual and moral nature’’: the human capacities for creative imagination, language and symbolism generally, mathematics, interpretation and recording of natural phenomena, intricate social practices, and the like, a complex of capacities that seem to have crystallized fairly recently, perhaps a little over 50,000 years ago, among a small breeding group of which we are all descendants—a complex that sets humans apart rather sharply from other animals, including other hominids, judging by traces they have left in the archaeological record. The nature of the ‘‘human capacity,’’ as some researchers now call it, remains a considerable mystery. It was one element of a famous disagreement between the two founders of the theory of evolution, with Wallace holding, contrary to Darwin, that evolution of these faculties cannot be accounted for in terms of variation and natural selection alone, but requires ‘‘some other influence, law, or agency,’’ some principle of nature alongside gravitation, cohesion, and other forces without which the material universe could not exist. Although the issues are framed differently today within the core biological sciences, they have not disappeared (see Wallace 1889: chap. 15, Marshack 1985).

Same with our mathematical abilities:

Restriction to this case yields the successor function, from which the rest of the theory of natural numbers can be developed in familiar ways. That suggests a possible answer to a problem that troubled Wallace over a century ago: in his words, that the ‘‘gigantic development of the mathematical capacity is wholly unexplained by the theory of natural selection, and must be due to some altogether distinct cause’’ (1889:467), if only because it remained unused.

Consider also Tattersall's point here:

Still, it is far more likely that the neurological underpinnings of the human symbolic capacity were born in the major genetic/developmental reorganization that resulted in the physical entity Homo sapiens as we know it today – but that the expression of this underlying capacity had to await release by some cultural (White, 1982) rather than biological acquisition (Tattersall, 2004). This, of course, begs the question of what this cultural acquisition might have been; and it is hardly original to suggest that the prime candidate for the cultural releasing agent of the human symbolic capacity is the invention of language, facilitated by an already existing neural substrate.

I think the difference is that Chomsky/Tattersall/Hauser see culture as an effect of our innate symbolic ability and not the other way around. I'm not sure if I'm making sense but the difference is important and is what separates these two contrasting positions, I think. What confuses me (and maybe I'm mistaken), is if evolution of these abstract faculties was not guided by natural selection but due to natural law, might this explain why we seem to have a much deeper understanding of mind-independent reality than other animals? This is more in line with Peirce's argument and not Chomsky's (e.g. "and if man's mind has been developed under the influence of those laws, it is to be expected that he should have a natural light, or light of nature, or instinctive insight, or genius, tending to make him guess those laws aright, or nearly aright..."). But maybe I'm way off the mark and direct access to some aspect of mind-independent reality is not possible (as Chomsky argues), even if evolution is guided directly by such laws.

Why do you think that? There are journals, conferences, turf battles over whether you belong to paleolinguistics, biolinguistics or historical linguistics. Every semblance of an active academic domain

I meant this:

The most direct potential approaches to such investigation lie in the examination of the fossil and archaeological archives of the human past. Sadly, though, cognition in itself leaves no imprint in the tangible record. As a result, in trying to understand the evolution of our unusual cognitive mode we have to seek proxy systems.

 

[Albuquerque]

...it is my impression that the gravitational information coming out from the Moon, not being the Moon it is a natural model of the Moon or what the system Moon is, functionally speaking, say, in relation to Earth...sets of gravitons may be said to constitute the "linguistic" medium by which packets of information can be conveyed regarding variations in distance and its respective influence say in tides and so on...additionally we could consider rotation magnetic fields heat and such like but for simplification sake gravity suffices for analogy...now it seams fair to assert that the fundamental distinction we usually do regarding the encoding of information from living beings at large and humans in particular in opposition to inorganic systems is deeply rooted to the innate persuasive and persistent sense of agency provided by the highly complex so called "self effect" common to the particular development of our own system/species which to some extent has recently progressively been called into question by neuroscientists...if such is proven the case the all endless debate on language miraculous specificity will look very funny on history books...

 

[apeiron]

What confuses me (and maybe I'm mistaken), is if evolution of these abstract faculties was not guided by natural selection but due to natural law, might this explain why we seem to have a much deeper understanding of mind-independent reality than other animals? This is more in line with Peirce's argument and not Chomsky's (e.g. "and if man's mind has been developed under the influence of those laws, it is to be expected that he should have a natural light, or light of nature, or instinctive insight, or genius, tending to make him guess those laws aright, or nearly aright..."). But maybe I'm way off the mark and direct access to some aspect of mind-independent reality is not possible (as Chomsky argues), even if evolution is guided directly by such laws.

I don't think you give near enough weight to the impact of cultural evolution. Langauge opened up an entirely new realm of world-modelling for the human mind. And if you don't find a way to factor this in as part of your view of epistemology, then indeed you may jump to more fantastical reasons why humans are so good at world-modelling.

 

[Albuquerque]

...complex algorithms in computer programs can be very good in prediction and control and the tendency is to improve in the long run but it is not the case that they are conscious or aware on anything per se...it seams to me that we must separate "awareness" a problem of its own from complex forms of convergent data analysis...other then that I am personally not denying the importance of culture in general or even Ethics and Moral as methods to improve social efficiency in producing work, which is what they do, as they are none less then organizing "operative systems" where obviously a precise and yet subjective multi modal language is instrumental to the diversified adapting progress of a large group as a whole...nevertheless communication as means of achieving efficiency between a constellation or a cloud of integrated systems hardly can be seen as a specific human invention if not through a very narrow conception of what "language" and "communication" actually mean...we are indeed to obsessed with our sense of self importance to look at such matters in a frivolous cold and sufficiently distant manner...I for one indulge myself in imagining such scenarios for the sole and modest purpose of entertainment..

 

[bohm2]

I don't think you give near enough weight to the impact of cultural evolution. Langauge opened up an entirely new realm of world-modelling for the human mind. And if you don't find a way to factor this in as part of your view of epistemology, then indeed you may jump to more fantastical reasons why humans are so good at world-modelling.

You're probably right. Do you think that as a species we've evolved at all in the past ~50,000 years despite major changes in culture (and I'm not talking about things that are environmental like increase in height/weight, etc.)? I mean if I was to take a human infant from ~50,000 years ago and bring him/her up in today's society would he/she be pretty well like any other human being? Take a Neandethal or a pre-human ancestor and do the same.

 

[Evo]

You're probably right. Do you think that as species we've evolved at all in the past 50,000 years despite major changes in culture (and I'm not talking about things that are environmental like increase in height/weight, etc.)? I mean if I was to take a human infant from ~50,000 years ago and bring him/her up in today's society would he/she be pretty well like any other human being? Take a Neandethal or a pre-human ancestor and do the same.

Humans from ~50k years ago, yes.

 

[bohm2]

Humans from ~50k years ago, yes.

Do you think that an infant from that era that is brought up in modern society would not have the same language/math/science/music abilities/potential, etc as a modern human infant?

 

[Evo]

Do you think that an infant from that era that is brought up in modern society would not have the same language/math/science/music abilities/potential, etc as a modern human infant?

They'd have the same abilities, the modern human brain has been around ~50,000 years.

 

[Pythagorean]

What about transgenerational epigenetic effects? They've begun to manifest changes in the body at least (grandmothers of the depression have granddaughters more susceptible to diabetes and obesity).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epigenetics#Transgenerational_epigenetic_observations

Won't it be a while (and a lot of experiments and studies) before we can say what such effects have played a role in brain function in 50k years? (given that the textbook example of famine and diabetes was a two-generation development).

 

[apeiron]

Do you think that as a species we've evolved at all in the past ~50,000 years despite major changes in culture (and I'm not talking about things that are environmental like increase in height/weight, etc.)?

Yes, some researchers argue there has actually been faster genetic change during the past 10k than during any earlier period!

Gould was one of those who pushed the view that H.sapiens would have been genetically frozen since the cultural revolution 50kya. But the evidence is not supporting him.

See http://www.pnas.org/content/104/52/20753.full.pdf+html

To the extent that new adaptive alleles continued to reflect demographic growth, the Neolithic and later periods would have experienced a rate of adaptive evolution 100 times higher than characterized most of human evolution. Cultural changes have reduced mortality rates, but variance in reproduction has continued to fuel genetic change (51). In our view, the rapid cultural
evolution during the Late Pleistocene created vastly more opportunities for further genetic change, not fewer, as new avenues emerged for communication, social interactions, and creativity.

So it is entirely probable that the human brain has continued to evolve. There are all the highly controversial ethnic morphometric studies (Australian aborigines having larger primary visual cortex, for instance) but now we are moving into the neurogenetics era and can expect to have some much clearer answers.

This is another celebrated recent result...http://psych.colorado.edu/~carey/pdfFiles/ASPMMicrocephalin_Lahn.pdf

It could be something about an adaptation to tonal language, but what it is about is still speculative. The fact of continued genetic change, less so.

Could you adopt an archaic H.sapiens and rear it so it wouldn't stand out in high school? You would still want to say yes, but no longer with such certainty.

 

[apeiron]

What science? I thought there is very little science in this area.

This is a nice example of the kind of thing Chomsky has never done.

Restrictions on Biological Adaptation in Langauge Evolution
http://else.econ.ucl.ac.uk/papers/uploaded/329.pdf

Christiansen computer models the rate of cultural change against genetic change and argues that the co-evolution of language and genetic hard-wiring just can't happen as cultural evolution always runs ahead too fast - even if you invoke a Baldwin effect.

For example, the entire Indo-European language group, including Breton, Danish, Faroese, Gujarati, Hittite, Tadzik, and Waziri which exhibit huge variations in case systems, word order, and phonology, have diverged in just 10,000 years (33). Thus, the “environment” of linguistic conventions changes far more rapidly, and yields far greater diversity (34), than the typical properties of physical and biological environments to which organisms must adapt...

...Thus, a highly intricate and abstract language “module” (5), “instinct” (6) or “organ” (7) postulated to explain language acquisition (7, 39), language universals (7) and the species-specificity of human language (8) could not have arisen through biological adaptation.

Indeed, this conclusion is reinforced by the observation that, had such adaptation occurred in the human lineage, these processes would have operated independently on modern human populations as they spread throughout Africa and the rest of the world during the last 100 kyr. If so, genetic populations should have coevolved to their own language groups, leading to divergent and mutually incompatible language modules (40).

Linguists have found no evidence for this (6). For example, native Australasian populations have been largely isolated for 50 kyr (31), but learn European languages readily.

This is not such a problem for vocal tract evolution however...

Although we have shown that arbitrary linguistic properties cannot be genetically encoded through adaptation, this does not preclude genetic adaptation to aspects of language held stable by functional pressures. For example, changes in the vocal apparatus may have arisen from functional pressures to produce more intelligible vocalization, although this point is controversial (48-50).

Then on the question that seems central to your concerns - is human grammatical language merely contingent or does it have deep Platonic structure? - Christiansen comes down on the side of "just contingent".

Although our simulations indicate that some biological adaptations for functional aspects of language could have taken place, we suggest that the close fit between the structure of language and the mechanisms employed to acquire and use it primarily arose because language has been shaped by the brain through cultural evolution. Indeed, the astonishing subtlety and diversity of patterns in human language (34) may for the most part result from the complex interaction of multiple constraints on cultural evolution, deriving from the nature of thought, the perceptuo-motor system, cognitive limitations on learning and processing, and pragmatic/communicative factors (40). Thus, as suggested by Darwin (64), the evolution of human language may be best understood in terms of cultural evolution, not biological adaptation.

However, I don't completely agree. I think that both the mammalian brain and language as the code of thought are subject to some severe optimality constraints. The evolution of both is guided by some deep structure. Which of course is why I think semiotics, hierarchy theory, dichotomies, dimensional constraint, etc, are crucial to explaining why brains and minds are the way they are. The evolution of reality-modelling is subject to stern efficiency constraints.

So Chomsky was never completely wrong. But he never properly engaged with the complexity of human evolution - the mix of the biological and cultural.

His response to the growing weight of evidence for the importance of the cutural bit seems to be to have stripped back his generative grammar to something more minimal - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimalist_program - that could still conceivably be the bare bones of a genetic language organ.

However it still seems to miss what I think is essential - the serial/computational constraint imposed on a hierarchical/dynamic structure. Or the impact a vocal tract had on a brain. This is a crucial part of the "deep structure" story - as can be seen from Pattee's epistemic cut and his take on the genetic code/cellular metabolism.

So yes, there is something true about the structuralist/Platonic point of view - something regular reductionist science does not much consider. But Chomsky seems always too distanced from the real world evidence to get it.

 

[bohm2]

Yes, some researchers argue there has actually been faster genetic change during the past 10k than during any earlier period!Gould was one of those who pushed the view that H.sapiens would have been genetically frozen since the cultural revolution 50kya. But the evidence is not supporting him.

I'm pretty sure there is no evidence against Gould's major hypothesis, which is in agreement with Evo. Take any human infant from any part of the globe whether Africa, Asia, Europe, the Arctic or a human infant from ~50,000 yrs ago. If brought up in today's society they would be able to surf the net and do pretty much everything we can do. Do you disagree with this?

This is a nice example of the kind of thing Chomsky has never done.

From his most recent talk this is his argument (see video starting at ~27:00 minutes):

There is a field called Evolution of language, which has a burgeoning literature, most of which in my view is total nonsense. But anyway, its growing. In fact, it isn't even about evolution of language, its almost entirely speculations about evolution of communication which is a different topic. And its kind of natural topic to look at if your caught up in another myth, a misinterpretation of evolutionary theory, which holds that changes take place only incrementally. Small change, then another small change, and finally you get complex organisms. That was believed at one time, and you can find sentences in darwin... you can quote, that's the bible. But for a long time evolutionary biologists have understood it doesn't work like that. You can have quite sudden changes that, small changes, that lead to huge phenomenal difference. In the area of communication you can mislead yourself into believing that since every organism you can think of, from bacteria to humans, has some kind of communication system, so maybe our communication system us just a slight modification of primates' or whatever you like. But its undoubtedly not true, but at least you can delude yourself into believing it. On the other hand language seems totally separate. These nothing even remotely analogous or nothing at all homologous as far as anyone knows. Theres a few things that look similar, like say songbirds are at such a distance from an evolutionary point of view that its just got to be convergent evolution to the extent that there is a similarity. And there is interesting questions you can study, but only if you take biology in the last 50 years seriously. If you are back to the pop darwinism that you learned in 8th grade that's no good. Anyhow, the fact that there's been no evolution in 50000 years is interesting if anyone really wants to study evolution of language. It raises a lot of questions, but I don't want to get to far from the Poverty of the Stimulus...

On the Poverty of the Stimulus
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/psychlangsci/research/linguistics/news-events/latest-news/n_chomsky

 

[apeiron]

If brought up in today's society they would be able to surf the net and do pretty much everything we can do. Do you disagree with this?

No, I think the odds are still that the genetic diversity within the modern population would swamp the genetic difference that would exist between us and H.sapiens circa 50kya. But this claim is now much more open to question.

For instance, a significant seeming observation about the famous cave paintings is they look like eidetic imagery. Which in the modern era would be seen as a primitive or even pathological trait.

The art of modern children and modern tribal art is about what the painter is thinking, rather than seeing.

So right there is evidence for a mental difference. Could it be simply a sociocultural difference? Probably. Or could it be a genetic one? Not so likely, but still possible.

Broadly, of course, I have been arguing all along for the fundamental importance of a sociocultural explanation of the human difference. Whereas I thought you were championing the genetic.

But on the question of whether the brain is unchanged for the past 50ky, the honest answer is no. And that is something a sociocultural approach has to take into account.

 

[apeiron]

From his most recent talk this is his argument (see video starting at ~27:00 minutes):

Hah, he still knows how to make himself the centre of attention, doesn't he. Fling around the outrageous comments, then retreat into opaqueness so he can't be pinned down by the stung critics. It's a tactic that has longed worked for his political views as well.

Geoff Pullum responds here...http://biolinguistica.wordpress.com/2011/11/20/1516/

These recent talks and papers share a steadfast refusal to engage with anything that might make the debate about the poverty of the stimulus (POS) an empirical one. They issue blanket dismissals of nearly all modern cognitive/linguistic science as worthless, and sweep aside whole genres of work on the basis of what seems to be extremely shallow acquaintance. Claims about parallels in the natural sciences feature prominently, as does a preference for authority over evidence...

...So he portrays current skepticism among cognitive scientists about linguistic nativism as not just obtuse, but actively harmful, a threat to our whole discipline. This is an interesting (if rather risky) new way of stoking enthusiasm for linguistic nativism: appeal to linguists’ self-interest and desire for security (you don’t want to be shut down, do you?). But it’s hard to take seriously. Linguistics is not going to die just because a fair number of its practitioners now have at least some interest in machine learning, evolutionary considerations, computational models of acquisition, and properties of the child’s input, and are becoming acquainted with probability theory, corpus use, computer simulation, and psychological experimentation — as opposed to waving all such techniques contemptuously aside...

...The argument from absence of stimulus is pretty much demolished by this Bayesian insight: the argument form simply is not valid. And for people who use the phrase “the logical problem of language acquisition” (as linguistic nativists have been doing since 1981), that ought to mean something. It certainly seems to me sufficient to justify including at least a brief introduction to Bayesian statistical reasoning in the education of every theoretical linguist...

...Lieberman notes that dramatic evolutionary developments like disappearance of lactose intolerance or radical alteration in the ability to survive in high-altitude low-oxygen environments can take place in under 3000 years; yet (as Chomsky stresses) the evidence that any human being can learn any human languages is strong, suggesting that UG shows no genetic variation at all. Why would UG remain so astonishingly resistant to minor mutations for so many tens of thousands of years? There is no selection pressure that would make it disadvantageous for Australian aborigines to have different innate constraints on movement or thematic role assignment from European or African populations; yet not a hint of any such genetic diversity in innate linguistic capacities has ever been identified, at least in grammar. Why not? Chomsky’s response is basically that it just happened...

 

[bohm2]

Hah, he still knows how to make himself the centre of attention, doesn't he. Fling around the outrageous comments, then retreat into opaqueness so he can't be pinned down by the stung critics.
Geoff Pullum responds here...http://biolinguistica.wordpress.com/2011/11/20/1516/

Do you find Geoff Pullum's argument against the "poverty of stimulus" argument convincing?

We conclude that linguists have some additional work to do if they wish to sustain their claims about having provided support for linguistic nativism, and we offer some reasons for thinking that the relevant kind of future work on this issue is likely to further undermine the linguistic nativist position.

Empirical assessment of stimulus poverty arguments
http://www.ucd.ie/artspgs/research/pullum.pdf

Personally, I agree completely with Chomsky on this issue for the relatively simple and seemingly trivial (for me) reasons he offers here:

Poverty of stimulus problems are ubiquitous. Every aspect of growth and development poses huge poverty of stimulus problems. Now the term isn't used in biology and the reason is it's taken to be so obvious that there is no need for a term, so it's obvious that there is a poverty of stimulus problem when humans develop arms instead of wings or a mammalian visual system but not an insect visual system. There is a stimulus. There's external data like nutrition but there's – no one even bothers to argue about it - there is no way for nutrition to determine that you have a mammalian visual system so that's got to be accounted for by something internal, some genetic property. And then you go on to try to find out what it is and ask why it's that way and not some other way. In the case of language, there is a term, poverty of stimulus, and it's considered highly controversial, but just about everything about language is considered highly controversial, even if it is perfectly obvious, a total truism.

Poverty of Stimulus: Unfinished Business
http://www.stiftung-jgsp.uni-mainz.de/Bilder_allgemein/Mainz_transcript_edited.pdf
‘Poverty of the Stimulus’ Revisited: Recent Challenges Reconsidered
http://csjarchive.cogsci.rpi.edu/proceedings/2008/pdfs/p383.pdf
Poverty of the Stimulus Revisited
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/psychlangsci/news-events/seminars-talks/berwicketal2011

 

[apeiron]

Personally, I agree completely with Chomsky on this issue for the relatively simple and seemingly trivial (for me) reasons he offers here:

It's just a crazy strawman argument. Kids are soaked in language from birth.

You cited Pullum's paper. What in it do you dispute?

...it is calculated that a child in a working-class family will have heard 20 million word tokens by the age of 3, and a child being raised in a family on welfare will have heard only 10 million (p. 132). Nonetheless, even in a welfare household, the cumulative exposure to language use of a 3-year-old amounts to ten times the entire extant corpus of Old English literature...

...By these numbers, even a welfare child would be likely to hear about 7,500 questions that crucially falsify the structure-independent auxiliary-fronting generalization, before reaching the age of 3...

And how do you make sense of Chomsky's statements like this?...

it's obvious that there is a poverty of stimulus problem when humans develop arms instead of wings or a mammalian visual system but not an insect visual system.

You don't learn an arm or a stomach. But you do learn to see, hear, move, and all the other stuff a brain does. Someone needs to take a course on infant brain development. Then quit comparing apples with oranges.

http://www.jneurosci.org/content/13/5/1916.full.pdf

 

[bohm2]

It's just a crazy strawman argument. Kids are soaked in language from birth. You cited Pullum's paper. What in it do you dispute?[/url]

That's why I also posted the other links by Chomsky et al. that go into more detail. It seems the debate between him and Geoffrey Pullum go farther back than this:

On Formalization and Formal Linguistics
http://linguistics.berkeley.edu/~syntax-circle/syntax-group/spr06/chomsky1990.pdf

And I think I'm starting to understand why you don't favour the nativist approach. You favour the empiricist competitor model championed by Friston's 'Bayesian Brain' theory, according to which brains are hierarchically organized statistical inference machines operating via recurrent cascades of predictive coding (the paper you posted before):

The free-energy principle: a unified brain theory?
http://www.fil.ion.ucl.ac.uk/~karl/The free-energy principle A unified brain theory.pdf

I think Chomsky and some of the authors do offer arguments against these type of Bayesian models, as per links I provided. I will look at the stuff more carefully when I finish my stupid exam. They made us have an exam on January 2/2012. I hate my college.

 

[apeiron]

And I think I'm starting to understand why you don't favour the nativist approach. You favour the empiricist competitor model championed by Friston's 'Bayesian Brain' theory, according to which brains are hierarchically organized statistical inference machines operating via recurrent cascades of predictive coding (the paper you posted before):

Exactly. As a reductionist enterprise, science is always seeking to divide itself into either/or scenarios. Something is fundamental, everything else is emergent.

But every definite thesis must harbour its equally definite antithesis (the definition of a dichotomy) and so if someone like Skinner arises to say it is "all just associative learning", someone else gets the job of speaking for the other side, and becoming celebrated for saying "no, in fact it is all just innate knowledge".

So what I actually always seek is the middle ground that describes instead the interaction between what others have divided. And neural network approaches are an example of a fruitful balance between dynamics and computation, nature and nurture, structure and process.

The social dynamics of science really demand that Chomsky set himself up as "the clear other" in major debates. It is the way to make a career. And this is what he is very successful at. It is the trick that makes him even more famous in political discourse as well.

This is why, in the speech you cited, he creates a cartoon version of his enemy - scientists who are only interested in "communication", not real language and its "deep" structure. Or scientists who are like Skinnerians in believing the genome is sculpted gradually, gene by gene - the exact biological equivalent of his bogeyman of blind associative learning, statistics without informational structure.

So I don't favour a nativist approach, nor whatever is its dichotomistic opposite. Instead, if they are a valid dichotomy, then I would favour whatever arises in between as a scientific description of their systematic interaction.

To be against Chomsky, doesn't mean I am for some modern version of Skinner. And what really annoys me is Chomsky continuing to play a stale old game when confronted with modern science that tries to describe material reality from a systems perspective. It may serve his reputation, but it does not serve human knowledge.

Now you are trying to do the same thing with me. If I am not a nativist, then I must be some kind of other - an empiricist. And that is after I don't know how many of my posts highlighting the "deep structure" to be found in Peirce, Salthe, Pattee, Rosen, etc.

Analysis must be matched by synthesis, differentiation by integration. Once ignorance has been divided, the truth is to be found in the space cleared in-between.

 

[bohm2]

The social dynamics of science really demand that Chomsky set himself up as "the clear other" in major debates. It is the way to make a career. And this is what he is very successful at. It is the trick that makes him even more famous in political discourse as well.

I'm incapable of understanding such stuff even if that was the case. And I think it's the same with political discourse. I'll just stick to stuff that is at least within my capabilities. I seem to be right in the middle of this Venn diagram:

 

[bohm2]

This is the major author with Pinker who debated Chomsky/Hauser/Fitch on the evolution of language. I thought this quote on consciousness in a recent preliminary paper is interesting. For whatver reason, I think he is mistaken but it is possible that he might be right:

First he notes Chomsky's position with respect to language and thought:

From this perspective on the language faculty and its place in the mind/brain, let us consider a speculation of Chomsky’s concerning the evolution of the language faculty. For decades he has asserted (e.g. Chomsky 1975) that the basic function of the language faculty is not communication, and that language is in fact poorly designed for communication. More recently (e.g. Chomsky 2000, Berwick and Chomsky 2011) he has added an argument to the effect that we use language mostly to talk to ourselves, in an inner monologue or Joycean stream of consciousness, and he suggests that if language is “designed” for anything, it is for thought. The “externalization” of language as sound, he suggests, was a later stage in the evolution of the language faculty. As we saw in section 6, he further suggests that “externalization” may not even have required a cognitive innovation specific to language.

And contrasts it with his view:

My analysis of this situation (Jackendoff 1987a, 1996c, 2007a, 2012) is that Conceptual Structure, i.e. the formal structure of the thought conveyed by a sentence, is almost completely unconscious, and that what we experience as our inner monologue is actually the phonological structure linked to the thought. We are aware of our thinking because we hear the associated sounds in our head...

Consciousness is linked not with thought, but with phonology and the other forms of perception and perceptual imagery shown in Figure 7. That is, one has the experience of thought through phonological, visual, haptic, proprioceptive, and perhaps auditory imagery. As far as I know, this observation has not been made by any of the numerous philosophers and neuroscientists investigating consciousness. This is in part because they treat “language” as a single cognitive function, failing to recognize the crucial distinction between phonology, syntax, and semantics. As a result, they think of phonological imagery as simply “linguistic imagery” – a characterization that is too coarse to distinguish between a “mere” sound pattern and the thought it expresses. If this account is on the right track, our inner monologue is possible only by virtue of having words – and we have to learn words in the context of a communicative speech community. We can only talk to ourselves by virtue of having learned to talk to others. To be sure, speech and inner speech can enhance thought, by making it possible for us to attend to the combinatorial structure of thought, through its phonological proxies (Jackendoff 1996c, 2007a, 2012). But inner speech is not the thought itself (or the thought alone), as Chomsky appears to be claiming. Going back to evolution, I conclude that hominids could not have had an inner monologue until they had a language with phonology in it. I further conclude that the advantages of language for thought are a byproduct – albeit a substantial byproduct – of its advantages for communication, not the other way round, as Chomsky claims.

Jackendoff does consider deaf children on a footnote on p. 33 and attempts to explain it but I'm not sure he succeeds.

http://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/incbios/RayJackendoff/humanlanguage.pdf

 

[apeiron]

For whatver reason, I think he is mistaken but it is possible that he might be right:

So, is there a reason why he is mistaken?

First he notes Chomsky's position with respect to language and thought: The “externalization” of language as sound, he suggests, was a later stage in the evolution of the language faculty.

This must count as Chomsky's single most egregious error.

And contrasts it with his view: We can only talk to ourselves by virtue of having learned to talk to others.

Jackendoff is obviously correct, but his error was to think that this is in anyway an original thought.

 

[Pythagorean]

Toddler's have no obvious vocal feedback. Possibly may rely on social cues from parents to regulate proper speech patterning.

Children and adults reacted to this manipulation by changing their vowels in a direction opposite to the perturbation. Surprisingly, toddlers' speech didn't change in response to altered feedback, suggesting that long-held assumptions regarding the role of self-perception in articulatory development need to be reconsidered.

Current Biology 22, 1–5, January 24, 2012, Elsevier Ltd All rights reserved DOI 10.1016/j.cub.2011.11.052

 

[bohm2]

So, is there a reason why he is mistaken?...This must count as Chomsky's single most egregious error...Jackendoff is obviously correct, but his error was to think that this is in anyway an original thought.

These authors suggest the following evidence:

The development of a regularized, structured homesign system in the face of little to no linguistic input, including parental input, gives credence to those arguing for innate language via Poverty of the Stimulus. The fact that the deaf children were found to form recursive, creative, and meaningful signs and systems similar to the natural and more developed languages of the world by their own invention would indicate an innate drive to linguistic communication (Goldin-Meadow et al., 1984). As Feldman, Goldin-Meadow, and Gleitman 91978, p. 408) stated,

We have studied the communicative system developed by young children who are as radically deprived of language input as can be imagined. We have found that these linguistically isolated individuals display communicative skills that are language-like, despite their deprivations. We conclude that there are significant internal dispositions in humans that guide the language acquisition process. Such expressive output from such impoverished, and indeed almost nonexistent, input supports the Poverty of the Stimulus argument and indicates an internal system for language...

A more specific situation can be seen in the case of Simon, a profoundly deaf boy who is the son of deaf parents who learned ASL as teenagers...Additionally, Simon’s performance on the use of movement morphemes was on par with that of the compared deaf children from native-input backgrounds (Newport, 1999). As there is no outside influence to support this compensation, such an improvement points towards an internal correction mechanism and drive towards convergence upon the standard form.

The author concludes:

These last two observations imply that when a feature is simply an element of one specific language some initial input is needed, but when it is universal it can be internally realized. The evidence for an ability to create universals without input suggests an internal, innate language faculty and supports Poverty of the Stimulus-type arguments.

I haven't looked at other similar deaf children research, etc. and I didn't look at her arguments closely.


Incomplete Input as a Poverty of the Stimulus Argument
http://www.dartmouth.edu/~mgullick/gullickpovertystim07.pdf

 

[apeiron]

I haven't looked at other similar deaf children research, etc. and I didn't look at her arguments closely.

You seem to be entangling several separate questions.

1) the evolution of language
2) the neurology of language
3) the relationship between language and thought

If you are citing the evidence of the congenitally deaf in relation to (3), for example, I could point to the studies that show the deaf with fluent signing use signing in their interior dialogue. And those without were once regarded as mentally retarded, on a par with animals, in their cognition.

This then perhaps goes to the other two questions as it illustrates the plasticity and lack of cognitive modularity/hardwiring in the human "faculty" for speech and higher order thinking. It can be related also to the findings that Broca's area is a premotor area for hand as well as oral motor planning.

Then arguments can begin whether this means a gestural language predated oral language, or as seems more plausible, the brain was pre-adapted for syntactical language because of about a million years of evolution for tool-making and tool-use.

But it would really help if you could spell out the exact nature of your hypothesis here.

The bare basics of Chomsky's current views are maybe not controversial. Langauge must be some combination of a genetic endowment, developmental environment and structural principles - the last being the least well defined.

But Chomsky still has big blindspots in his thinking.

- 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.

For example, three key elements of grammar: three different bits of the brain - only one in the old putative "grammar module".

...three seemingly distinct syntactic operations are supported by mechanisms in distinct brain areas – Movement in Broca’s (perhaps to an extent in Wernicke’s) are; Dative Shift in posterior portions of the right frontal lobe (vPCS, aINS); reflexive-antecedent binding in an anterior part of the right frontal lobe (SFG).

http://freud.tau.ac.il/~yosef1/papers/Grodzinsky_BR.pdf

And as I said, Broca's is now understood to be a premotor area for hand control as much as vocalisation. So there is nothing functionally unique in this organisation either. Broca's just contributes certain computational activities to the mix.

 

[apeiron]

Toddler's have no obvious vocal feedback. Possibly may rely on social cues from parents to regulate proper speech patterning.

Yes, this is another thing they need to learn. And can't even begin to learn until the higher cortex has matured enough to form connections to the parts of the brain that have to be regulated.

 

[bohm2]

- 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.

With respect to the skeptical position on "poverty of stimulus" is that something that you believe to be true or is it something that most linguists/psychologists/cognitive scientists believe? I was under the impression that most in these fields do think it's valid. I'm pretty sure even Pinker et al. who question Chomsky on his view on the evolution of language would agree with Chomsky on this point. And last time I sat in courses in this area, I got the impression that most researchers in this area, take this notion of poverty of stimulus as not very controversial (despite Pullum's and Bayesian learning arguments to the contrary). I honestly can't see how anyone can believe otherwise. Regardless, if I took a poll on this issue from scientists in this area, do you think most would favour the "poverty of stimulus" argument or your position that there is no great "lack of stimulus"? Not that it makes it true, either way.

- Yes, this is another thing they need to learn. And can't even begin to learn until the higher cortex has matured enough to form connections to the parts of the brain that have to be regulated.

Are you sure that is what that study Pythagorean posted really means?

 

[apeiron]

With respect to the skeptical position on "poverty of stimulus" is that something that you believe to be true or is it something that most linguists/psychologists/cognitive scientists believe?

Again, Chomsky's POS was a criticism against the atomistic reductionism of Skinnerian Behaviourism. And I am sure that these days - despite the cult-like grip that Behaviourism can have on people - no one would believe it to offer an adequate account of language learning.

It is also obvious just from having kids that they learn in a generative, world-predicting, fashion.

So then the next step is to develop theories of prediction-based learning.

Instead, Chomsky and his disciples (yes, another cult it looks like) exaggerate POS-like arguments to rule out any sort of learning machines. The role of experience must be limited to something like flicking the developmental switch on some sort of genetic hardware.

And even this hardware mustn't be contaminated by learning/experience of the evolutionary kind.

Chomsky would like the genetics to be the product of some kind of Platonic efficiency principles, some UG deep mathematical structure, rather than something that might actually have an evolutionary history.

So again, he trots out a POS argument against the gradualism and atomism of modern synthesis Darwinism. Langauge and symbolic thought erupted too suddenly in human history. Therefore ordinary evolutionary learning must have a minimal explanatory role.

I didn't quite realize it before, but there is a consistent pattern in Chomsky's thought. At every turn, reject the vagaries of the material world and turn inward towards the certainty of logical structure. Empiricism bad, rationalism good.

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

Great for him. Meanwhile serious science can get on with the business of synthesis - a balanced approach to evolution like evo-devo, or to brain organisation, like generative neural network theory, or to metaphysics generally, such as Peircean semiotics.

(Yes, I know Chomsky claims these days to be all evo-devo, but again, read what he actually writes and you can see he is still humming the same rationalist tune.)

 

[bohm2]

Instead, Chomsky and his disciples (yes, another cult it looks like) exaggerate POS-like arguments to rule out any sort of learning machines. The role of experience must be limited to something like flicking the developmental switch on some sort of genetic hardware.

I think you are being a bit unfair/biased/judgemental here (e.g. cult/disciples?). He does offer evidence against the Bayesian models if you check the links I provided (PTR refers to the Perfors/Tenenbaum/Regier paper):

Crucially, however, it does not follow that such learners will acquire grammars in which rules are structure dependent. On the contrary, as we show below, the acquired grammars may still operate structure-independently. In short, inferring that language is hierarchical (in PTR’s sense)leaves the original POS (poverty of stimulus) question untouched, and their Bayesian model does not explain the constrained ambiguity facts. Let us examine why...

http://www.ucl.ac.uk/psychlangsci/news-events/seminars-talks/berwicketal2011

And from reading of the literature, most researchers also recognize the limitations of neural networks/connectionist models you favour. For instance consider this recent review:

The neural basis of structure in language
http://www.illc.uva.nl/Research/Dissertations/DS-2011-11.text.pdf

I realize Chomsky seems very dismissive of these models (and maybe comes off as a bit arrogant?) and probably pisses off a lot of researchers. Then again, it could also be his radical politics that many dislike? I'm not sure. I don't really understand his arguments against these models but he seems pretty aware of all the research in this area, if you read his writings, despite some of your old posts arguing otherwise. 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.

 

[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)