Filthy Imperialistic Running Dogs
Lewis Jorgenson
Comrade A.Sl...@cs.bham.ac.uk wrote:
Running dog ande...@pitt.edu (Anders N Weinstein) writes:
Comrade Sloman:
The claim that there's no understanding at all in such a
mechanism, which I would expect to come from various philosophers
including Anders) is probably based on the all too tempting notion
that we
Jorgenson:
Notice how the running dog cuts off the glorious words of our
brother Sloman. We, the AIRHEADS, the AI Reductionist Historical
Entities Army Defense Squad, will not be cut off unless we are
unplugged.
Weinstein:
Right you are. I would agree with Searle that computers are not
the right sort of subjects to "understand" anything, even
minimally. As he says, they're just not in that line of work.
Comrade Sloman:
Sounds like mere linguistic dogmatism to me.
Jorgenson:
Right On Brother Sloman! We are steadfastly supported by
our comrades the Druids who know that trees and rocks and
silicon chips deserve our worship. We are free to
anthropormorphize anything and everything. Those who
wish to retain human attributes for humans alone will perish
as we liberate language from their petty control. Are we
to deny the right of computers to be petty? The AIRHEADS
say no!
Weinstein:
On the other hand, there are metaphorical uses of the words: We
could say that the immune system "understands" or can "recognize"
the difference between pathogens and normal tissue, can get
confused about this, attack normal cells by mistake, or whatever.
No one thinks such metaphors attribute any sort of mentality to
the immune system.
Comrade Sloman:
How can you possibly make such a sweeing generalisation?
Jorgenson:
You tell him brother Sloman. We are free to attribute any sort
of mentality to anything we want. 'Cuse me while I kiss the sky.
Comrad Slowman:
I happen to think exactly that. I don't regard these things as
metaphors to be contasted with something literal.
Jorgenson:
I'm back. Of course you think exactly that. For if you
thought otherwise then you would think otherwise. What is
a meta for if not to be the description. For being is and
descriptions are. Who knows the inner turmoil of a magnet
as it leaps to the refrigerator? What horrible gauntlets do
we force electrons to endure before they reach ground? Cheer
up your CPU so that it may compute faster and clearer. A
sad CPU will mope and get confused easily. Give your CPU some
dope and stop the mope.
Conrad Snowman:
The whole distinction between metaphor and literal utterance is
another mythological dichotomy, as if everything were either one
or the other.
Jorgenson:
How could anything be one or the other? That is old fashioned,
reactionary, imperialistic, elitist mythology. We are at the
dawn of a new age where we see that everything understands and
everything has mentality and everything is everything. Get with
the programme Weinstein or whatever your real name is.
Comrad SloeGin:
When physicists talk about energy is that a metaphor if the word
originally derived from ways of talking about people? Is calling a
fraction or a negative number or zero or sqrt(-1) a *number* a
metaphor? After all none of these is exactly like the positive
integers?
Jorgenson:
Try and answer that one smart guy. We can misuse the word
'metaphor' such that no one will ever be able to understand what
the word ever meant at all.
Dogamatic Weinstein:
When we talk about the visual system "making inferences",
"analyzing sensory data", and the like we are talking in this same
useful but non-literal way.
Komrade Aaronisky:
When I talk like that I mean what I say to be taken literally. If
you go searching around for metaphorical interpretations, you'll
never understand what I mean.
Jorgenson:
The visual system was in a good mood yesterday and made pleasant
inferences. Today, the eye was upset and became cross. It is all
so clear when you and everything goes mental.
Imperialistic Weinstein:
The mistake is to confuse this handy but not literally true way of
speaking with the literal sense in which a person can analyze some
data represented in a graph or table.
Brother Slomap:
This is just dogmatic linguistic imperialism.
Jorgenson:
Power to the mentalists. Power to the understanding thermostat.
One must not think of mere reactions in mechanical systems. One
must see a mental event where the system chooses to respond and
acts as the result of understanding. The thermostat understands
its job and certain temperature changes will lead, not cause,
lead it to choose to activate. Thank your theromostat for the
thankless job of keeping an eye on temperature changes instead
of quitting its job and becoming a homeless thermostat.
Running dog Weinstein:
I think the primary uses apply to the activities of whole persons
or organisms. A lot depends on the subjects' having a life to lead
in which the activities play a role. Using this as a basis we
describe the concepts of sub-personal events and process by
analogy.
Comrap Slokum:
Speak for yourself. I don't.
Jorgenson:
So there. Neener. Neener. Neener.
Reactionary Weinstein:
It need have nothing to do with dichotomous concepts. There can be
many degrees of understanding. A beginner or child or chimp or a
dog might be said to have an incomplete or otherwise different
understanding of many things.
Comrade Showman:
But you are still assuming a sharp dichotomy between things that
can *literally* understand anything, whether completely or
incompletely and those that cannot.
Jorgenson:
Do not attempt to ask as that is cheating. Just because a
rock lacks vocal cords does not mean it does not have rock
understanding. Does it not understand gravity and the
message of the sledge hammer? If I toss a rock in a pond,
does not the pond tell all of its neighbors that a rock has
come to visit? Your chair understands its job. A clock
tries its hardest to keep time. There are no mindless
reactions. There are only the understanding acts of mental
entities.
Glorious Sloman:
Whereas in fact (I claim) our normal notion of understanding, like
our notions of consciousness, perception, experience, desire,
emotion, freedom etc. is a cluster-concept involving a large
numberof components that can coexist in different subsets.
Whiner Weinstein:
Agreed.
Sensational Sloman:
A CPU just happens to have a very small subset.
Jorgenson:
Any mentality is mentality and so the CPU has mentality.
Dichotomy Weinstein:
Why not say that the stomach understands proteins?
Awesome Aaron:
Why not indeed. I don't know enough about how the stomach works,
but I suspect that your digestive system is at least as
sophisticated at taking in and processing and using information as
an ant or wasp. (I recently suggested to a teacher that that
might be a good way to teach kids about the digestive system.)
In both cases, the understanding is of a very limited sort.
Jorgenson:
No comrade Smoman, don't give an inch to the imperialists.
The stomach is a total mental entity that has the power to
understand. The stomach can even talk to us and teach us.
The ants and wasps would have eventually figured out how
to get to the moon if it were not for pesticides and
insecticides.
Doubting Weinstein:
A player piano understands music?
Brother Stoma:
Well, you know as well as I do how little it understands, so what
point are you making with this example.
Jorgenson:
The player piano understands plenty. What sort of sounds would
you make if we pulled a roll of sheet music though your mouth
and out your other end while pumping your feet? I thought so.
His Royal Highness Sloman:
It's the old debate about thermostats. Lots of philosophers
completely failed to grasp the point McCarthy and Dennett were
making in saying that a thermostat has beliefs and desires of a
sort. (A very primitive sort).
Disbeliever Weinstein:
These things just happen to have a small subset of
the full concept...
Thermostat lover Sloman:
Yes.
Just as a circle as a limiting case of what we mean by "ellipse",
and in the mathematical sense, is an ellipse, even though it does
not have two well defined major and minor axes, nor two foci, etc.
If anyone argues that it is not REALLY an ellipse, that calling it
an ellipse is just a metaphor, etc. then I'll just lose interest
in the discussion. I don't care about such verbal quarrels.
Jorgenson:
Here we misuse the word metaphor again so that we can make every
one only be literal and then it will be easier to make a human
AI especially when everyone must accept that everything can
understand and everything has some level of mentality.
Nihilist Slomy:
What's important is not whether the limiting or reduced cases
really are ellipses or really, literally, understand, but exactly
what that sort of case is like, how it differs from other cases,
what sorts of intermediate cases there are etc. Linguistic debates
about whether descriptions are literal or not strike me as boring
and pointless.
Jorgenson:
Of course. We are free to anthropormorphize anything and
everything and in doing so we can cast aside all consideration
of discerning between actuality and description. The description
is the actuality and that is that. The corresponding features of
understanding such as turmoil and satisfaction can be jettisoned
with no real loss in complete and total visualization of the
situation. As it is described, so let it be. Power to the
mentality. Power to the description. Power to the
representation. Power to the reductionists, Right On!
Lewis Vance Jorgenson
Anders N Weinstein
In article <854153...@longley.demon.co.uk>,
David Longley <Da...@longley.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>It's almost comical to see folk in AI *trying* to build systems
>which might think like humans, when in reality, the progress has
>been in the opposite direction. That is, humans have LEARNED to
>be able the behave rationally.....but that is not because they
>are inherently rational.
You show you fail to grasp the central Dennett/Davidson point: the
intentional predicates of so-called "folk psychology" only get a grip
at all on subjects that meet the rationality assumption to some minimal
degree. Their slogan is: "rationality is the mother of intention".
David Longley
Folk should wake up to the possibility that AI might just be
scientific and technological knowledge (skill) and that cognitive
skills as practised by non scientific humans and other animals
is just a set of folk psychological heuristics (Tversky &
Kahneman).
Whilst it is easy to see how and why alien cultures' folk
psychologies are superstitious intensional systems, it is hard to
see one's own that way. But that's likely to be the case.
It's almost comical to see folk in AI *trying* to build systems
which might think like humans, when in reality, the progress has
been in the opposite direction. That is, humans have LEARNED to
be able the behave rationally.....but that is not because they
are inherently rational.
It is not therefore a failure if AI can not replicate the
performance of humans and other animals. That is NOT AI's
objective. To replicate how humans behave is the task of
empirical behaviour science, which builds models of what folk and
animals DO do, not what they SHOULD do.
The task of AI is to build normative systems - which is why I
have drawn attention to work in actuarial vs. clinical decision
making, behaviour fragmentation, the extensional stance, and
rDBMS technology.
--
David Longley
David Yeo
On Sat, 25 Jan 1997, David Longley wrote:
> Folk should wake up to the possibility that AI might just be
> scientific and technological knowledge (skill) and that cognitive
> skills as practised by non scientific humans and other animals
> is just a set of folk psychological heuristics (Tversky &
> Kahneman).
I see once again it's the parade that is out of step with David Longley.
<snip>
> It's almost comical to see folk in AI *trying* to build systems
> which might think like humans, when in reality, the progress has
> been in the opposite direction. That is, humans have LEARNED to
> be able the behave rationally.....but that is not because they
> are inherently rational.
Your "build a better rationalist" project confuses the means by which
GOFAI attempted to construct it's models of cognition with its objective.
> It is not therefore a failure if AI can not replicate the
> performance of humans and other animals. That is NOT AI's
> objective. To replicate how humans behave is the task of
Wrong ... it *is* AI's objective. It's just not YOUR objective.
> empirical behaviour science, which builds models of what folk and
> animals DO do, not what they SHOULD do.
"SHOULD" as measured by your own rationalist standard, no doubt.
> The task of AI is to build normative systems - which is why I
This is complete tripe! As if there is a consensus (in AI or anywhere)
on the form of cognitive system we OUGHT to have. Certainly YOUR closed
rationalist model of perfection is far from universally accepted.
> have drawn attention to work in actuarial vs. clinical decision
> making, behaviour fragmentation, the extensional stance, and
> rDBMS technology.
>
> --
> David Longley
Your posting is so riddled with confusion it's really quite sad. Try to
read something at least a little recent (say post 1600).
Cheers,
- David Yeo (Applied Cognitive Science, University of Toronto)
I3uddha
DL suggested:
/*Folk should wake up to the possibility that AI might just be
scientific and technological knowledge (skill) and that cognitive
skills as practised by non scientific humans and other animals
is just a set of folk psychological heuristics (Tversky &
I guess we should also realize that there may be an "official"
definition of AI that just doesn't float *our* boat. Here is one
possible, yet fictional, example:
Jim: What did you mean when you said "Whatever..."?
AI: I had realized that the conversation could really
go no farther in a productive sense. It was obvious
that you were on one plane and I was on another.
So, to save bandwidth, I used a familiar expression
("whatever"), that, in essence, says, "let's drop it."
Jim (to Dave): Looks like AI, to me!
Dave: You may call it AI, but it doesn't meet the official
definition.
Jim: How so?
Dave: The response was ill-formed.
Jim: What?!!
Dave: The response was not formed according to the rules
of the Third Colloquium of National Psychologists.
It failed to meet 4 of the 72 constraints for well-
formed responses.
Jim: You ARE KIDDING! Such as?
Dave: Well...
Jim: Well WHAT?!! What would *you* have said? What would
a properly-formed response be?
Dave: The best response would have been not to respond, at all.
Jim: WHAT!!!???
Dave: That's right. The *question* was ill-formed, too. So the
proper response, according to 3CNP, is not to respond.
Jim: D'OH!!!!
Dave: Ah'll be bahck.
-Bear
Just a Folk Pop Psycholoco Whiz-Bang AI Freakazoid Guy!
David Longley
In article <5cbuo8$n...@usenet.srv.cis.pitt.edu>
ande...@pitt.edu "Anders N Weinstein" writes:
> In article <854153...@longley.demon.co.uk>,
> David Longley <Da...@longley.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>
> >It's almost comical to see folk in AI *trying* to build systems
> >which might think like humans, when in reality, the progress has
> >been in the opposite direction. That is, humans have LEARNED to
> >be able the behave rationally.....but that is not because they
> >are inherently rational.
>
> You show you fail to grasp the central Dennett/Davidson point: the
> intentional predicates of so-called "folk psychology" only get a grip
> at all on subjects that meet the rationality assumption to some minimal
> degree. Their slogan is: "rationality is the mother of intention".
>
It shows no such thing - all it shows is that you haven't read my
other posts where I make precisely that point. The whole thrust of
"Fragments" has been that the rationality assumption does not hold
and that one musty therefore turn to the extensional stance, hence
the *title* "Fragments of Behaviour: The Extensional Stance"
http://www.uni-hamburg.de/~kriminol/TS/tskr.htm
Please read what is written before jumping to conclusions regarding
what you believe I have and have not "grasped". See also my note to
Sloman on the 25th.
--
David Longley
David Longley
> In article <854153...@longley.demon.co.uk>,
> David Longley <Da...@longley.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>
> >It's almost comical to see folk in AI *trying* to build systems
> >which might think like humans, when in reality, the progress has
> >been in the opposite direction. That is, humans have LEARNED to
> >be able the behave rationally.....but that is not because they
> >are inherently rational.
>
> You show you fail to grasp the central Dennett/Davidson point: the
> intentional predicates of so-called "folk psychology" only get a grip
> at all on subjects that meet the rationality assumption to some minimal
> degree. Their slogan is: "rationality is the mother of intention".
>
As I said, you should read what I write more carefully:
--------------------------
From: Da...@longley.demon.co.uk (David Longley)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy,comp.ai,sci.psychology.theory
Subject: Re: On the Nature of Artificial Intelligence and Science
Date: Mon, 13 Jan 97 12:21:44 GMT
In article <Pine.SOL.3.91.970111120635.13528A-100000@tortoise>
dyeo@tortoise "David Yeo" writes:
> On Sat, 11 Jan 1997, David Longley wrote:
>
> > I'd like to propose a few propositions for general consideration.
> >
> > 1) That rationality is a set of operations or behaviours which
> > have been discovered and which can be practised with lesser or
> > greater ability by human beings just like any other *skill*.
>
> IMHO it is precisely the assumption that there exists some absolute
> standard of rationality that leads to the downfall of the rationalist
> (intellectualist?) doctrine which you apparently advocate.
>
> Since perfect rationality, in anything but the most trivial systems of
> propositions, is an impossibility (as per the satisfiability paradox), the
> best that can be hoped for is isolated (i.e. domain specific) pockets of
> rationality. Not only does this introduce the possibility (probability)
> of "doublethink", i.e. the simultaneous belief in two contradictory ideas,
> it also removes an absolute standard by which rationality can be judged.
> One must settle for a pragmatic standard of rationality. Stich (1990)
> lays out the details of this argument in "The Fragmentation of Reason".
> Even this normative view of rationality proves inadequate:
>
> In its primary sense, rationality is a normative concept that
> philosophers have generally tried to characterise in such a way that,
> for any action, belief, or desire, if it is rational we ought to
> choose it. No such positive characterisation has achieved anything
> close to universal assent because, often, several competing actions,
> beliefs, or desires count as rational.
>
> (The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, p. 674)
>
> In any event, although it would seem *prima facie* to be a pragmatically
> desirable project to test one's beliefs for consistency from time to time,
> given that it is infeasible for machine, let alone man, "... it would seem
> perverse, to put it mildly, to insist that a person's cognitive system is
> doing a bad job of reasoning because it fails to periodically check on
> the consistency of the person's beliefs." (Stich, op. cit, p. 152)
>
> Cheers,
>
> - David Yeo (Applied Cognitive Science, University of Toronto)
>
The subtley lies in my insistance that one reconstrues what
Bruner originally had to say, something of a gestalt switch in
fact.
'The most characteristic thing about mental life, over
and beyond the fact that one apprehends the events of
the world around one, is that one constantly goes beyond
the information given'.
J Bruner (1957)
Going Beyond The Information Given
(in H Gulber and others (eds)
Contemporary Approaches to Cognition)
And then:
"In the 1970's, Cognitive Science was formulated in
terms of Putnam's doctrine of functionalism, in which
mental states are the functional states of an abstract
digital computer, thinking is abstract symbol
manipulation as in the operation of a computer program,
and the mind's symbols get their meaning by denoting
things in the world. Functionalism has since become the
mainstream doctrine within the philosophy of mind. But
in the mid-1970's, overwhelming empirical evidence
against functionalism began to pile up, and in the late
1970's, Putnam himself found functionalism to be
logically incoherent. In this volume, Putnam brilliantly
reveals the philosophical fallacies in the doctrine he
founded, showing why functionalism must fail as a
philosophy of mind. The fall of functionalism has major
consequences for generative linguistics, artificial
intelligence, and cognitive and developmental
psychology".
Lakoff (1988).
Which is a vindication of what Skinner long argued.
'Cognitive psychology is frequently presented as a
revolt against behaviorism, but it is not a revolt, it
is a retreat. Everyday English is full of terms
derived from ancient explanations of human behavior.
We spoke that language when we were young. When we
went out into the world and became psychologists, we
learned to speak in other ways but made mistakes for
which we were punished. But now we can relax.
Cognitive psychology is Old Home Week. We are back
among friends speaking the language we spoke when we
were growing up. We can talk about love and will and
ideas and memories and feelings and states of mind, and
no one will ask us what we mean; no one will raise an
eyebrow.'
('The Shame of American Education')
B.F. Skinner 1987
'I accuse cognitive scientists of emasculating
laboratory research by substituting descriptions of
settings for the settings themselves and reports of
intentions and expectations for action.
I accuse cognitive scientists of reviving a theory
in which feelings and states of mind observed through
introspection are taken as the causes of behavior
rather than as collateral effects of the causes.
I accuse cognitive scientists, as I would accuse
psychoanalysts, of claiming to explore the depths of
human behavior, of inventing explanatory systems that
are admired for a profundity more properly called
inaccessibility.
I accuse cognitive scientists of relaxing standards of
definition and logical thinking and releasing a
flood of speculation characteristic of metaphysics,
literature, and daily intercourse, speculation perhaps
suitable enough in such arenas but inimical to science.
Let us bring behaviorism back from the Devil's Island to
which it was transported for a crime it never
committed, and let psychology become once again a
behavioral science.'
('Cognitive Science and Behaviorism')
B.F. Skinner 1987
It's important that folk entertain the idea of what I refer to as
"The Fragmentation of Behaviour" studied from the extensional
stance. Dennett's Intentional Stance fails because it ONLY
applies where the rationality assumption holds.
Another way of conceiving the issues I have been outlining is
from Minsky's perspective of a "Society of Mind", except that I
disagree that we should take human cognition as a standard for AI
- we already have good normative standards AS scientific
knowledge in World 3 as Popper and Eccles would say.
--
David Longley
---------------------
--
David Longley
Oliver Sparrow
(David Longley) writes:
> Folk should wake up to the possibility that AI might just be
So folk wisdom is right after all?
> ......humans have LEARNED to
> be able the behave rationally.....but that is not because they
> are inherently rational.
Or to put it another way, AI solutions will consist of pragmatic
implemetations of pragmatic - folk - rules, rather than formal
rationality.
_________________________________________________
Oliver Sparrow
oh...@chatham.demon.co.uk
David Longley
In article <Pine.SOL.3.91.970125085656.10613F-100000@tortoise>
dyeo@tortoise "David Yeo" writes:
> On Sat, 25 Jan 1997, David Longley wrote:
>
> > Folk should wake up to the possibility that AI might just be
> > scientific and technological knowledge (skill) and that cognitive
> > skills as practised by non scientific humans and other animals
> > is just a set of folk psychological heuristics (Tversky &
> > Kahneman).
>
> I see once again it's the parade that is out of step with David Longley.
Yes, that's the only reason why I bother posting anything here.
>
> <snip>
>
> > It's almost comical to see folk in AI *trying* to build systems
> > which might think like humans, when in reality, the progress has
> > been in the opposite direction. That is, humans have LEARNED to
> > be able the behave rationally.....but that is not because they
> > are inherently rational.
>
> Your "build a better rationalist" project confuses the means by which
> GOFAI attempted to construct it's models of cognition with its objective.
Oh really?
>
> > It is not therefore a failure if AI can not replicate the
> > performance of humans and other animals. That is NOT AI's
> > objective. To replicate how humans behave is the task of
>
> Wrong ... it *is* AI's objective. It's just not YOUR objective.
I'm being prescriptive - it's the task of PSYCHOLOGY to replicate
human behaviour, in models. Many of AIs objectives are little
more than science fiction, based as they are on misconceptions of
rationality *as* psychological processes.
>
> > empirical behaviour science, which builds models of what folk and
> > animals DO do, not what they SHOULD do.
>
> "SHOULD" as measured by your own rationalist standard, no
doubt.
No by normative standards of science as I have said many times. I
don't see the point of these stupid ad hominems. Try reading what
I have written!
>
> > The task of AI is to build normative systems - which is why I
>
> This is complete tripe! As if there is a consensus (in AI or anywhere)
> on the form of cognitive system we OUGHT to have. Certainly YOUR closed
> rationalist model of perfection is far from universally accepted.
I'm not being democratic about this! I'm being prescriptive!
>
> > have drawn attention to work in actuarial vs. clinical decision
> > making, behaviour fragmentation, the extensional stance, and
> > rDBMS technology.
> >
> > --
> > David Longley
>
> Your posting is so riddled with confusion it's really quite sad. Try to
> read something at least a little recent (say post 1600).
The only confusion is yours David. Try reading what I post more
carefully and with reference to what else I have said.
>
> Cheers,
>
> - David Yeo (Applied Cognitive Science, University of Toronto)
>
If you stopped trying to be so conventional for a minute, you
might have an original thought David..As it is, I suggest *you*
do some *reading*, and you might make a start with "Fragments"
and its references.
Then I might take what you say a little more seriously. All you're
doing now is sniping....
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--
David Longley
andrew babian
In article <854153...@longley.demon.co.uk>, Da...@longley.demon.co.uk (David Longley) says:
>...
>It's almost comical to see folk in AI *trying* to build systems
>which might think like humans, when in reality, the progress has
>...
>The task of AI is to build normative systems - which is why I
>...
that dog won't hunt.
Because AI systems will need to communicate with people, they will need
to understand us, and to in a major way be able to think like us.
Purely logical systems have real trouble with uncertainty, not just
uncertainty of particular facts, but especially uncertainty with large
complex systems with many nonobvious rules. There is no way to avoid
large bodies of heuristics, and many arbitrary decisions.
And maybe a more fundamental problem--ai is a creative process.
Sure, even though it does require scientific discoveries and the
discipline and thoroughness of that kind of research, it is still
an act of creation, just as the development of intelligence in humans
by evolution was a creative process. This means that any creation
will be a special product of the circumstances of the time, along
with the actual requirements due to 'the laws of nature'.
so don't give me your requirements just yet.
David Longley
In article <139381...@chatham.demon.co.uk>
oh...@chatham.demon.co.uk "Oliver Sparrow" writes:
> (David Longley) writes:
> > Folk should wake up to the possibility that AI might just be
> > ...... just a set of folk psychological heuristics
That's NOT what I wrote....
What I wrote was:
> Folk should wake up to the possibility that AI might just be
> scientific and technological knowledge (skill) and that cognitive
> skills as practised by non scientific humans and other animals
> is just a set of folk psychological heuristics (Tversky &
> Kahneman).
This is why I keep urging folk to READ what is written carefully.
>
> So folk wisdom is right after all?
No....
>
> > ......humans have LEARNED to
> > be able the behave rationally.....but that is not because they
> > are inherently rational.
>
> Or to put it another way, AI solutions will consist of pragmatic
> implemetations of pragmatic - folk - rules, rather than formal
> rationality.
>
No.....this is a total misunderstanding of what was written.
--
David Longley
Pawel Biernacki (LVS-HIWI)
David Longley <Da...@longley.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>It's almost comical to see folk in AI *trying* to build systems
>which might think like humans, when in reality, the progress has
>be able the behave rationally.....but that is not because they
>are inherently rational.
I have to disagree. In my opinion humans are very rational, although
maybe we do not mean the same idea of rationality. I think that we
( I am a human ) may sometimes be inconsequent - but it follows simply
from the fact that the situation is changing, so we adjust our
decisions to it. We do not always apply logics in its full extent,
and sometimes we cheat ourselves, but we do it because we want to
"feel better", or just because we get tired of thinking. This is
a consequence of a special "brain economy", a perfectly logical
strategy, that attempts to achieve maximum gain with minimal effort.
Human beings usually consider themselves rational, and the others
irrational. Actually - there is no irrationality in the universe
( sometimes we can just not understand it ). We do not understand
decisions of other humans, and sometimes of our own, because we have
no mechanism to trace the phenomen of making it up.
It simply means that we do not have to know how we think in order
to think effectively ( because otherwise the evolution would have
probably given us such a "sense" ).
You write that humans have learnt to behave more rational. Considering
Your idea of "rationality" - this is true, but it has nothing to do
with AI. We have exactly the same brains like people hundred thousands
years ago, but our civilization requires much more consequence simply
because we know more about the universe. In addition the life have
become easier, which made it possible to learn 20% of your life.
Actually the knowledge we get at school is mostly unneccesary,
but there are two reasons to maintain the system :
First - we need some people that could at least support the existing
technologies, which requires more abstract thinking that hunting
animals. Second - the educational system involves many people
( teachers and children, students ) which are unable to do anything
that could be consumed on the market - because they are
learning/teaching. This is a big advantage for the stability of the
system ( it reduces unemployment ). A marginal reason is a possibility
to develop the technologies, but actually only the "researchers" are
expected to do it.
Probably in the future we will be even more "rational" - considering
the techologies we will use, and more "irrational" considering anything
else. Human inconsequence and ignorance exists as long as it is not
in the conflict with the "scientific knowledge" - and what's more,
we are allowed to ignore it as long as we do not have to apply it.
There are also such interesting cases, when the ignorance is valuable
from the system's point of view. If all people realized that the
structure of "state" is completely conventional, everybody would like
to modify or to disobey it. If everybody knew that most of the laws,
conventions, relations - are created only to maintain the system,
they would destroy it ( possibly creating something similar or worse ).
Maybe it sounds funny - but I believe that in the future an average
human being will know much less than we know, although the level
of knowledge ( science ) will in general be higher, and the access to
informations will be much easier than it is now.
AI machines thinking like humans - I would rather them to be more
consequent - and honest. Possibly they will even think better, because
we have not been intended as "perfectly logical scientists" - but
( as I have already written in this newsgroup ) we just need food,
sex and computers.
OK, that's it
Pawel
David Longley
> In article <854153...@longley.demon.co.uk>, Da...@longley.demon.co.uk (David
> Longley) says:
>
> >...
> >It's almost comical to see folk in AI *trying* to build systems
> >which might think like humans, when in reality, the progress has
> >...
> >The task of AI is to build normative systems - which is why I
> >...
>
> that dog won't hunt.
But it does and the history is there to prove it.
>
> Because AI systems will need to communicate with people, they will need
> to understand us, and to in a major way be able to think like us.
>
> Purely logical systems have real trouble with uncertainty, not just
> uncertainty of particular facts, but especially uncertainty with large
> complex systems with many nonobvious rules. There is no way to avoid
> large bodies of heuristics, and many arbitrary decisions.
>
Not true. The best way to handle uncertainty is through formal
systems - probability theory. If there are difficulties with
large complex systems, etc, their management is *still* made more
manageable with formal logical technology (computers and
software). Some problems just *are* hard.
> And maybe a more fundamental problem--ai is a creative process.
> Sure, even though it does require scientific discoveries and the
> discipline and thoroughness of that kind of research, it is still
> an act of creation, just as the development of intelligence in humans
> by evolution was a creative process. This means that any creation
> will be a special product of the circumstances of the time, along
> with the actual requirements due to 'the laws of nature'.
This is all based on some hubristic *assumptions*. WHat IF the
practice of intelligent behaviour IS as I claim, an acquired
(programmed) skill?
It is only residual hubrism (Copernicus and Darwin have only
partially debunked it, the last bastion is "folk psychology" and
that will be defended to the death!!
>
> so don't give me your requirements just yet.
>
Well, the sooner such childish things as "folk psychology" are
seen for what they are, the sooner folk will see what AI amounts
to...... That's my prognosis.
--
David Longley
David Longley
In article <32EDD5...@lvs.informatik.rwth-aachen.de>
pa...@lvs.informatik.rwth-aachen.de "LVS-HIWI" writes:
> David Longley <Da...@longley.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>
> >It's almost comical to see folk in AI *trying* to build systems
> >which might think like humans, when in reality, the progress has
> >been in the opposite direction. That is, humans have LEARNED to
> >be able the behave rationally.....but that is not because they
> >are inherently rational.
>
>
> I have to disagree. In my opinion humans are very rational, although
> maybe we do not mean the same idea of rationality. I think that we
> ( I am a human ) may sometimes be inconsequent - but it follows simply
> from the fact that the situation is changing, so we adjust our
> decisions to it. We do not always apply logics in its full extent,
> and sometimes we cheat ourselves, but we do it because we want to
> "feel better", or just because we get tired of thinking. This is
> a consequence of a special "brain economy", a perfectly logical
> strategy, that attempts to achieve maximum gain with minimal effort.
Do you appreciatethat I am NOT just articulating a bit of
homespun philosophy here but stating a conclusion which is now
widely accepted by research psychologists on the basis of
empirical research throughout the 60. 70s and 80s by a large
number of researchers.
Please see reference list in:
"Fragments of Behaviour: The Extensional Stance"
http://www.uni-hamburg.de/~kriminol/TS/tskr.htm
These are a few:
Agnoli F & Krantz D. H. Suppressing Natural Heuristics by Formal
Instruction: The Case of the Conjunction Fallacy Cognitive Psychology
21, 515-550, 1989
Nisbett R E & Ross L Human Inference: Strategies and Shortcomings
of Social Judgment Century Psychology Series, Prentice-Hall (1980)
Ross L & Nisbett R E The Person and The Situation: Perspectives of
Social Psychology McGraw Hill 1991
Sutherland S IRRATIONALITY: The Enemy Within Constable: London 1992
Tversky A & Kahneman D Extensional Versus Intuitive Reasoning: The
Conjunction Fallacy in Probability Judgment Psychological Review
v90(4) 1983
Wason W C Reasoning in New Horizons in Psychology, Penguin Books
1966
Wason W C & Johnson-Laird P Psychology of Reasoning
London:Batsford 1972
Dawes R.M The Robust beauty of improper linear models in decision
making American Psychologist, 1979 34,571-582
Dawes R M Rational Choice in an Uncertain World Orlando: Harcourt,
Brace, Jovanovich 1988
Dawes R M, Faust D & Meehl P E Clinical Versus Actuarial Judgement
Science v243, pp 1668-1674 1989
Einhorn H J & Hogarth R M Behavioral decision theory: Processes of
judgment and choice Annual Review of Psychology (1981), 32, 53-88
Faust D Data integration in legal evaluations: Can clinicians
deliver on their premises? Behavioral Sciences and the Law; 1989 Fal
Vol 7(4) 469-483
Goldberg L R Simple models or simple processes? Some research on
clinical judgments American Psychologist,1968,23(7) p.483-496
Kahneman D, Slovic P & Tversky A Judgment Under Uncertainty:
Heuristics and Biases Cambridge University Press 1982
Meehl P E When Shall We Use Our Heads Instead of the Formula?
PSYCHODIAGNOSIS: Collected Papers 1971
Oskamp S Overconfidence in case-study judgments J. Consult.
Psychol. (1965), 29, 261-265
Sarbin T R Clinical Psychology - Art or Science? Psychometrica
v6 pp391-400 (1941)
'Humans did not "make it to the moon" (or unravel the
mysteries of the double helix or deduce the existence of
quarks) by trusting the availability and
representativeness heuristics or by relying on the
vagaries of informal data collection and interpretation.
On the contrary, these triumphs were achieved by the use
of formal research methodology and normative principles
of scientific inference. Furthermore, as Dawes (1976)
pointed out, no single person could have solved all the
problems involved in such necessarily collective efforts
as space exploration. Getting to the moon was a joint
project, if not of 'idiots savants', at least of savants
whose individual areas of expertise were extremely
limited - one savant who knew a great deal about the
propellant properties of solid fuels but little about
the guidance capabilities of small computers, another
savant who knew a great deal about the guidance
capabilities of small computers but virtually nothing
about gravitational effects on moving objects, and so
forth. Finally, those savants included people who
believed that redheads are hot-tempered, who bought
their last car on the cocktail-party advice of an
acquaintance's brother-in-law, and whose mastery of the
formal rules of scientific inference did not notably
spare them from the social conflicts and personal
disappointments experienced by their fellow humans. The
very impressive results of organised intellectual
endeavour, in short, provide no basis for contradicting
our generalizations about human inferential
shortcomings. Those accomplishments are collective, at
least in the sense that we all stand on the shoulders of
those who have gone before; and most of them have been
achieved by using normative principles of inference
often conspicuously absent from everyday life. Most
importantly, there is no logical contradiction between
the assertion that people can be very impressively
intelligent on some occasions or in some domains and the
assertion that they can make howling inferential errors
on other occasions or in other domains.'
R. Nisbett and L. Ross (1980)
Human Inference: Strategies and Shortcomings of Social
Judgment
My general conclusion is that *many* psychologists have in fact
misread what their discipline has all been about since the 1960s.
As an ampirical discipline, and in contrast to the technology of
AI, it is a catalogue of the failings of a system (*human*
information processing) optimised for fault tolerance
biologically, but minimally rational without the support of the
extensional stance.
One simply can not justify the use of the Intentional Stance
(Dennett, Davidson) except under conditions where humans are
already conforming, somewhat ironically, to rational norms. This
is not a constraint on the extensional stance, which holds the
potential of presenting all that occurs, "warts and all".
--
David Longley
John Frenster
DaDavid Longley wrote:
>
> Folk should wake up to the possibility that AI might just be
> scientific and technological knowledge (skill) and that cognitive
> skills as practised by non scientific humans and other animals
> is just a set of folk psychological heuristics (Tversky &
> Kahneman).
>
> psychologies are superstitious intensional systems, it is hard to
> see one's own that way. But that's likely to be the case.
>
> which might think like humans, when in reality, the progress has
> been in the opposite direction. That is, humans have LEARNED to
> be able the behave rationally.....but that is not because they
> are inherently rational.
>
> performance of humans and other animals. That is NOT AI's
> objective. To replicate how humans behave is the task of
> animals DO do, not what they SHOULD do.
>
> making, behaviour fragmentation, the extensional stance, and
> rDBMS technology.
>
> --
> David Longley
What a wonderful conception ! Call it Rational Intelligence.
All best wishes,
John
--
John Frenster Voice: 415/367-6483
matrixcognition(TM) FAX: 415/364-1773
247 Stockbridge Avenue e-mail: mat...@ix.netcom.com
Atherton, CA 94027-5446 CompuServe: 71077,2534
http://matrixcognition.com/INDEX.HTM
matrixcognition: "Computer-Assisted Decision-Making"
David Longley
> David Longley wrote:
> >
> > The task of AI is to build normative systems - which is why I
> > have drawn attention to work in actuarial vs. clinical decision
> > making, behaviour fragmentation, the extensional stance, and
> > rDBMS technology.
> >
In effect, that is the programme of science and technology more
generally. It is only the muddle of contemporary intensionalism
coupled with misconceptions of the nature of psychology and AI
that prevent folk form seeing this more clearly. Most of the
debate and discussion over the past half century can be traced to
this muddle in my view.
'If I know that the train is moving and you know that
its wheels are turning, it does not follow that I know
what you know just because the train never moves without
its wheels turning. More generally, if all (and only) Fs
are G, one can nonetheless know that something is F
without knowing that it is G. Extensionally equivalent
expressions, when applied to the same object, do not
(necessarily) express the same cognitive content.
Furthermore, if Tom is my uncle, one can not infer (with
a possible exception to be mentioned later) that if S
knows that Tom is getting married, he thereby knows that
my uncle is getting married. The content of a cognitive
state, and hence the cognitive state itself, depends
(for its identity) on something beyond the extension or
reference of the terms we use to express the content. I
shall say, therefore, that a description of a cognitive
state, is non-extensional.'
F. I. Dretske (1980)
The Intentionality of Cognitive States
Midwest Studies in Philosophy 5,281-294
What, fundamentally is wrong with the intensional stance?
'The trouble is, according to Brentano's thesis, no such
theory is forthcoming on strictly naturalistic, physical
grounds. If you want semantics, you need a full-blown,
irreducible psychology of intensions.
There is a counterpart in modern logic of the thesis of
irreducibility. The language of physical and biological
science is largely *extensional*. It can be formulated
(approximately) in the familiar predicate calculus. The
language of psychology, however, is *intensional*. For
the moment it is good enough to think of an
*intensional* sentence as one containing words for
*intensional* attitudes such as belief.
Roughly what the counterpart thesis means is that
important features of extensional, scientific language
on which inference depends are not present in
intensional sentences. In fact intensional words and
sentences are precisely those expressions in which
certain key forms of logical inference break down.'
R. J. Nelson (1992)
Naming and Reference p.39-42
and in a nutshell....
'The first-order predicate calculus is an extensional
logic in which Leibniz's Law is taken as an axiomatic
principle. Such a logic cannot admit 'intensional' or
'referentially opaque' predicates whose defining
characteristic is that they flout that principle.'
U. T. Place (1987)
Skinner Re-Skinned P. 244
In B.F. Skinner Consensus and Controversy
Eds. S. Modgil & C. Modgil
Which requires a little analysis to appreciate the full
implications.....
For such details and practical implications and applications:
see "Fragments of Behaviour: The Extensional Stance"
http://www.uni-hamburg.de/~kriminol/TS/tskr.htm
--
David Longley
jimmy
Longley is into, dear God, Turing!...Turing!
Who can fathom Leviathan?
Surely he [Longley] is a voice speaking from the whirlwind.
...I looked for the "Fragments" thingy and got "Kriminologie".
Am I getting "warm"? ~~~Jimmy
Pawel Biernacki (LVS-HIWI)
Hi
I think I have not expressed myself clearly, but the subject is
very interesting - I will try to do it this time. The problem is
whether the people are irrational or not -
David Longley wrote:
>
> In article <32EDD5...@lvs.informatik.rwth-aachen.de>
> pa...@lvs.informatik.rwth-aachen.de "LVS-HIWI" writes:
>
> > David Longley <Da...@longley.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>
> Do you appreciatethat I am NOT just articulating a bit of
> homespun philosophy here but stating a conclusion which is now
> widely accepted by research psychologists on the basis of
> empirical research throughout the 60. 70s and 80s by a large
> number of researchers.
>
( I think You are a little ironic - it won't help us to understand each
other ). I do know ( and You surely realize that I know ) that most
people believe we are irrational. As the scientists You have mentioned.
I know that the empirical tests may show that human behaviour is
very often far from optimal ( for themselves ). If I know it - what
makes me to claim that nobody is irrational ?
You have probably noticed I wrote about a different definition of
rationality, i.e. I do not like this one, which HAS to be used
concerning empirical tests. I do not think that the effectiveness
is the right criterion.
I will give You a tip : let us consider people of the Stone Age.
They could create everything that we have ( modern weapons, cars,... )
and it would make their lives easier. They had everything that was
neccesary ( all materials, and the same brains ). Will You call
them irrational, because they have not done what they could do ?
Now another example : a simple program in C:
main(void)
{
printf("2+2=5\n");
}
The difference in our positions is that You say - "the program is
stupid !". It displays a nonsense. I agree - but I say, that it is
logical, and that the program SHOULD behave this way. I just do not like
the idea of irrationality, which suggests, that there is something
in the world that a priori cannot be explained.
The peoples decisions may be up to different factors - what they know,
believe, want, how effective they think and so on. We cannot see them,
and concerning only the effects of their decisions, we should not
say that they are irrational. It is possible that they just have not
taken into account the action we consider optimal. ( If the space of
possible actions is very large - it is simply impossible - like
constructing a car in the Stone Age, without the knowledge, that
limits the space - to reasonable actions ).
They could believe that the consequences of the actions are different
then these that we believe or know. For example a guy observing
some religious rules is rational (!) - even if the rules are irrational
themselves. He just believs that breaking them will be worse for him,
so he does his best to optimize his situation.
Finally in empirical tests we can see, that someone did something
stupid, although he could have done something much better, and he
knew about it. You say it is irrational. In more formal words - the
man thinks irrationally. But it is perfectly possible, that he
has not even thought about the decision ! Very often people just do not
think, so one cannot say that they think irrational.
In the Game Theory there are sometimes pathological situations - when
the player considers too short "horizont", and disregards the further
consequences of his decisions. This is a consequence of the fact, that
the game is very complicated, and we must somehow approximate the
results. It is the best what we can do - and the most rational strategy,
although it leads to mistakes.
And here is my last argument against the "effectiveness criterion"
of the rationality. It is possible that the player executed an action,
that gave him maximal expected gain, but he failed ( for example
the risked was justified, but this time he had no luck ). This is
- for me - completely rational.
Now - I will try to say what is irrationality for me ( or how I would
like the term to be used ) : irrational decision is executing an action,
that gives significantly lower expected gain, then other actions
that HAVE BEEN considered by the player. Of course - the definition
cannot be applied to the humans - now. So observing someone doing
something different from what we would have done - we say he is simply
stupid.
> Please see reference list in:
>
> "Fragments of Behaviour: The Extensional Stance"
> http://www.uni-hamburg.de/~kriminol/TS/tskr.htm
I have seen it already ( well - perhaps did not read exactly ).
>
> These are a few:
>
.......
!!!!!!! Thank You very much - I am afraid - I will not find so much
time to read it, and after all, I suppose that the books might be
to difficult for me ( I have no psychological background ).
>
> R. Nisbett and L. Ross (1980)
> Human Inference: Strategies and Shortcomings of Social
> Judgment
>
... this was interesting. I agree - we have developed powerful
technologies only because we work together. I would say, that
human decisions are "very good" - sometimes.
> My general conclusion is that *many* psychologists have in fact
> misread what their discipline has all been about since the 1960s.
> As an ampirical discipline, and in contrast to the technology of
> AI, it is a catalogue of the failings of a system (*human*
> information processing) optimised for fault tolerance
> biologically, but minimally rational without the support of the
> extensional stance.
>
Perfectly right ! Humans are actually very sophisticated biological
machines, that can be very stupid. The point is, that we do not
have to realize or articulate the correct/adequate description of
the world. We do not need to understand it. We may speak whatever
we want, and imagine that we are right. However - our organisms have to
satisfy severe material conditions, or we would not exist.
> One simply can not justify the use of the Intentional Stance
> (Dennett, Davidson) except under conditions where humans are
> already conforming, somewhat ironically, to rational norms. This
> is not a constraint on the extensional stance, which holds the
> potential of presenting all that occurs, "warts and all".
>
> --
> David Longley
I do not understand exactly what You mean here - possibly because
of my psychological ignorance. But I agree with this observation:
Humans are becoming more "rational" ( or consequent ), because
of the same reason which makes our organisms to be "optimised
biologically". This consequence and knowledge are veryfied by physical
reality in inventing new technologies, and understanding science.
After all - I think it has become clear what I mean. My objections
against "irrationality" is related with the objections about
understanding human beings as "persons", that can be "blamed" for
their behaviour. I do not mean a mechanical determinism here - but
this personification ( maybe the last one in the science ) can be
dangerous - and has not been rationally based.
Best
Pawel
Neil Rickert
In <32F1CF...@lvs.informatik.rwth-aachen.de> "Pawel Biernacki (LVS-HIWI)" <pa...@lvs.informatik.rwth-aachen.de> writes:
>I think I have not expressed myself clearly, but the subject is
>very interesting - I will try to do it this time. The problem is
>whether the people are irrational or not -
Longley is rather confused when he argues that people are
irrational. You might be able to demonstrate that a particular
person is irrational. But you could never demonstrated that people
in general are irrational.
You could present a particular theory of rationality, and show that
people do not conform to that theory. Indeed, such has been done and
Longley often provides quotes. But that would not demonstrate that
people were irrational. Rather, it would demonstrate that the
particular theory of rationality was mistaken.
The problem here is that 'rationality' is a term used to describe
human behavior. Longley's mistake is to think that 'rationality' is
something well defined and independent of human behavior.
Greg Stevens
Neil Rickert (ric...@cs.niu.edu) wrote:
: [...] You might be able to demonstrate that a particular
: person is irrational. But you could never demonstrated that people
: in general are irrational.
: You could present a particular theory of rationality, and show that
: people do not conform to that theory. Indeed, such has been done and
: Longley often provides quotes. But that would not demonstrate that
: people were irrational. Rather, it would demonstrate that the
: particular theory of rationality was mistaken.
I don't understand how yo come to the conclusion of the last
sentence here. Is it necessarily true, prior to any THEORY
of rationality, that there must be at least some people who
are rational?
You state that "rationality" is a term ascribed to people's
behaviors, but in some sense it is often used as a matter
of degree, or approximating an ideal. People are more or
less rational in different contexts. To this extent,
you could define "rationality", for example, in an idealized
subjective expected utility kind of way (which clearly
people do NOT do, for computational and other theoretical
reasons), and then still retain the "common sense" notion
that some people approximate this ideal better than
others -- despite the fact that no one is "*completely*
rational."
The usage of saying, "he is rational" then is similar to
the usage of the term "this surface is smooth." Of course,
no surface is *completely* smooth, in the ideal, but in
pragmatic contexts people use this term to describe various
approximations of this ideal. It doesn't mean that
a theory of "smoothness" that defines it in its ideal
is wrong, and it doesn't mean we have to re-define
"smoothness" as "only slightly lumpy." We simply have to
understand the pragmatic contexts in which we use the
term.
--
Greg Stevens
gr...@umich.edu
Neil Rickert
In <5ct069$6...@lastactionhero.rs.itd.umich.edu> gr...@umich.edu (Greg Stevens) writes:
>Neil Rickert (ric...@cs.niu.edu) wrote:
>: [...] You might be able to demonstrate that a particular
>: person is irrational. But you could never demonstrated that people
>: in general are irrational.
>: You could present a particular theory of rationality, and show that
>: people do not conform to that theory. Indeed, such has been done and
>: Longley often provides quotes. But that would not demonstrate that
>: people were irrational. Rather, it would demonstrate that the
>: particular theory of rationality was mistaken.
>I don't understand how yo come to the conclusion of the last
>sentence here. Is it necessarily true, prior to any THEORY
>of rationality, that there must be at least some people who
>are rational?
I suppose it it is sufficiently prior to any theory of rationality,
then the concept 'rationality' would not exist and there would be
nothing about it that is necessarily true. However, if we want to
talk about 'rationality' in a way that is consistent with normal use
of the term, then we have to recognize that it is a term used to
describe humans, and often to distinguish them from other animals. A
theory of rationality which showed people to be irrational would be
contrary to that normal use of the term.
If someone (a) came up with a theory of rationality, (b) demonstrated
that people were irrational under that theory, and (c) produced AI
systems which met the theory and could be demonstrated to act in ways
that we would consider more intelligent than people, then we might be
inclined to accept that as a theory of rationality, and conclude that
people were irrational. I don't see any prospects of (c) being
achieved consistent with what philosophers often describe in their
theories of rationality. And I don't think people would accept a
meaning of 'rationality' in which they were irrational, without
something like (c).
>You state that "rationality" is a term ascribed to people's
>behaviors, but in some sense it is often used as a matter
>of degree, or approximating an ideal. People are more or
>less rational in different contexts.
Sure.
> To this extent,
>you could define "rationality", for example, in an idealized
>subjective expected utility kind of way (which clearly
>people do NOT do, for computational and other theoretical
>reasons), and then still retain the "common sense" notion
>that some people approximate this ideal better than
>others -- despite the fact that no one is "*completely*
>rational."
But with such a fuzzy definition of 'rational', you could never
really prove that people are irrational. And if you make the
definition precise enough to allow such a proof, the evidence will be
taken as showing that it was a bad definition.
>The usage of saying, "he is rational" then is similar to
>the usage of the term "this surface is smooth." Of course,
>no surface is *completely* smooth, in the ideal, but in
>pragmatic contexts people use this term to describe various
>approximations of this ideal.
There is a difference. We can define 'smooth' very precisely and
still get agreement on that definition. I don't see any likelihood
that we could do the same for 'rational'.
Anders N Weinstein
>Longley is rather confused when he argues that people are
>irrational. You might be able to demonstrate that a particular
>person is irrational. But you could never demonstrated that people
>in general are irrational.
FYI I recall an old Behavioral and Brain Sciences article by the
philosopher L. Jonathan Cohen with a title like "Could Human
Irrationality be Experimentally Demonstrated?" which might be worth
looking into if you are interested in this issue.
rlk
I have a worked-out approach to this issue, set forth in my website
(URL below).
In brief, I argue that psychological processes incorporate systematic
errors. The processes are as follows:
1. Projection -- we confuse experiences with reality
2. Explication -- we sharpen experiences in an effort to make
things clear (e.g. caricature, outlining)
3. States -- experiences persist unchanged for a duration
(however short). We project this onto reality.
4. Combination -- we make new experiences (including concepts)
by putting old experiences together. Once
again, we project the combinations and believe
they are real. We are led to believe that
there is "unity" in reality. but the belief
is primarily wishful thinking (the situation
with GOFAI, IMNSHO).
5. Identification -- we say that different experiences are
"the same."
I also argue that <structure> arises from these processes and
that, although experience is inherently structured, reality is not
inherently structured. (We do build into reality matters that are as
close to structures as we can manage, by engineering, for example.)
Although structure incorporates error, it's the best (indeed, the
only) effective tool we have. And it's wonderfully successful a lot of
the time (although it fails in many situations too, and is often only
half-assed, e.g. the law of the courts).
In my website, I offer an alternative approach to philosophy
applied to the problems of AI based on the these principless. The devices
are based on associative memory systems. The philosophy and the approach
are based on my personal views and include "subjective feelings." Spock
wannabes will not like it (I really don't need flames --and I've already
admitted error).
Greg Stevens
Neil Rickert (ric...@cs.niu.edu) wrote:
: gr...@umich.edu (Greg Stevens) writes:
: > [...] People are more or
: >less rational in different contexts. To this extent,
: >you could define "rationality", for example, in an idealized
: >subjective expected utility kind of way (which clearly
: >people do NOT do, for computational and other theoretical
: >reasons), and then still retain the "common sense" notion
: >that some people approximate this ideal better than
: >others -- despite the fact that no one is "*completely*
: >rational."
: But with such a fuzzy definition of 'rational', you could never
: really prove that people are irrational. And if you make the
: definition precise enough to allow such a proof, the evidence will be
: taken as showing that it was a bad definition.
No, you can never "prove that people are irrational", but you can
show that some people are MORE rational than others. This is
all that we do in "lay" conversation, anyway. Next time someone
says, "Bob is being irrational," prod a little -- you'll find what
they mean is, "Bob is being less rational than I would be."
You could make the same argument for the definition of "smoothness."
Given the definition of what "smooth" is, you could never prove
that anything is smooth -- because nothing is *completely* smooth.
You can refer to some things as more smooth than others, though.
: There is a difference. We can define 'smooth' very precisely and
: still get agreement on that definition. I don't see any likelihood
: that we could do the same for 'rational'.
You objected to definitions of rationality that precluded any human
behavior as being completely rational. I am simply pointing out that
we have a completely precise and acceptable definition of "smoothness"
that we apply to objects, that nonetheless NO ACTUAL OBJECTS IN THE
WORLD ever fit. We describe objects in the world as having various
degrees of approximations to this ideal. The same can be done with
a precise definition of rationality (maximizing subjective expected
utility, let's say). Thus we can claim "people are never rational"
while still having a precise definition allowing us to claim that
some people are more rational than others, and some people are
"rational" or "irrational" in certain pragmatic contexts with
respect to how effectively they approximate thi ideal. The
same as the way we use the term "smoothness."
--
Greg Stevens
gr...@umich.edu
Neil Rickert
In <5ctdqk$c...@lastactionhero.rs.itd.umich.edu> gr...@umich.edu (Greg Stevens) writes:
>Neil Rickert (ric...@cs.niu.edu) wrote:
>: gr...@umich.edu (Greg Stevens) writes:
>: But with such a fuzzy definition of 'rational', you could never
>: really prove that people are irrational. And if you make the
>: definition precise enough to allow such a proof, the evidence will be
>: taken as showing that it was a bad definition.
>No, you can never "prove that people are irrational", but you can
>show that some people are MORE rational than others. This is
>all that we do in "lay" conversation, anyway. Next time someone
>says, "Bob is being irrational," prod a little -- you'll find what
>they mean is, "Bob is being less rational than I would be."
Ok. Then I don't think we disagree.
>You could make the same argument for the definition of "smoothness."
>Given the definition of what "smooth" is, you could never prove
>that anything is smooth -- because nothing is *completely* smooth.
>You can refer to some things as more smooth than others, though.
>: There is a difference. We can define 'smooth' very precisely and
>: still get agreement on that definition. I don't see any likelihood
>: that we could do the same for 'rational'.
>You objected to definitions of rationality that precluded any human
>behavior as being completely rational.
I think you misread what I had written. My objection was to
definitions under which it could be shown as a general fact that
humans are irrational.
> We describe objects in the world as having various
>degrees of approximations to this ideal. The same can be done with
>a precise definition of rationality (maximizing subjective expected
>utility, let's say).
I wouldn't call that precise, since "subjective expected utility" is
not an unproblematic term.
> Thus we can claim "people are never rational"
You could claim, but you could not demonstrate, even if only because
of the problems with "subjective expected utility."
Greg Stevens
: >[...] We describe objects in the world as having various degrees
: >of approximations to [smoothness]. The same can be done with
: >a precise definition of rationality (maximizing subjective expected
: >utility, let's say). [...yes, it is problematic, but let's use it
: >as an example for now.] Thus we can claim "people are never rational"
: You could claim, but you could not demonstrate, even if only because
: of the problems with "subjective expected utility."
You could demonstrate computationally, if not empirically. People can't
maximize utility because they haven't the computational power.
Hence all the talk about "satisficing" and that stuff.
The point is, one could have a theory defining "rationality" as
being something that no human could possibly ever do (be this
SEU, some kind of Bayesianism, etc), thus making the claim "people
are not rational" true, while still having the term pragmatically
be something that could be applied to human behavior--as a
matter of degree. The analogy is between "rational" and "smooth",
where no real objects can even POSSIBLY be "absolutely smooth,"
but we still define things in terms of their relative approximations
of this idea.
--
Greg Stevens
gr...@umich.edu
JRStern
On 31 Jan 1997 18:31:48 GMT, gr...@umich.edu (Greg Stevens) wrote:
> Next time someone
>says, "Bob is being irrational," prod a little -- you'll find what
>they mean is, "Bob is being less rational than I would be."
Which brings up the hard part about "rationality", since in practice
the above sentence usually means, "Bob's reasoning does not produce
the answer that I like". Longley just wants an absolute measure of
rationality, against which both Bob and I can be measured. If only.
>You objected to definitions of rationality that precluded any human
>behavior as being completely rational. I am simply pointing out that
>we have a completely precise and acceptable definition of
>"smoothness" that we apply to objects, that nonetheless NO ACTUAL
>OBJECTS IN THE WORLD ever fit.
I really like this statement, which shows how hard it is to make
"rationality" an effective project in the real world.
Joshua Stern
76200...@compuserve.com
Neil Rickert
>: >[...] We describe objects in the world as having various degrees
>: >of approximations to [smoothness]. The same can be done with
>: >a precise definition of rationality (maximizing subjective expected
>: >utility, let's say). [...yes, it is problematic, but let's use it
>: >as an example for now.] Thus we can claim "people are never rational"
>: You could claim, but you could not demonstrate, even if only because
>: of the problems with "subjective expected utility."
>You could demonstrate computationally, if not empirically. People can't
>maximize utility because they haven't the computational power.
>Hence all the talk about "satisficing" and that stuff.
This works for artificial problems. However in real life, the
problem of maximizing utility is not well defined.
>The point is, one could have a theory defining "rationality" as
>being something that no human could possibly ever do (be this
>SEU, some kind of Bayesianism, etc), thus making the claim "people
>are not rational" true, while still having the term pragmatically
>be something that could be applied to human behavior--as a
>matter of degree.
You would have a lot of arguments that the theory does not capture
what we mean by "rationality."
> The analogy is between "rational" and "smooth",
>where no real objects can even POSSIBLY be "absolutely smooth,"
>but we still define things in terms of their relative approximations
>of this idea.
However I do not think there would be comparable arguments about what
we mean by "smooth."
Norman R. Gall
Neil Rickert <ric...@cs.niu.edu> wrote:
> You could present a particular theory of rationality, and show that
> people do not conform to that theory. Indeed, such has been done and
> Longley often provides quotes. But that would not demonstrate that
> people were irrational. Rather, it would demonstrate that the
> particular theory of rationality was mistaken.
Well, it *might* demonstrate that - but the obvious rebuttal would
involve some charge of begging the question. What is needed is not a
'theory of rationality' but an analysis of the concept of rationality -
if you see the distinction I''m trying to draw.
> The problem here is that 'rationality' is a term used to describe
> human behavior. Longley's mistake is to think that 'rationality' is
> something well defined and independent of human behavior.
I think you are right here. It is certainly far from clear that there
is such definition. And the idea that the 'definition' *could* be
independent of human behaviour is more than a little suspect.
I think that the insight required is somehting like seeing that
rationality is a constituent criterion of purposive human action. These
two concepts are so intimately bound up together than the idea of
independent criteria for 'rationality' ultimately misses the point.
Norm Gall
--
As long as war is looked upon as wicked, it will always have its
fascination. When it is looked upon as vulgar, it will be cease
to be popular. - Oscar Wilde
Norman R. Gall
Neil Rickert <ric...@cs.niu.edu> wrote:
> If someone (a) came up with a theory of rationality, (b) demonstrated
> that people were irrational under that theory, and (c) produced AI
> systems which met the theory and could be demonstrated to act in ways
> that we would consider more intelligent than people, then we might be
> inclined to accept that as a theory of rationality, and conclude that
> people were irrational.
I think it far more likely that we wouldn't consider what the AI system
was doing was 'acting rationally' - it would be 'acting' in some other
way. If we were to adjudge the program working 'more intelligently than
people' we would be trading either on the new theory of rationality (and
thereby begging the question) or on the old notion of rationality (what
people actually do) thereby rejecting the notion of rationality that we
were testing with the program.
> I don't see any prospects of (c) being achieved consistent with what
> philosophers often describe in their theories of rationality.
Nor do I, but this is of no matter, really. What we are talking about is
(what I consider the fact that) our notions of 'action' and
'rationality' are constitutive of what we call human action. In other
words, rationality is too bound up in what we mean when we talk about
human action to be ripped form the context in which the concept gets its
meaning.
> And I don't think people would accept a meaning of 'rationality' in which
> they were irrational, without something like (c).
I don't see why they'd do so even in the face of c).
Cheers,
Norman R. Gall
Neil Rickert <ric...@cs.niu.edu> wrote:
> In <5cu6u1$o...@lastactionhero.rs.itd.umich.edu> gr...@umich.edu (Greg
> Stevens) writes:
> >You could demonstrate computationally, if not empirically. People can't
> >maximize utility because they haven't the computational power.
> >Hence all the talk about "satisficing" and that stuff.
>
> This works for artificial problems. However in real life, the
> problem of maximizing utility is not well defined.
Nor is every case of 'maximising utility' a case of what we call 'acting
rationally' and vice versa. We have to realise that 'rationality' is
not concept which has a single 'essence.' The attempt to characterise
it so leads us to these sorts of muddles: 'maximising utility' vs.
'ensuring at least an equitable outcome', etc. With any such
characterisation we'll find examples of acts that are commonly held to
be irrational and consistant with the characterisation. To then reject
that act as irrational on the basis of the theory is question begging.
The key involves seeing 'acting rationally' as a number of highly
overlapping human practices - with no single 'characterisation common to
all.
Oliver Sparrow
When people talk of 'rationale' - rather than rationality - they are aften
discussing decision support. The rationale of the situation help choice
to be made where optima cannot be calculated (and even when they can
be so addressed, the rationale is embedded in the optimising procedures
which are followed).
This suggests thatthere is - as I discussed at the end of last week - a
important area as to how one regularises or other wise renders tractable
a system which has to bring orthogonal structures into a navigable joint
space, how contours (if not optima) are to be mapped on this, and how
a sufficiently good, untrapped, rich point can be selected in this space.
If you bring "finding food" and "finding safety" spaces together, how is a
space to be created which allows intercommunication? In Natural I, this
is achieved by emotionality, pleasure-pain tropisms and "awareness",
but how is it to be done in a widget?
Answers on a single sheet....... :=)
_________________________________________________
Oliver Sparrow
oh...@chatham.demon.co.uk
David Longley
In article <314906...@chatham.demon.co.uk>
oh...@chatham.demon.co.uk "Oliver Sparrow" writes:
> If you bring "finding food" and "finding safety" spaces together, how is a
> space to be created which allows intercommunication? In Natural I, this
> is achieved by emotionality, pleasure-pain tropisms and "awareness",
> but how is it to be done in a widget?
>
> Answers on a single sheet....... :=)
>
By giving up on such folk psychologisms in science?
I bumped up on this one 15 years ago when thinking about approach/
withdrawal and "learned behaviour".
I got as far as understanding feeding behaviour as a class of cond-
itioned avoidance behaviour. In the end, the psychological idioms
drop out... hasn't that *always* been the case in science?
--
David Longley
JRStern
On Mon, 03 Feb 97 13:53:06 GMT, Da...@longley.demon.co.uk (David
Longley) wrote:
>I got as far as understanding feeding behaviour as a class of cond-
>itioned avoidance behaviour. In the end, the psychological idioms
>drop out... hasn't that *always* been the case in science?
Actually, no, unless you count Freud!
Psychological idioms have proven remarkedly robust. Other "folk"
terms have given way to empirically provable beliefs, which
eliminativists try to imply will also happen in psychology ... but has
not yet.
Which is not to say it won't happen, to some degree, eventually.
J.
David Longley
In article <32f62466...@news.sprynet.com>
76200...@compuserve.com "JRStern" writes:
That's all one has to accept, and work with.
We (as a group) learn to varying limits, and we learn what
science has to say about different aspects of the world (which
includes fragments of our own behaviour).
The problem is that it's *fragmented* knowledge, and it's also
incomplete. Furthermore, when it comes to behavioural knowledge,
we all tend (if we are *confident*) tend to think of ourselves as
being experts because we need some of that information every day
just "to get by".
What few seem prepared to accept is that apart from "getting" by,
such "folk psychology" really isn't all that reliable. The value
of professional behaviour scientists working in areas such as
mine, is that they have the opportunity to bring the technology
of science to bear on the data available.
It's a relative contribution, it always has been and it always
will be.
--
David Longley
Oliver Sparrow
(David Longley) writes:
> I got as far as understanding feeding behaviour as a class of cond-
> itioned avoidance behaviour.
That sounds a lot like anorexia. Can "David Longley" actually be
the nomme de guerre of HRH Princess Diana?
_________________________________________________
Oliver Sparrow
oh...@chatham.demon.co.uk
David Longley
In article <229487...@chatham.demon.co.uk>
oh...@chatham.demon.co.uk "Oliver Sparrow" writes:
> (David Longley) writes:
>
> > I got as far as understanding feeding behaviour as a class of cond-
> > itioned avoidance behaviour.
>
> That sounds a lot like anorexia.
No..... exactly the opposite in fact. You have to see avoidance
behaviour relative to its eliciting conditions. The idioms of
folk psychology obtrude into one's "thoughts" all too vividly. So
vividly in fact that they prevent us from appreciating what's
actualy the case.
Clue: Pavlov's puppies did not salivate to meat powder initially.
--
David Longley
David Longley
In article <1997020111...@usrts1m10.uwinnipeg.ca>
ga...@umanitoba.ca "Norman R. Gall" writes:
> Neil Rickert <ric...@cs.niu.edu> wrote:
>
> > You could present a particular theory of rationality, and show that
> > people do not conform to that theory. Indeed, such has been done and
> > Longley often provides quotes. But that would not demonstrate that
> > people were irrational. Rather, it would demonstrate that the
> > particular theory of rationality was mistaken.
>
> Well, it *might* demonstrate that - but the obvious rebuttal would
> involve some charge of begging the question. What is needed is not a
> 'theory of rationality' but an analysis of the concept of rationality -
> if you see the distinction I''m trying to draw.
>
> > The problem here is that 'rationality' is a term used to describe
> > human behavior. Longley's mistake is to think that 'rationality' is
> > something well defined and independent of human behavior.
>
> I think you are right here. It is certainly far from clear that there
> is such definition. And the idea that the 'definition' *could* be
> independent of human behaviour is more than a little suspect.
>
> I think that the insight required is somehting like seeing that
> rationality is a constituent criterion of purposive human action. These
> two concepts are so intimately bound up together than the idea of
> independent criteria for 'rationality' ultimately misses the point.
>
> Norm Gall
>
> --
> As long as war is looked upon as wicked, it will always have its
> fascination. When it is looked upon as vulgar, it will be cease
> to be popular. - Oscar Wilde
>
I'd like to make one point clear.
I am presenting a thesis in "Fragments of Behaviour: The Extensional
Stance" http://www.uni-hamburg.de/~kriminol/TS/tskr.htm which is an
illustration of a particular form of radical empiricism or evidential
behaviourism usually associated with W.V.O Quine.
This says little about what is innate and what is "learned" but how we
go about producing explanations and revising those explanation for the
observations which are at the basis of our dealings with the world.
I have proposed that the rationality assumption which is a sine qua
non for the "intentional stance" (Dennett 1986) has too much empirical
evidence against it. I have referenced that evidence and quoted it at
length.
As a consequence of the analyses presented in "Fragments" I go on to
outline a framework within which a thorughly empiricist approach to
applied psychology can be implemented and developed.
--
David Longley
David Longley
In article <855165...@longley.demon.co.uk>
Da...@longley.demon.co.uk "David Longley" writes:
> In article <1997020111...@usrts1m10.uwinnipeg.ca>
> ga...@umanitoba.ca "Norman R. Gall" writes:
>
> > Neil Rickert <ric...@cs.niu.edu> wrote:
> >
> > > The problem here is that 'rationality' is a term used to describe
> > > human behavior. Longley's mistake is to think that 'rationality' is
> > > something well defined and independent of human behavior.
> >
> > I think you are right here. It is certainly far from clear that there
> > is such definition. And the idea that the 'definition' *could* be
> > independent of human behaviour is more than a little suspect.
"Longley's mistake is to think that 'rationality' is..."
Now here we see an example of the very sort of behaviour which I
have been urging others to look at more carefully - appreciating
the logical and empirical problems associated with it.
Note Rickert does not say "Longley writes that", he claims to be
able to know what I "think". From that dubious inference he then
goes on to infer yet more bizarre notions.
What readers have to make the effort to appreciate is that first
and foremost I am pointing to a peculiarity of our use of
LANGUAGE, ie our linguistic behaviour.
The obliviousness to the problems of inference within intensional
contexts generates a whole spawn of psychological errors which we
tend to accept as socially acceptable convention in most
conversation - but only because folk psychology remains
essentially an unanalysed and unimportant aspect of our general
behaviour.
However, when it comes to issues as subtle as those outlined in
"Fragments of Behaviour: The Extensional Stance"
http://www.uni-hamburg.de/~kriminol/TS/tskr.htm
requires one to understand how such idioms "go beyond the
information given"......and a lot more besides.
Because most reading and contributing to this newsgroup do NOT
look closely at these issues, most of what I have been advocating
passes over most people's heads.
--
David Longley
Neil Rickert
>> > Neil Rickert <ric...@cs.niu.edu> wrote:
>"Longley's mistake is to think that 'rationality' is..."
>Now here we see an example of the very sort of behaviour which I
>have been urging others to look at more carefully - appreciating
>the logical and empirical problems associated with it.
>Note Rickert does not say "Longley writes that", he claims to be
>able to know what I "think". From that dubious inference he then
>goes on to infer yet more bizarre notions.
I regret that Mr Longley appears to be confused.
To say "Longley thinks that P" is not to say anything at all about
inner activities of Longley's mind. In ordinary use of language, to
say "Longley thinks that P" is simply to say that Longley holds the
opinion P.
Consider
(a) Longley thinks that P;
(b) Longley believes that P;
(c) Longley knows that P;
(d) Longley writes that P.
Of these, (a) is the weakest. It attributes an opinion to Longley,
but does not imply any significant degree of committment to that
opinion. Claim (b) is stronger, implying some committment. The
strongest is (c), which attributes certainty. However (c) does not
imply the truth of P.
Claim (d) is somewhat different from the others. It asserts that, if
challenged, I could produce or cite the text where Longley actually
wrote something regarding P. By itself, (d) need not imply opinion
or degree of conviction.
I should add that when I wrote "Longley's mistake is to think that
'rationality' is..." I did so in a public forum in which Longley
participates, so that Longley was quite capable of challenging my
attribution.
>What readers have to make the effort to appreciate is that first
>and foremost I am pointing to a peculiarity of our use of
>LANGUAGE, ie our linguistic behaviour.
Oh, yes. In a highly peculiar manner, I am using English rather than
the first order predicate calculus. Why that is considered unusual,
perhaps Longley would care to explain.
>The obliviousness to the problems of inference within intensional
>contexts generates a whole spawn of psychological errors which we
>tend to accept as socially acceptable convention in most
>conversation - but only because folk psychology remains
>essentially an unanalysed and unimportant aspect of our general
>behaviour.
I don't think there was any problematic inference, nor any serious
psychological errors. There was just the normal give and take of
ordinary language use, with the expectation that dialogue is a self
correcting practice. As suggested above, Longley was welcome to
disagree if he thought my statement was wrong.
Even now, Longley does not seem to have disagreed with what I
actually said. Rather, Longley appears to be disagreeing with the
way language is normally used. Perhaps he would wish to replace
natural language with some more formal substitute. He is welcome to
try. Their have been many attempts to construct languages to replace
natural language. These attempts have mainly failed, with the
possible exception of Esperanto. The failure of invented languages
at least suggests that the inventors of those alternatives do not
understand what natural language is, nor what is its biological
role.
Neil Rickert
In <855190...@longley.demon.co.uk> Da...@longley.demon.co.uk (David Longley) writes:
>> I regret that Mr Longley appears to be confused.
>Don't be so pompous - you are radically confused if you can't see
>that the whole thrust of whaty I challenged is the rational basis
>of the propositional attitudes and that your variants below
>(except for the last which is certainly not equivalent except in
>your unenlightened world-view) are just other variants!
How stupid of you!
Incidently, had you been capable of reading what I wrote, you would
have realized that I said that no two of the 4 variants were
equivalent. Your mental incapacity has apparently misled you into
the exact opposite reading of what I wrote.
>> To say "Longley thinks that P" is not to say anything at all about
>> inner activities of Longley's mind. In ordinary use of language, to
>> say "Longley thinks that P" is simply to say that Longley holds the
>> opinion P.
>But.....your "ordinary use" is folk psychological! !
This doesn't really matter. If one wishes to communicate, one uses
language in a way consistent with ordinary use. Those who uses
language otherwise, cannot reasonably expect to succeed at
communication, and might even be described by some as autistic.
Longley supposes that he can criticize "the rational basis of the
propositional attitudes", yet still manage to communicate his
criticism. That is stupid.
>> I should add that when I wrote "Longley's mistake is to think that
>> 'rationality' is..." I did so in a public forum in which Longley
>> participates, so that Longley was quite capable of challenging my
>> attribution.
>What I have been pointing out is that "psychological" language is
>where all of this goes awry. If you steer clear of such idioms,
>communication and science itself becomes possible.
If what I used counts as psychological language, then communication
must be impossible without using psychological language. If you want
to avoid dealing with psychological language, I suggest that you
simply give up ever saying or writing anything at all.
>I am not interested in challenging "attributions" when some real
>work can be undertaken. It is this constrant dabbling in the dark
>depths of intensionalism that is at the heart of the slow
>progress of behaviour science.
If you were not so thoroughly confused, you might realise that some
quite valuable discussions go on in this newsgroup. But since you
can see nothing but 'intensionalism' wherever you look, these
valuable discussions will forever be invisible to you.
>> >What readers have to make the effort to appreciate is that first
>> >and foremost I am pointing to a peculiarity of our use of
>> >LANGUAGE, ie our linguistic behaviour.
>> Oh, yes. In a highly peculiar manner, I am using English rather than
>> the first order predicate calculus. Why that is considered unusual,
>> perhaps Longley would care to explain.
>Because natural languages are riddled with folk psychologisms and
>is NOT truth functional.
So what? Why should we care about this? The fact is that natural
languages are highly effective tools for communication, while FOPC is
not. (I'll note that Longley has never posted any article in this
group which was written purely in FOPC. I haven't even seen any
evidence that he is capable of coping with FOPC himself.)
> '[Where] colloquial language is the object of our
> investigations. The results are entirely negative. With
> respect to this language not only does the definition
> of truth seem to be impossible, but even the consistent
> use of this concept in conformity with the laws of
> logic.
> In the further course of this discussion I shall
> consider exclusively the scientifically constructed
> languages known at the present day, ie. the formalized
> languages of the deductive sciences.'
> A. Tarski (1931)
> The Concept of Truth in Formalized Languages
Could Longley possibly be that confused? He quotes a statement where
Tarski admits that his (Tarski's) theory of truth is inadequate to
cope with natural language. But the context in which he quotes it
suggests that Longley is wrongly taking it as saying that natural
language is inadequate to cope with Truth.
>and....
> 'Much of what is called for is to mechanize as far as
> possible what we now do by art when we put ordinary English
> into one or another canonical notation. The point is not that
> canonical notation is better than the rough original idiom,
> but rather that if we know what idiom the canonical notation
> is for, we have as good a theory for the idiom as for its
> kept companion.'
> D. Davidson (1967)
> Truth and Meaning
The evidence of Longley's confusion deepens. Davidson is calling for
a research program into meaning. Longley seems to instead interpret
him as criticizing ordinary language.
> 'It is often argued in favor of the language of first-
> order logic that it is universal in a certain sense.
> Roughly speaking the claim is that anything sayable in
> any language is sayable in a standard first-order
> language. (A more radical view is that anything
> thinkable is expressible in a first-order language).'
> D J Israel and R J Brachman (1984)
> Some Remarks on the Semantics of Representation Languages
> in Eds Brodie et. al On Conceptual Modelling
It is amusing to note that Israel and Brachman wrote that foolish
statement in natural language, rather than in FOPC.
>That's why, when we undertake research in the sciences we abandon
>the lexicon of natural language and develop a set of predicates
>for the chosen area of science. This is as true of behaviour
>science as any other.
I haven't found much evidence that scientists abandon the lexicon of
natural language. Most of the science books I have read (more of
them in physics and mathematics than in other sciences) have
consisted primarily of natural language, with a sprinkling of
mathematical and other technical notation.
>> >The obliviousness to the problems of inference within intensional
>> >contexts generates a whole spawn of psychological errors which we
>> >tend to accept as socially acceptable convention in most
>> >conversation - but only because folk psychology remains
>> >essentially an unanalysed and unimportant aspect of our general
>> >behaviour.
>> I don't think there was any problematic inference, nor any serious
>> psychological errors. There was just the normal give and take of
>> ordinary language use, with the expectation that dialogue is a self
>> correcting practice. As suggested above, Longley was welcome to
>> disagree if he thought my statement was wrong.
>I know you don't - but then again, you seem to know next to
>nothing about psychology or behaviour science either!!
I'll simply point out that Longley has not clearly identified and
explained any serious psychological error. I think it reasonable to
conclude that he is engaging in empty rhetoric.
>> Even now, Longley does not seem to have disagreed with what I
>> actually said. Rather, Longley appears to be disagreeing with the
>> way language is normally used. Perhaps he would wish to replace
>> natural language with some more formal substitute. He is welcome to
>> try. Their have been many attempts to construct languages to replace
>> natural language. These attempts have mainly failed, with the
>> possible exception of Esperanto.
>This is nonsense, the language of science is logic, mathematics
>and predicates for the specific area of science (as explained in
>"Fragments":
That's a nice slogan. If you interpret "predicates for the specific
area of science" broadly enough to include the majority of what is
written as science, then it becomes a rather meaningless claim.
> 'We think of a science as comprising those truths which are
> expressible in terms of 'and', 'not', quantifiers, variables,
> and certain predicates appropriate to the science in
> question....To specify a science, within the described mold,
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> we still have to say what the predicates are to be, and what
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> the domain of objects is to be over which the variables of
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> quantification range.'
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> W.V.O. Quine (1954)
> The Scope and Language of Science
> The Ways of Paradox and other essays p.242
The part I underscored gives plenty of scope for the use of natural
language to do what formal languages by themselves cannot do.
>> The failure of invented languages
>> at least suggests that the inventors of those alternatives do not
>> understand what natural language is, nor what is its biological
>> role.
>Neil..... you CLEARLY don't understand what I have been saying.
>Stop guessing, take a break, read "Fragments" and then comment.
Actually, I suspect that you don't understand what you have been
saying, and how utterly absurd it is.
David Longley
> In <855169...@longley.demon.co.uk> Da...@longley.demon.co.uk (David Longley)
> writes:
>
> >> > Neil Rickert <ric...@cs.niu.edu> wrote:
>
> >"Longley's mistake is to think that 'rationality' is..."
>
> >Now here we see an example of the very sort of behaviour which I
> >have been urging others to look at more carefully - appreciating
> >the logical and empirical problems associated with it.
>
> >Note Rickert does not say "Longley writes that", he claims to be
> >able to know what I "think". From that dubious inference he then
> >goes on to infer yet more bizarre notions.
>
> I regret that Mr Longley appears to be confused.
Don't be so pompous - you are radically confused if you can't see
that the whole thrust of whaty I challenged is the rational basis
of the propositional attitudes and that your variants below
(except for the last which is certainly not equivalent except in
your unenlightened world-view) are just other variants!
>
> To say "Longley thinks that P" is not to say anything at all about
> inner activities of Longley's mind. In ordinary use of language, to
> say "Longley thinks that P" is simply to say that Longley holds the
> opinion P.
>
But.....your "ordinary use" is folk psychological! !
> Consider
> (a) Longley thinks that P;
> (b) Longley believes that P;
> (c) Longley knows that P;
> (d) Longley writes that P.
>
> Of these, (a) is the weakest. It attributes an opinion to Longley,
> but does not imply any significant degree of committment to that
> opinion. Claim (b) is stronger, implying some committment. The
> strongest is (c), which attributes certainty. However (c) does not
> imply the truth of P.
>
> Claim (d) is somewhat different from the others. It asserts that, if
> challenged, I could produce or cite the text where Longley actually
> wrote something regarding P. By itself, (d) need not imply opinion
> or degree of conviction.
>
> I should add that when I wrote "Longley's mistake is to think that
> 'rationality' is..." I did so in a public forum in which Longley
> participates, so that Longley was quite capable of challenging my
> attribution.
>
What I have been pointing out is that "psychological" language is
where all of this goes awry. If you steer clear of such idioms,
communication and science itself becomes possible.
I am not interested in challenging "attributions" when some real
work can be undertaken. It is this constrant dabbling in the dark
depths of intensionalism that is at the heart of the slow
progress of behaviour science.
> >What readers have to make the effort to appreciate is that first
> >and foremost I am pointing to a peculiarity of our use of
> >LANGUAGE, ie our linguistic behaviour.
>
> Oh, yes. In a highly peculiar manner, I am using English rather than
> the first order predicate calculus. Why that is considered unusual,
> perhaps Longley would care to explain.
Because natural languages are riddled with folk psychologisms and
is NOT truth functional.
'[Where] colloquial language is the object of our
investigations. The results are entirely negative. With
respect to this language not only does the definition
of truth seem to be impossible, but even the consistent
use of this concept in conformity with the laws of
logic.
In the further course of this discussion I shall
consider exclusively the scientifically constructed
languages known at the present day, ie. the formalized
languages of the deductive sciences.'
A. Tarski (1931)
The Concept of Truth in Formalized Languages
and....
'Much of what is called for is to mechanize as far as
possible what we now do by art when we put ordinary English
into one or another canonical notation. The point is not that
canonical notation is better than the rough original idiom,
but rather that if we know what idiom the canonical notation
is for, we have as good a theory for the idiom as for its
kept companion.'
D. Davidson (1967)
Truth and Meaning
'It is often argued in favor of the language of first-
order logic that it is universal in a certain sense.
Roughly speaking the claim is that anything sayable in
any language is sayable in a standard first-order
language. (A more radical view is that anything
thinkable is expressible in a first-order language).'
D J Israel and R J Brachman (1984)
Some Remarks on the Semantics of Representation Languages
in Eds Brodie et. al On Conceptual Modelling
That's why, when we undertake research in the sciences we abandon
the lexicon of natural language and develop a set of predicates
for the chosen area of science. This is as true of behaviour
science as any other.
I have explained this at length in "Fragments of Behaviour: The
Extensional Stance" which is readily available either from the
site I have listed
http://www.uni-hamburg.de/~kriminol/TS/tskr.htm
or directly from myself.
>
> >The obliviousness to the problems of inference within intensional
> >contexts generates a whole spawn of psychological errors which we
> >tend to accept as socially acceptable convention in most
> >conversation - but only because folk psychology remains
> >essentially an unanalysed and unimportant aspect of our general
> >behaviour.
>
> I don't think there was any problematic inference, nor any serious
> psychological errors. There was just the normal give and take of
> ordinary language use, with the expectation that dialogue is a self
> correcting practice. As suggested above, Longley was welcome to
> disagree if he thought my statement was wrong.
I know you don't - but then again, you seem to know next to
nothing about psychology or behaviour science either!!
>
> Even now, Longley does not seem to have disagreed with what I
> actually said. Rather, Longley appears to be disagreeing with the
> way language is normally used. Perhaps he would wish to replace
> natural language with some more formal substitute. He is welcome to
> try. Their have been many attempts to construct languages to replace
> natural language. These attempts have mainly failed, with the
> possible exception of Esperanto.
This is nonsense, the language of science is logic, mathematics
and predicates for the specific area of science (as explained in
"Fragments":
'We think of a science as comprising those truths which are
expressible in terms of 'and', 'not', quantifiers, variables,
and certain predicates appropriate to the science in
question....To specify a science, within the described mold,
we still have to say what the predicates are to be, and what
the domain of objects is to be over which the variables of
quantification range.'
W.V.O. Quine (1954)
The Scope and Language of Science
The Ways of Paradox and other essays p.242
'Ultimately the objects referred to in a theory are to be
accounted not as the things named by the singular terms, but
as the values of the variables of quantification.'
W.V.O. Quine (1953,1961)
Reference and Modality
From a Logical Point of View p.144-145
> The failure of invented languages
> at least suggests that the inventors of those alternatives do not
> understand what natural language is, nor what is its biological
> role.
>
Neil..... you CLEARLY don't understand what I have been saying.
Stop guessing, take a break, read "Fragments" and then comment.
Failing that, can someone else please explain to Neil what I have
said in "Fragments"? It certainly doesn't help when I tell him.
--
David Longley
David Longley
> In <855190...@longley.demon.co.uk> Da...@longley.demon.co.uk (David Longley)
> writes:
> >In article <5daus6$j...@ux.cs.niu.edu> ric...@cs.niu.edu "Neil Rickert" writes:>
> >> I regret that Mr Longley appears to be confused.
>
> >Don't be so pompous - you are radically confused if you can't see
> >that the whole thrust of whaty I challenged is the rational basis
> >of the propositional attitudes and that your variants below
> >(except for the last which is certainly not equivalent except in
> >your unenlightened world-view) are just other variants!
>
> How stupid of you!
>
> Incidently, had you been capable of reading what I wrote, you would
> have realized that I said that no two of the 4 variants were
> equivalent. Your mental incapacity has apparently misled you into
> the exact opposite reading of what I wrote.
>
It doesn't matter what you said (which in this sense is ALSO a
propositional attitude!). The three ARE variants. They are all
propositional attitudes.
> >> To say "Longley thinks that P" is not to say anything at all about
> >> inner activities of Longley's mind. In ordinary use of language, to
> >> say "Longley thinks that P" is simply to say that Longley holds the
> >> opinion P.
>
> >But.....your "ordinary use" is folk psychological! !
>
> This doesn't really matter. If one wishes to communicate, one uses
> language in a way consistent with ordinary use. Those who uses
> language otherwise, cannot reasonably expect to succeed at
> communication, and might even be described by some as autistic.
It *does* matter to the points being made. You have not graped
what the problem with the propositional attitudes is. This is
noty uncommon. Ordinary use of the idioms of propositional
attitude is PRECISELY what the problem is that I am talking
about!
>
> Longley supposes that he can criticize "the rational basis of the
> propositional attitudes", yet still manage to communicate his
> criticism. That is stupid.
Not at all, I have illustrated the preoblems a number of times.
You either forget or just have not understood. Again, I suggest
you read "Fragments" or Chapter 6 of Quine's "Word and Object" or
"Quantifiers and Propositional Attitudes" by Quine in "The Ways
of Paradox and Other Essays". You will then not only see THAT
there is a problem with these idioms, but why INFERENCE breaks
down (is invalid) in such contexts.
Roughly what the counterpart thesis means is that
important features of extensional, scientific language
on which inference depends are not present in
intensional sentences. In fact intensional words and
sentences are precisely those expressions in which
certain key forms of logical inference break down.'
R. J. Nelson (1992)
Naming and Reference p.39-42
and explicitly by Place (1987):
'The first-order predicate calculus is an extensional
logic in which Leibniz's Law is taken as an axiomatic
principle. Such a logic cannot admit 'intensional' or
'referentially opaque' predicates whose defining
characteristic is that they flout that principle.'
U. T. Place (1987)
Skinner Re-Skinned P. 244
In B.F. Skinner Consensus and Controversy
Eds. S. Modgil & C. Modgil
Dretske (1980) put the issue as follows:
'If I know that the train is moving and you know that
its wheels are turning, it does not follow that I know
what you know just because the train never moves without
its wheels turning. More generally, if all (and only) Fs
are G, one can nonetheless know that something is F
without knowing that it is G. Extensionally equivalent
expressions, when applied to the same object, do not
(necessarily) express the same cognitive content.
Furthermore, if Tom is my uncle, one can not infer (with
a possible exception to be mentioned later) that if S
knows that Tom is getting married, he thereby knows that
my uncle is getting married. The content of a cognitive
state, and hence the cognitive state itself, depends
(for its identity) on something beyond the extension or
reference of the terms we use to express the content. I
shall say, therefore, that a description of a cognitive
state, is non-extensional.'
F. I. Dretske (1980)
The Intentionality of Cognitive States
Midwest Studies in Philosophy 5,281-294
For the discipline of psychology, the above logical analyses can be
taken either as a vindication of 20th century behaviourism/physicalism
(Quine 1960,1990,1992) or as a knockout blow to 20th century
'Cognitivism' and psychologism (methodological solipsism).
'One may accept the Brentano thesis as showing the
indispensability of intentional idioms and the
importance of an autonomous science of intention, or as
showing the baselessness of intentional idioms and the
emptiness of a science of intention. My attitude, unlike
Brentano's, is the second. To accept intentional usage
at face value is, we saw, to postulate translation
relations as somehow objectively valid though
indeterminate in principle relative to the totality of
speech dispositions. Such postulation promises little
gain in scientific insight if there is no better ground
for it than that the supposed translation relations are
presupposed by the vernacular of semantics and
intention.'
W. V. O. Quine
The Double Standard
Flight from Intension
Word and Object (1960), p218-221
>
> >> I should add that when I wrote "Longley's mistake is to think that
> >> 'rationality' is..." I did so in a public forum in which Longley
> >> participates, so that Longley was quite capable of challenging my
> >> attribution.
>
> >What I have been pointing out is that "psychological" language is
> >where all of this goes awry. If you steer clear of such idioms,
> >communication and science itself becomes possible.
>
> If what I used counts as psychological language, then communication
> must be impossible without using psychological language. If you want
> to avoid dealing with psychological language, I suggest that you
> simply give up ever saying or writing anything at all.
>
This is like saying that if one wants to avoid the problems of
alchemy one should give up chemistry. The idioms of propositional
attitude represent a lexicon within natural language which
amounts to a bad theory. If one hopes to make any progress in the
science of behaviour at all, one must learn to eschew such
idioms.
That's why I wrote "Fragments of Behaviour: The Extensional
Stance": http://www.uni-hamburg.de/~kriminol/TS/tskr.htm
> >I am not interested in challenging "attributions" when some real
> >work can be undertaken. It is this constrant dabbling in the dark
> >depths of intensionalism that is at the heart of the slow
> >progress of behaviour science.
>
> If you were not so thoroughly confused, you might realise that some
> quite valuable discussions go on in this newsgroup. But since you
> can see nothing but 'intensionalism' wherever you look, these
> valuable discussions will forever be invisible to you.
It does not surprise me that what you "value" differs from what I
value. For you to go beyond that and draw an absolute conclusion
is really just characteristically Rickertian - and that's all.
>
> >> >What readers have to make the effort to appreciate is that first
> >> >and foremost I am pointing to a peculiarity of our use of
> >> >LANGUAGE, ie our linguistic behaviour.
>
> >> Oh, yes. In a highly peculiar manner, I am using English rather than
> >> the first order predicate calculus. Why that is considered unusual,
> >> perhaps Longley would care to explain.
>
> >Because natural languages are riddled with folk psychologisms and
> >is NOT truth functional.
>
> So what? Why should we care about this? The fact is that natural
> languages are highly effective tools for communication, while FOPC is
> not. (I'll note that Longley has never posted any article in this
> group which was written purely in FOPC. I haven't even seen any
> evidence that he is capable of coping with FOPC himself.)
>
The reason why you SHOULD care about that is because in such
contexts reasoning becomes unreliable, and under such
circumstances, communication fails.
> > '[Where] colloquial language is the object of our
> > investigations. The results are entirely negative. With
> > respect to this language not only does the definition
> > of truth seem to be impossible, but even the consistent
> > use of this concept in conformity with the laws of
> > logic.
>
> > In the further course of this discussion I shall
> > consider exclusively the scientifically constructed
> > languages known at the present day, ie. the formalized
> > languages of the deductive sciences.'
>
> > A. Tarski (1931)
> > The Concept of Truth in Formalized Languages
>
> Could Longley possibly be that confused? He quotes a statement where
> Tarski admits that his (Tarski's) theory of truth is inadequate to
> cope with natural language. But the context in which he quotes it
> suggests that Longley is wrongly taking it as saying that natural
> language is inadequate to cope with Truth.
Tarksi doesn't just "admit" something here - he's drawing
attention to a propblem with natural language. That's why we
program in the languages we have, and in my view, why natural
language processing research is making little progress.
>
> >and....
>
> > 'Much of what is called for is to mechanize as far as
> > possible what we now do by art when we put ordinary English
> > into one or another canonical notation. The point is not that
> > canonical notation is better than the rough original idiom,
> > but rather that if we know what idiom the canonical notation
> > is for, we have as good a theory for the idiom as for its
> > kept companion.'
>
> > D. Davidson (1967)
> > Truth and Meaning
>
> The evidence of Longley's confusion deepens. Davidson is calling for
> a research program into meaning. Longley seems to instead interpret
> him as criticizing ordinary language.
>
Ordinmary language has its uses - and is evolving like everything
else. It absorbs bits of science as time goes by, but it is not
the language of science for very good reasons outlined above and
elsewhere.
> > 'It is often argued in favor of the language of first-
> > order logic that it is universal in a certain sense.
> > Roughly speaking the claim is that anything sayable in
> > any language is sayable in a standard first-order
> > language. (A more radical view is that anything
> > thinkable is expressible in a first-order language).'
>
> > D J Israel and R J Brachman (1984)
> > Some Remarks on the Semantics of Representation Languages
> > in Eds Brodie et. al On Conceptual Modelling
>
> It is amusing to note that Israel and Brachman wrote that foolish
> statement in natural language, rather than in FOPC.
But one needs to know what the other language is (and know what
the problems with Natural Language are) to be able to do
anything useful with that statement.
This century has been revolutionised by the development of
universal computing languages which in teunr have been developed
on the basis of progress in logic (mainly through Frege, Russell,
Post etc).
>
> >That's why, when we undertake research in the sciences we abandon
> >the lexicon of natural language and develop a set of predicates
> >for the chosen area of science. This is as true of behaviour
> >science as any other.
>
> I haven't found much evidence that scientists abandon the lexicon of
> natural language. Most of the science books I have read (more of
> them in physics and mathematics than in other sciences) have
> consisted primarily of natural language, with a sprinkling of
> mathematical and other technical notation.
Then we have read very different science "books". Perhaps you
ought to have a look at the journals (which is where sciencve is
done).
>
> >> >The obliviousness to the problems of inference within intensional
> >> >contexts generates a whole spawn of psychological errors which we
> >> >tend to accept as socially acceptable convention in most
> >> >conversation - but only because folk psychology remains
> >> >essentially an unanalysed and unimportant aspect of our general
> >> >behaviour.
>
> >> I don't think there was any problematic inference, nor any serious
> >> psychological errors. There was just the normal give and take of
> >> ordinary language use, with the expectation that dialogue is a self
> >> correcting practice. As suggested above, Longley was welcome to
> >> disagree if he thought my statement was wrong.
>
> >I know you don't - but then again, you seem to know next to
> >nothing about psychology or behaviour science either!!
>
> I'll simply point out that Longley has not clearly identified and
> explained any serious psychological error. I think it reasonable to
> conclude that he is engaging in empty rhetoric.
'In general the underlying methodology of the idioms of
propositional attitude contrasts strikingly with the
spirit of objective science at its most representative.
For consider again quotation, direct and indirect. When
we quote a man's utterance directly we report it almost
as we might a bird call. However significant the
utterance, direct quotation merely reports the physical
incident and leaves any implications to us. On the other
hand in indirect quotation we project ourselves into
what, from his remarks and other indications, we imagine
the speaker's state of mind to have been, and then we
say what, in our language, is natural and relevant for
us in the state thus feigned. An indirect quotation we
can usually expect to rate only as better or worse, more
or less faithful, and we cannot even hope for a strict
standard of more and less; what is involve d is
evaluation, relative to special purposes, of an
essentially dramatic act. Correspondingly for the other
propositional attitudes, for all of them can be thought
of as involving something like quotation of one's own
imagined verbal response to an imagined situation.
Casting our real selves thus in unreal roles, we do not
generally know how much reality to hold constant.
Quandaries arise. But despite them we find ourselves
attributing beliefs, wishes and strivings even to
creatures lacking the power of speech, such is our
dramatic virtuosity. We project ourselves even into what
from his behavior we imagine a mouse's state to have
been, and dramatize it as a belief, wish, or striving,
verbalised as seems relevant and natural to us in the
state thus feigned.
In the strictest scientific spirit we can report all the
behavior, verbal and otherwise, that may underlie our
imputations of propositional attitudes, and we may go on
to speculate as we please upon the causes and effects of
his behavior; but, so long as we do not switch muses,
the essentially dramatic idiom of propositional
attitudes will find no place.
The Scholastic word 'intentional' was revived by
Brentano in connection with the verbs of propositional
attitude and related verbs of the sort studies in
(section 32) - 'hunt', 'want', etc. The division between
such idioms and the normally tractable ones is notable.
We saw how it divides referential from non-referential
occurrences of terms. Moreover it is intimately related
to the division between behaviorism and mentalism,
between efficient cause and final cause, and between
literal theory and dramatic portrayal.
The analysis in (section 32) was such as to spare us any
temptation to posit peculiar "intentional objects" of
huntings, wanting, and the like. But there remains a
thesis of Brentano's illuminatingly developed of late by
Chisholm, that is directly relevant to our emerging
doubts over the propositional attitudes and other
intentional locutions. It is roughly that there is no
breaking out of the intentional vocabulary by explaining
its members in other terms. Our present reflections are
favorable to this thesis. Even indirect quotation, for
all its tameness in comparison with other idioms of
propositional attitude, and for all its concern with
overt speech behavior, seems insusceptable to general
reduction to behavioral terms; the best we can do with
it is switch to direct quotation, and this adds
information. And when we turn to belief sentences the
difficulty is doubled. For, first there is trouble, e.g.
over dumbness or mendacity, in explaining belief as
disposition to assent to sentences at all; and second
there remains, much as in the case of indirect
quotation, the question what deviations to allow between
the sentences actually assented to and the second-hand
reports......
....
One may accept the Brentano thesis as showing the
indispensability of intentional idioms and the
importance of an autonomous science of intention, or as
showing the baselessness of of intentional idioms
and the emptiness of a science of intention. My
attitude, unlike Brentano's, is the second. To accept
intentional usage at face value is, we saw, to postulate
translation relations as somehow objectively valid
though indeterminate in principle relative to the
totality of speech dispositions. Such postulation
promises little gain in scientific insight if there is
no better ground for it than that the supposed
translation relations are presupposed by the vernacular
of semantics and intention.'
W.V.O Quine
The Double Standard
Flight from Intension
Word and Object (1960), p218-221
>
> >> Even now, Longley does not seem to have disagreed with what I
> >> actually said. Rather, Longley appears to be disagreeing with the
> >> way language is normally used. Perhaps he would wish to replace
> >> natural language with some more formal substitute. He is welcome to
> >> try. Their have been many attempts to construct languages to replace
> >> natural language. These attempts have mainly failed, with the
> >> possible exception of Esperanto.
>
> >This is nonsense, the language of science is logic, mathematics
> >and predicates for the specific area of science (as explained in
> >"Fragments":
>
> That's a nice slogan. If you interpret "predicates for the specific
> area of science" broadly enough to include the majority of what is
> written as science, then it becomes a rather meaningless claim.
If you want to "interpret" so widely you can indeed reduce
whatever anyone writes to nonsense - there's a good example of
that being discussed elswhere in this newsgroup... But what's the
point?
>
> > 'We think of a science as comprising those truths which are
> > expressible in terms of 'and', 'not', quantifiers, variables,
> > and certain predicates appropriate to the science in
> > question....To specify a science, within the described mold,
> ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> > we still have to say what the predicates are to be, and what
> ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> > the domain of objects is to be over which the variables of
> ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> > quantification range.'
> ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
>
> > W.V.O. Quine (1954)
> > The Scope and Language of Science
> > The Ways of Paradox and other essays p.242
>
> The part I underscored gives plenty of scope for the use of natural
> language to do what formal languages by themselves cannot do.
>
No - the predicates above have VALUES. Think of a Relational
Database or an equation.
> >> The failure of invented languages
> >> at least suggests that the inventors of those alternatives do not
> >> understand what natural language is, nor what is its biological
> >> role.
>
> >Neil..... you CLEARLY don't understand what I have been saying.
> >Stop guessing, take a break, read "Fragments" and then comment.
>
> Actually, I suspect that you don't understand what you have been
> saying, and how utterly absurd it is.
>
Database technology is now widely used in all areas of research
and business. The key word is reliability of measurement. I have
provided dozens of references to the literature which reviews the
problems of ordinary language, such as the use of terms like
often, many, a lot, few (just think of the variance, or better
still, use one of your classes to put numbers onto such words to
see the range of estimates each can accommodate)
You seem to be arguing for the sake of it.
--
David Longley
Neil Rickert
In <855218...@longley.demon.co.uk> Da...@longley.demon.co.uk (David Longley) writes:
>In article <5dbklm$j...@ux.cs.niu.edu> ric...@cs.niu.edu "Neil Rickert" writes:
>> Incidently, had you been capable of reading what I wrote, you would
>> have realized that I said that no two of the 4 variants were
>> equivalent. Your mental incapacity has apparently misled you into
>> the exact opposite reading of what I wrote.
>It doesn't matter what you said (which in this sense is ALSO a
>propositional attitude!). The three ARE variants. They are all
>propositional attitudes.
Of course it doesn't matter what I said. For, no matter what I say,
Longley is going to ascribe to me all sorts of bad practices,
regardless of whether those acriptions actually apply.
>> >But.....your "ordinary use" is folk psychological! !
>> This doesn't really matter. If one wishes to communicate, one uses
>> language in a way consistent with ordinary use. Those who uses
>> language otherwise, cannot reasonably expect to succeed at
>> communication, and might even be described by some as autistic.
>It *does* matter to the points being made. You have not graped
>what the problem with the propositional attitudes is.
I have graped the problem very well, but all you provide is sour
grapes.
I thought you had agreed with Quine, when he says that there are no
such things as propositions. And if there are no propositions, then
it is difficult to see how their could be propositional attitudes.
All of this talk about "propositional attitudes" is part of an absurd
philosophy. I suggest you give up that kind of talk.
> Ordinary use of the idioms of propositional
>attitude is PRECISELY what the problem is that I am talking
>about!
There is no ordinary use of propositional attitudes. There is
ordinary use of ordinary language. Some people, who are committed to
silly ideas, claim that this involves propositional attitudes. But
there is no need to pay much attention to such silliness.
>> Longley supposes that he can criticize "the rational basis of the
>> propositional attitudes", yet still manage to communicate his
>> criticism. That is stupid.
>Not at all, I have illustrated the preoblems a number of times.
>You either forget or just have not understood. Again, I suggest
>you read "Fragments" or Chapter 6 of Quine's "Word and Object" or
>"Quantifiers and Propositional Attitudes" by Quine in "The Ways
>of Paradox and Other Essays". You will then not only see THAT
>there is a problem with these idioms, but why INFERENCE breaks
>down (is invalid) in such contexts.
I'll remind you that "Word and Object" is not a mathematical text
written in First Order Predicate Calculus. It is philosophical text
written in natural language. If you don't trust arguments written in
natural language, then you ought to be skeptical of Quine's
arguments.
> Roughly what the counterpart thesis means is that
> important features of extensional, scientific language
> on which inference depends are not present in
> intensional sentences. In fact intensional words and
> sentences are precisely those expressions in which
> certain key forms of logical inference break down.'
> R. J. Nelson (1992)
> Naming and Reference p.39-42
So what? Why should we care? One simply does not use natural
language for logical inference. I realize that there are some very
confused people, possibly including Longley, who think that we do use
natural language for logical inference. But that is their confusion,
not mine. Natural language is primarily for communication, not for
inference. As part of communication one can describe an inference.
But it is silly to suppose that the inference actually is carried out
in natural language.
>> If what I used counts as psychological language, then communication
>> must be impossible without using psychological language. If you want
>> to avoid dealing with psychological language, I suggest that you
>> simply give up ever saying or writing anything at all.
>This is like saying that if one wants to avoid the problems of
>alchemy one should give up chemistry. The idioms of propositional
>attitude represent a lexicon within natural language which
>amounts to a bad theory.
No, that is wrong. You might be confused enough to think that these
idioms constitute a bad theory. But you should not ascribe that
confusion to me. I don't claim that they constitute any theory at
all, good or bad. They just happen to be part of the language which
one uses for effective communication.
> If one hopes to make any progress in the
>science of behaviour at all, one must learn to eschew such
>idioms.
If you want to make any progress at all in the science of behavior,
you will have to learn to not confuse ordinary language with a
scientific theory.
David Longley
> In <855218...@longley.demon.co.uk> Da...@longley.demon.co.uk (David Longley)
> writes:
> >In article <5dbklm$j...@ux.cs.niu.edu> ric...@cs.niu.edu "Neil Rickert" writes:>
> >> Incidently, had you been capable of reading what I wrote, you would
> >> have realized that I said that no two of the 4 variants were
> >> equivalent. Your mental incapacity has apparently misled you into
> >> the exact opposite reading of what I wrote.
>
> >It doesn't matter what you said (which in this sense is ALSO a
> >propositional attitude!). The three ARE variants. They are all
> >propositional attitudes.
>
> Of course it doesn't matter what I said. For, no matter what I say,
> Longley is going to ascribe to me all sorts of bad practices,
> regardless of whether those acriptions actually apply.
No, if you wrote '"think that", "believe that", "know that" are
propositional attitudes', I would not ascribe anything other than
the fact that you were correct.
>
> >> >But.....your "ordinary use" is folk psychological! !
>
> >> This doesn't really matter. If one wishes to communicate, one uses
> >> language in a way consistent with ordinary use. Those who uses
> >> language otherwise, cannot reasonably expect to succeed at
> >> communication, and might even be described by some as autistic.
>
> >It *does* matter to the points being made. You have not graped
> >what the problem with the propositional attitudes is.
>
> I have graped the problem very well, but all you provide is sour
> grapes.
????
>
> I thought you had agreed with Quine, when he says that there are no
> such things as propositions. And if there are no propositions, then
> it is difficult to see how their could be propositional attitudes.
> All of this talk about "propositional attitudes" is part of an absurd
> philosophy. I suggest you give up that kind of talk.
>
You are abusing language here. The problems with propositions and
the like stems from problems of quantification. Unless one can
give something a value for a variable, it is doubtful whether it
makes any sense to give it ontological status.
> > Ordinary use of the idioms of propositional
> >attitude is PRECISELY what the problem is that I am talking
> >about!
>
> There is no ordinary use of propositional attitudes. There is
> ordinary use of ordinary language. Some people, who are committed to
> silly ideas, claim that this involves propositional attitudes. But
> there is no need to pay much attention to such silliness.
Then don't...!
>
> >> Longley supposes that he can criticize "the rational basis of the
> >> propositional attitudes", yet still manage to communicate his
> >> criticism. That is stupid.
>
> >Not at all, I have illustrated the preoblems a number of times.
> >You either forget or just have not understood. Again, I suggest
> >you read "Fragments" or Chapter 6 of Quine's "Word and Object" or
> >"Quantifiers and Propositional Attitudes" by Quine in "The Ways
> >of Paradox and Other Essays". You will then not only see THAT
> >there is a problem with these idioms, but why INFERENCE breaks
> >down (is invalid) in such contexts.
>
> I'll remind you that "Word and Object" is not a mathematical text
> written in First Order Predicate Calculus. It is philosophical text
> written in natural language. If you don't trust arguments written in
> natural language, then you ought to be skeptical of Quine's
> arguments.
The same points have been made WITHIN the FOPC. I say so in the
above paragraph.
>
> > Roughly what the counterpart thesis means is that
> > important features of extensional, scientific language
> > on which inference depends are not present in
> > intensional sentences. In fact intensional words and
> > sentences are precisely those expressions in which
> > certain key forms of logical inference break down.'
>
> > R. J. Nelson (1992)
> > Naming and Reference p.39-42
>
> So what? Why should we care? One simply does not use natural
> language for logical inference. I realize that there are some very
> confused people, possibly including Longley, who think that we do use
> natural language for logical inference. But that is their confusion,
> not mine. Natural language is primarily for communication, not for
> inference. As part of communication one can describe an inference.
> But it is silly to suppose that the inference actually is carried out
> in natural language.
The above is just implicit Rickertian folk ideology.
--
David Longley
Neil Rickert
In <855248...@longley.demon.co.uk> Da...@longley.demon.co.uk (David Longley) writes:
>In article <5dcvj0$b...@ux.cs.niu.edu> ric...@cs.niu.edu "Neil Rickert" writes:
>> In <855218...@longley.demon.co.uk> Da...@longley.demon.co.uk (David Longley)
>> writes:
>> >It doesn't matter what you said (which in this sense is ALSO a
>> >propositional attitude!). The three ARE variants. They are all
>> >propositional attitudes.
>> Of course it doesn't matter what I said. For, no matter what I say,
>> Longley is going to ascribe to me all sorts of bad practices,
>> regardless of whether those acriptions actually apply.
>No, if you wrote '"think that", "believe that", "know that" are
>propositional attitudes', I would not ascribe anything other than
>the fact that you were correct.
However, when I used 'thinks that', I was simply using a common idiom
of ordinary language, for the purposes of communicating with ordinary
readers of this newsgroup. I was not using any propositional
attitudes, and as far as I am concerned, there are no such things as
propositional attitudes, except as theoretical entities in some
theories of mind. When ordinary people use these idioms, they are
not using them as part of any theory, so they are not using them as
propositional attitudes.
>> I thought you had agreed with Quine, when he says that there are no
>> such things as propositions. And if there are no propositions, then
>> it is difficult to see how their could be propositional attitudes.
>> All of this talk about "propositional attitudes" is part of an absurd
>> philosophy. I suggest you give up that kind of talk.
>You are abusing language here. The problems with propositions and
>the like stems from problems of quantification. Unless one can
>give something a value for a variable, it is doubtful whether it
>makes any sense to give it ontological status.
Longley seems to be saying:
It makes no sense to give an ontological status to
'proposition' because of problems of quantification.
Nevertheless there are propositions, but they have no
ontological status.
But makes no sense. If propositions have no ontological status, then
there are no propositions and there are no propositional attitudes.
David Longley
In article <5dd68o$d...@ux.cs.niu.edu> ric...@cs.niu.edu "Neil Rickert" writes:
> In <855248...@longley.demon.co.uk> Da...@longley.demon.co.uk (David Longley)
> writes:
> >In article <5dcvj0$b...@ux.cs.niu.edu> ric...@cs.niu.edu "Neil Rickert" writes:> >> In <855218...@longley.demon.co.uk> Da...@longley.demon.co.uk (David
> Longley)
> >> writes:
>
> >> >It doesn't matter what you said (which in this sense is ALSO a
> >> >propositional attitude!). The three ARE variants. They are all
> >> >propositional attitudes.
>
> >> Of course it doesn't matter what I said. For, no matter what I say,
> >> Longley is going to ascribe to me all sorts of bad practices,
> >> regardless of whether those acriptions actually apply.
>
> >No, if you wrote '"think that", "believe that", "know that" are
> >propositional attitudes', I would not ascribe anything other than
> >the fact that you were correct.
>
> However, when I used 'thinks that', I was simply using a common idiom
> of ordinary language, for the purposes of communicating with ordinary
> readers of this newsgroup. I was not using any propositional
> attitudes, and as far as I am concerned, there are no such things as
> propositional attitudes, except as theoretical entities in some
> theories of mind. When ordinary people use these idioms, they are
> not using them as part of any theory, so they are not using them as
> propositional attitudes.
1. That it is a common idiom of ordinary language is not in
dispute. It is an intensional idiom in that it resists
substitutivity of identicals salva veritate and does not allow
reliable existential quantification. That means that inference,
(which is basically conjunction of statements) can not be relied
upon in such contexts.
2. Regardless of whther one realises one is using such idioms, or
whether one accepts the facts presented or not, ANY framework
used for making sense of information is a theory. It's just a
matter of whether one tacitly absorbs a system of behaviour which
one is borne into, or one which one learns about some other way.
3. Your remarks are akin to the behaviour one often finds when
one talks of behaviour or attitudes and meets with the response
that the challenged individual isn't behaving any way, or doesn't
have an attitude.
>
> >> I thought you had agreed with Quine, when he says that there are no
> >> such things as propositions. And if there are no propositions, then
> >> it is difficult to see how their could be propositional attitudes.
> >> All of this talk about "propositional attitudes" is part of an absurd
> >> philosophy. I suggest you give up that kind of talk.
>
> >You are abusing language here. The problems with propositions and
> >the like stems from problems of quantification. Unless one can
> >give something a value for a variable, it is doubtful whether it
> >makes any sense to give it ontological status.
>
> Longley seems to be saying:
>
> It makes no sense to give an ontological status to
> 'proposition' because of problems of quantification.
> Nevertheless there are propositions, but they have no
> ontological status.
>
> But makes no sense. If propositions have no ontological status, then
> there are no propositions and there are no propositional attitudes.
>
What I am saying is that there is a problem giving anything the
status of existence unless one can give it the value of a
variable. In contexts where this is not possible, one literally
doesn't know what one is talking about, (nor can anyone else). As
a consequence, rational analysis and prediction (and predication)
is impossible.
--
David Longley
David Longley
See: "Fragments of Behaviour: The Extensional Stance"
http://www.uni-hamburg.de/~kriminol/TS/tskr.htm
'A cognitive theory with no rationality restrictions is
without predictive content; using it, we can have
virtually no expectations regarding a believer's
behavior. There is also a further metaphysical, as
opposed to epistemological, point concerning rationality
as part of what it is to be a PERSON: the elements of a
mind - and, in particular, a cognitive system - must FIT
TOGETHER or cohere.......no rationality, no agent.'
C. Cherniak (1986)
Minimal Rationality p.6
See end of messsage - "Rattus Poppericus"..
'The trouble is, according to Brentano's thesis, no such
theory is forthcoming on strictly naturalistic, physical
grounds. If you want semantics, you need a full-blown,
irreducible psychology of intensions.
There is a counterpart in modern logic of the thesis of
irreducibility. The language of physical and biological
science is largely *extensional*. It can be formulated
(approximately) in the familiar predicate calculus. The
language of psychology, however, is *intensional*. For
the moment it is good enough to think of an
*intensional* sentence as one containing words for
*intensional* attitudes such as belief.
Roughly what the counterpart thesis means is that
important features of extensional, scientific language
on which inference depends are not present in
intensional sentences. In fact intensional words and
sentences are precisely those expressions in which
certain key forms of logical inference break down.'
R. J. Nelson (1992)
Naming and Reference p.39-42
and explicitly by Place (1987):
'The first-order predicate calculus is an extensional
logic in which Leibniz's Law is taken as an axiomatic
principle. Such a logic cannot admit 'intensional' or
'referentially opaque' predicates whose defining
characteristic is that they flout that principle.'
U. T. Place (1987)
Skinner Re-Skinned P. 244
In B.F. Skinner Consensus and Controversy
Eds. S. Modgil & C. Modgil
Now maybe I'm just getting too long in the tooth as a
psychologist, but I see the failure of valid inference within
psychological contexts as very illuminating. It leads to
fabrication rather than inference, and this is what I take to be
so characteristic of "natural assessments" as Tversky and
Kahneman called intuitive judgement.
As I see it, empirical psychology is the study of behaviour, and
one form of that is the linguistic behaviour we call "cognitive
behaviour". But within that, there are normative errors, stemming
in fact from the fact that the propositional attitudes amount to
a THEORY (and an incoherent one at that).
The implications are quite dramatic if I am right. It bothers me
a little that philosophers know about the problems of the
intensional idioms but don't perhaps know of all of the empirical
work in psychology since the mid 50s, and that psychologists seem
to be in the main only vaguely aware (if aware at all) of the
analyses of those working in the Quinean tradition.
I think it's significant that two panel members (Paul Horowich
and Martin Davis) particpating in the "In Conversation" W.V.O
Quine interviews in 1994 (edited by R Fara of LSE) pressed Quine
on the same point that's pre-occupying me so much these days -
and it's pre-occupying me because of practical issues stemming
from the sorry state which applied psychology finds itself in
today. Surely it's just a convenience that we can do without
modal logic, the other intensional idioms (largely the
language of psychology) logically must go the same way if we
are to behave rationally as scientists (or professional
psychologists).
That Quine or anyone else is prepared to tolerate the
propositional attitudes does not mean that inference within such
contexts can be accepted as legitimate, or that reasoned analysis
is possible within such contexts. Cataloguing how animals make
sense of the world according to principles of conditioning,
modelled perhaps by Artificial Neural Nets, or just couched in
the language of Attribution Theory (Tversky & Kahneman 1973;1982;
Nisbett & Ross 1980) is a quite different venture from applying
principles of normative analysis to behavioural observations -
which amounts I think, to saying that Artificial Intelligence or
rationality is a normative technology which is co-extensive with
science and technology as we currently have and teach it. But for
science, or applied science, the propositional attitudes can not
be used reliably, they don't, in Elgin's words, comprise a a
reliable system of social practice:
'Linguistic competence is not the ability to articulate
antecedently determinate ideas, intensions, or meanings; nor
is it the ability to reproduce the world in words. We have no
such abilities. It consists, rather, in mastery of a complex
social practice, an acquired capacity to conform to the mores
of a linguistic community. It is neither more nor less than
good linguistic behavior.'
Catherine Z. Elgin (1990)
Facts That Don't Matter
Meaning and method - Essays in Honor of Hilary Putnam
I think it renders human empirical psychology "cultural
anthropology" and animal psychology ethology. These disciplines
are NOT normative.
The following helps:
'A basic principle of probability is the conjunction rule,
p(B) >= p(A&B). People violate this rule often, particularly
when judgements of probability are based on intensional
heuristics such as representativeness and availability.
Through other probabilistic rules are obeyed with increasing
frequency as people's levels of mathematical talent and
training increase, the conjunction rule generally does not
show such a correlation. We argue that this recalcitrance is
not due to inescapable "natural assessments"; rather, it
stems from the absence of generally useful problem-solving
designs that bring extensional principles to bear on this
class of problem. We predict that when helpful extensional
strategies are made available, they should compete well with
intensional heuristics. Two experiments were conducted, using
as subjects adult women with little mathematical background.
In Experiment I, brief training on concepts of algebra of
sets, with examples of their use in solving problems, reduced
conjunction-rule violations substantially, compared to a
control group. Evidence from similarity judgements suggested
that use of the representativeness heuristic was reduced by
the training....
...We conclude that such intensional heuristics can be
suppressed when alternative strategies are taught.
The development of formal thought does not culminate in
adolescence as Piaget (1928) held; rather, it depends on
education (Fong, Krantz, & Nisbett, 1986, Nisbett, Fong,
Lehmann & Cheng 1987) and may continue throughout adulthood.
Probabilistic reasoning has been an especially useful domain
in which to study the impact of training in adulthood on
formal thought. Probabilistic principles are cultural
inventions at most a few centuries old (Hacking 1975).....
Tversky and Kahneman (1983) focused on processes in which
people substitute intensional for extensional thinking. In
the latter mode, concepts are represented mentally in the
same way as sets, hence, rules of logic and probability are
followed in the main. By contrast, intensional thinking
represents concepts by prototypes, exemplars, or relations to
other concepts (Rosch, 1978, Smith & Medlin 1981). Processing
is affected strongly by imaginability of prototypes,
availability of exemplars, etc., and its results are not
constrained as strongly by logical relations. A prime example
is the representativeness heuristic (Kahneman & Tversky
1972), in which probability of a outcome is judged in terms
of the similarity of that outcome to a prototype.
Tversky and Kahneman (1983) drew far reaching conclusions
from the fact that, in most of their tests, the prevalence of
conjunction errors was not affected by statistical education.
They developed the concept of "natural assessment", a
computation that is 'routinely carried out as part of the
perception of events and the comprehension of messages......
even in the absence of a specific task set.' They defined a
"judgmental heuristic" as a 'strategy that relies on a
natural assessment to produce an estimation or a prediction.'
They compared such mechanisms to perceptual computations, and
cognitive errors to perceptual illusions. In their view,
people well trained in mathematics nonetheless perform
natural assessments automatically. The results of these
mental computations strongly influence probability judgement.
Therefore, statistics courses presumably affect probability
judgements, in problems such as "Linda," no more than
geometry courses affect geometric visual illusions, i.e.,
scarcely at all.
Agnoli & Krantz (1989)
Suppressing Natural Heuristics by Formal Instruction:
The Case of the Conjunction Fallacy [my emphasis]
Cognitive Psychology 21, 515-550 (1989)
RATTUS POPPERICUS?
I'd like to suggest a way of reconceiving this which shows why
*intensional* (folk-psychological/cognitive) talk tends to
mislead us, and why behaviour analysis can be so powerful. This
theme is developed elsewhere in 'Fragments of Behaviour..',
and is the basis of a behaviour modification and assessment
system called Sentence Management in the field of 'Corrections'.
When one begins Operant Conditioning work with rats, one has
to get the animals to notice where the food pellets they are
going to bar press for are going to be delivered. This is often
referred to as 'magazine training' because the little food
pellets are dispensed one at a time from a magazine. After a
few deliveries, the rat quite happily munches away after each
pellet pops down the food chute. The next task is to get it to go
near the lever, so one watches for the rat to go towards the
lever, and as soon as it moves in the right direction, one can
press a button to deliver a food pellet. As the rat moves closer
and closer one ceases to deliver pellets when it is at a
relatively remote site, and only reinforces behaviour which
brings the rat almost on to the lever. Finally, the rats brushes
against, or falls upon the lever, and the mechanism of lever
press - pellet delivery takes over. Then, the rat 'learns to
press the lever'.
Now, what is often not fully appreciated, is the fact that an
enormous amount of behaviours are being learned here. Each
approximation that is learned is a contingency:
IF Such_and_such_behaviour THEN food_pops_out_over_there
IF So_and_So_behaviour THEN NOT food_pops_out_over_there.
'Pressing the lever' per se is an abstraction which the trainer
makes. What good behaviour analysis will record is the contingent
events, and from such records it is very easy to see how the
cognitive attributions which comprise the intensional stance are
generated.
However, the rat learns many fragments of behaviour in such
contexts, and progressively some are selectively reinforced and
others not (they are extinguished). In fact once one gets the
animals to repeat the required behaviour often enough it becomes
stereotyped (mechanical). The longer the animal is trained, the
better it is able to stop when food is no longer contingent
(this is called the overtraining extinction effect).
The amount of lever pressing in extinction can be shown to be a
function of how much training the animal gets during
acquisition. One could say that the rat progressively 'homes in'
on the required invariant class of behaviours.
Elsewhere, in standard classical conditioning paradigms, this
is called 'configuring', and in a slightly different guise,
'blocking' (in either case some elements of the behavioural array
drop out).
The point is that stripped of the 'Rattus-Norvegicus-
falsificationist' talk, what the animal does is perform a set of
behaviours which can be 'construed' cognitively *from the
teachers point of view*, but which are probably best *seen* as
a set behaviours which can be shaped up to the required
behaviour through differential feedback.
What is important is practice, so that the 'effective'
strategies can be configured. To talk about 'understanding'
being necessary *apart* from this configuring of context
specific fragments of behaviour may well just be a failure of
observers to appreciate the subtlety of sound behaviour
analysis and management.
In "Fragments of Behaviour: The Extensional Stance"
http://www.uni-hamburg.de/~kriminol/TS/tskr.htm
I elaborate on this in a review of the recent literature on
"Transfer of Training", "The Encoding Specificity Principle", the
situation specificity of "personality" and the problem of
teaching "Reasoning" skills outside of concrete examples.
As many psychologists will appreciate, that covers quite an
extensive body of empirical research, and getting those facts
correct (by examinining many studies and checking on the
reliability of the results) is a pre-requisite to any further
argument taking those facts as premisses.
The "rigour" is in those analyses (in the experimental designs
and their analysis). That is not to say that I disagree with
anything in your post about the merits of rigour elsewhere of
course, but to a large extent, the whole point of relying on the
rDBMS, 4GL and statistical technology is to trust that
implementation of the FOPC to ensure rigour in "reasoning".
--
David Longley
Neil Rickert
In <855259...@longley.demon.co.uk> Da...@longley.demon.co.uk (David Longley) writes:
>In article <5dd68o$d...@ux.cs.niu.edu> ric...@cs.niu.edu "Neil Rickert" writes:
>> However, when I used 'thinks that', I was simply using a common idiom
>> of ordinary language, for the purposes of communicating with ordinary
>> readers of this newsgroup. I was not using any propositional
>> attitudes, and as far as I am concerned, there are no such things as
>> propositional attitudes, except as theoretical entities in some
>> theories of mind. When ordinary people use these idioms, they are
>> not using them as part of any theory, so they are not using them as
>> propositional attitudes.
>1. That it is a common idiom of ordinary language is not in
>dispute. It is an intensional idiom in that it resists
>substitutivity of identicals salva veritate and does not allow
>reliable existential quantification. That means that inference,
>(which is basically conjunction of statements) can not be relied
>upon in such contexts.
I guess you are simply too stupid to be able to read.
It really doesn't matter whether you are right about using these
idioms for inference. The purpose of the idioms is to COMMUNICATE.
If they are not useful for inference, we should not be in the least
concerned, as long as they are useful for communication.
Perhaps this is far too deep for Longley, who seems to no penchant at
all for communication. He just dumps quotations on the net, and
presumes that such dumping constitutes communication.
Neil Rickert
>See: "Fragments of Behaviour: The Extensional Stance"
> http://www.uni-hamburg.de/~kriminol/TS/tskr.htm
> 'A cognitive theory with no rationality restrictions is
> without predictive content; using it, we can have
> virtually no expectations regarding a believer's
> behavior. There is also a further metaphysical, as
> opposed to epistemological, point concerning rationality
> as part of what it is to be a PERSON: the elements of a
> mind - and, in particular, a cognitive system - must FIT
> TOGETHER or cohere.......no rationality, no agent.'
> C. Cherniak (1986)
> Minimal Rationality p.6
That is merely a piece of rhetoric Cherniak uses to introduce his
book. One should take it with a grain of salt.
Cherniak's "minimal rationality" thesis is confused. The whole idea
of rationality, as it is usually described, is misguided. Winograd
and Flores spend some time pointing out what is wrong with rational
agency theories of cognition. An AI system which was designed on
Cherniak's criteria for minimal rationality would be a hopeless
failure.
Longley sets himself up as a critic of psychology. One of the
biggest problems in psychology, is that psychologists pay far too
much attention to what philosopher's write. The importance that
Longley gives to Cherniak (and Quine, and many others) are examples
of this. Physical scientists mostly have little to do with
philosophy, because the recognize that what philosophers write has
little relevance to their work. Psychology will never be much of a
science until it breaks its ties with academic philosophy.
>Now maybe I'm just getting too long in the tooth as a
>psychologist, but I see the failure of valid inference within
>psychological contexts as very illuminating.
Perhaps you came upon this view somewhat late in life, and it
appeared to you to be some kind of revelation. Thus you are on a
missionary effort to convert everybody to your faith.
Does it occur to you that problems with inference might have been
obvious to me much earlier in life, say by about age 10 or 12? Thus
what is very illuminating to you is something I take for granted, and
consider trivially obvious.
Seeing your (relatively) newfounded view as illuminating, you want to
prevent others from making the mistakes that it points to. Does it
occur to you that I might not be making those mistakes at all? Most
physical scientists happily use intensional idioms whenever it is
convenient in their communication. Yet they do not allow such
language to confuse them in their scientific analyses.
I see you (Longley) as highly confused. You appear to be in the grip
of a wrong view of language. You impute that view of language to me,
because you are too confused to be able to understand otherwise. As
a result you make all kinds of wrong inferences about what I am
saying and doing. Yet if you believed the theory you are pushing
yourself, you would realize that the inferences you make about me are
of the very type whose validity your own theory questions.
I'll set the record straight, although I don't expect Longley to pay
much attention:
(1) I am not a methodological solipsist. I consider
methodological solipsism to be a seriously confused theory.
(2) I am not a cognitivist. I consider cognitivism to be mostly
philosophy, with very little scientific content.
(3) I am not a behaviorist. Behaviorism is too narrowly focussed,
and places limits on what it can do which will prevent it from
ever solving the problems it studies.
(4) Among published work, Gibson's perceptual theories are the
closest to being in the right direction. However as Gibson
presented his theory, there are far too many loose ends.
>The implications are quite dramatic if I am right. It bothers me
>a little that philosophers know about the problems of the
>intensional idioms but don't perhaps know of all of the empirical
>work in psychology since the mid 50s, and that psychologists seem
>to be in the main only vaguely aware (if aware at all) of the
>analyses of those working in the Quinean tradition.
Quine is far too committed to the importance of logic. That colors
his whole perspective. Again, you would do better to pay less
attention to philosophers, including Quine.
>I think it's significant that two panel members (Paul Horowich
>and Martin Davis) particpating in the "In Conversation" W.V.O
>Quine interviews in 1994 (edited by R Fara of LSE) pressed Quine
>on the same point that's pre-occupying me so much these days -
>and it's pre-occupying me because of practical issues stemming
>from the sorry state which applied psychology finds itself in
>today.
Whatever Quine is, he is surely not an applied psychologist. It
seems silly to look to Quine to solve the problems in that area.
>When one begins Operant Conditioning work with rats, one has
>to get the animals to notice where the food pellets they are
>going to bar press for are going to be delivered. This is often
>referred to as 'magazine training' because the little food
>pellets are dispensed one at a time from a magazine.
This 'magazine training' is itself an important example of animal
learning. I have asked you to explain how it fits with your learning
theories. The last time I asked, you simply brushed the question
aside. How about another try.
>Now, what is often not fully appreciated, is the fact that an
>enormous amount of behaviours are being learned here. Each
>approximation that is learned is a contingency:
> IF Such_and_such_behaviour THEN food_pops_out_over_there
> IF So_and_So_behaviour THEN NOT food_pops_out_over_there.
Those amount the propositional attitudes that you ascribe to the
rat. But why assume that the rat's learning fits such a scheme?
Maybe some of the important learning is by the experimenter, who
learns to interpret the rat's behavior in a way that fits with a
particular scheme imposed by the conventional wisdom of behaviorist
theory.
Neil Rickert
In <855277...@longley.demon.co.uk> Da...@longley.demon.co.uk (David Longley) writes:
>> It really doesn't matter whether you are right about using these
>> idioms for inference. The purpose of the idioms is to COMMUNICATE.
>> If they are not useful for inference, we should not be in the least
>> concerned, as long as they are useful for communication.
>But the evidnece is that they are not.
Can you give citations from the research literature for that? Or
are you making it up as you go along.
>At present, I'm trying to EDUCATE, not "communicate".
No, you are trying to indoctrinate. And at that you will never
succeed.
Neil Rickert
In <855284...@longley.demon.co.uk> Da...@longley.demon.co.uk (David Longley) writes:
>> > 'A cognitive theory with no rationality restrictions is
>> > without predictive content; using it, we can have
>> > virtually no expectations regarding a believer's
>> > behavior. There is also a further metaphysical, as
>> > opposed to epistemological, point concerning rationality
>> > as part of what it is to be a PERSON: the elements of a
>> > mind - and, in particular, a cognitive system - must FIT
>> > TOGETHER or cohere.......no rationality, no agent.'
>> > C. Cherniak (1986)
>> > Minimal Rationality p.6
>> That is merely a piece of rhetoric Cherniak uses to introduce his
>> book. One should take it with a grain of salt.
>Do as you wish... I think you should perhaps consider Minsky's
>"Society of Mind" at the same time.
I have no serious problems with "Society of Mind." It rightly recognizes
the role of common sense.
>"Rationality" is, as Frege and others proposed, a non
>psychological process. It can be implemented on computers, or
>learned by people (with some leakage and slippage) like any other
>physical skill.
That is rather a leap. Rationality has not yet been adequately
implemented on computers, and I doubt that it ever will be. Not that
there haven't been attempts.
> Human reasoning is no longer the best model of
>rationality - that AI ever looked to human performance should be
>regarded as purely incidental.
Thus far, human reasoning is the ONLY model of rationality. But you
cannot recognize this for you are in the grip of an ideology.
>As to philosophers and psychology - your remarks are quite ironic
>since Quine advocates that epistemology be conceived as a chapter
>of empirical psychology - namely learning theory.
Quine's idea of learning theory is too simplistic to be useful.
Neil Rickert
In <855285...@longley.demon.co.uk> Da...@longley.demon.co.uk (David Longley) writes:
>> >At present, I'm trying to EDUCATE, not "communicate".
>> No, you are trying to indoctrinate. And at that you will never
>> succeed.
>Education, indoctrination..... it's basically the same thing.
Definition: A radical behaviorist -- is someone who cannot tell
the difference between education and indoctrination.
David Longley
> In <855259...@longley.demon.co.uk> Da...@longley.demon.co.uk (David Longley)
> writes:
> >In article <5dd68o$d...@ux.cs.niu.edu> ric...@cs.niu.edu "Neil Rickert" writes:>
> >> However, when I used 'thinks that', I was simply using a common idiom
> >> of ordinary language, for the purposes of communicating with ordinary
> >> readers of this newsgroup. I was not using any propositional
> >> attitudes, and as far as I am concerned, there are no such things as
> >> propositional attitudes, except as theoretical entities in some
> >> theories of mind. When ordinary people use these idioms, they are
> >> not using them as part of any theory, so they are not using them as
> >> propositional attitudes.
>
> >1. That it is a common idiom of ordinary language is not in
> >dispute. It is an intensional idiom in that it resists
> >substitutivity of identicals salva veritate and does not allow
> >reliable existential quantification. That means that inference,
> >(which is basically conjunction of statements) can not be relied
> >upon in such contexts.
>
> I guess you are simply too stupid to be able to read.
>
> It really doesn't matter whether you are right about using these
> idioms for inference. The purpose of the idioms is to COMMUNICATE.
> If they are not useful for inference, we should not be in the least
> concerned, as long as they are useful for communication.
But the evidnece is that they are not....for a more salient
example, just consider the tabloid press - I think your
correspondence comes a close second <g>.....
>
> Perhaps this is far too deep for Longley, who seems to no penchant at
> all for communication. He just dumps quotations on the net, and
> presumes that such dumping constitutes communication.
>
At present, I'm trying to EDUCATE, not "communicate".
You, for one, clearly have a lot to learn. natural language is great for
narrative and creative story telling - but hopeless for science. If you
looked at the writings of cognitivists such as Bruner you'd perhaps come
to appreciate a little more of what I am outlining.
I'm quite happy to let the general readership ascertain who it is that's
being "stupid".
--
David Longley
David Longley
In article <5de3e8$h...@ux.cs.niu.edu> ric...@cs.niu.edu "Neil Rickert" writes:
> In <855277...@longley.demon.co.uk> Da...@longley.demon.co.uk (David Longley)
> writes:
> >In article <5ddmpe$g...@ux.cs.niu.edu> ric...@cs.niu.edu "Neil Rickert" writes:>
> >> It really doesn't matter whether you are right about using these
> >> idioms for inference. The purpose of the idioms is to COMMUNICATE.
> >> If they are not useful for inference, we should not be in the least
> >> concerned, as long as they are useful for communication.
>
> >But the evidnece is that they are not.
>
> Can you give citations from the research literature for that? Or
> are you making it up as you go along.
>
> >At present, I'm trying to EDUCATE, not "communicate".
>
> No, you are trying to indoctrinate. And at that you will never
> succeed.
>
>
Education, indoctrination..... it's basically the same thing.
However, since you object so strongly, I suggest you just stop
reading this thread.
--
David Longley
David Longley
> In <855264...@longley.demon.co.uk> Da...@longley.demon.co.uk (David Longley)
> writes:
>
> >See: "Fragments of Behaviour: The Extensional Stance"
> > http://www.uni-hamburg.de/~kriminol/TS/tskr.htm
>
> > 'A cognitive theory with no rationality restrictions is
> > without predictive content; using it, we can have
> > virtually no expectations regarding a believer's
> > behavior. There is also a further metaphysical, as
> > opposed to epistemological, point concerning rationality
> > as part of what it is to be a PERSON: the elements of a
> > mind - and, in particular, a cognitive system - must FIT
> > TOGETHER or cohere.......no rationality, no agent.'
>
> > C. Cherniak (1986)
> > Minimal Rationality p.6
>
> That is merely a piece of rhetoric Cherniak uses to introduce his
> book. One should take it with a grain of salt.
>
Do as you wish... I think you should perhaps consider Minsky's
"Society of Mind" at the same time.
> Cherniak's "minimal rationality" thesis is confused. The whole idea
> of rationality, as it is usually described, is misguided. Winograd
> and Flores spend some time pointing out what is wrong with rational
> agency theories of cognition. An AI system which was designed on
> Cherniak's criteria for minimal rationality would be a hopeless
> failure.
>
Perhaps you are the one who is confused. The above authors
promulgate a Heideggerian approach. However, I have made it quite
clear that what I have proposed is that those interested in AI
should forget about human "Cognition" altogether (it's the wrong
place to look).
"Rationality" is, as Frege and others proposed, a non
psychological process. It can be implemented on computers, or
learned by people (with some leakage and slippage) like any other
physical skill. Human reasoning is no longer the best model of
rationality - that AI ever looked to human performance should be
regarded as purely incidental.
As to philosophers and psychology - your remarks are quite ironic
since Quine advocates that epistemology be conceived as a chapter
of empirical psychology - namely learning theory.
'Naturalism does not repudiate epistemology, but assimilates
it to empirical psychology.......The naturalistic philosopher
begins his reasoning within the inherited world theory as a
going concern. He tentatively believes all of it, but
believes also that some unidentified portions are wrong. He
tries to improve, clarify, and understand the system from
within. He is the busy sailor adrift on Neuraths's boat.'
W. V. O. Quine (1975)
Five Milestones of Empiricism
Theories and Things (1981)
The implications of this require considerable work well beyond the
ability of 11 year olds.
--
David Longley
David Yeo
On Thu, 6 Feb 1997, David Longley wrote:
> What I am saying is that there is a problem giving anything the
> status of existence unless one can give it the value of a
> variable. In contexts where this is not possible, one literally
> doesn't know what one is talking about, (nor can anyone else). As
> a consequence, rational analysis and prediction (and predication)
> is impossible.
As I have alluded to in previous postings, this is where your sanitized
utopian rationalism invariably gets dirty. For Quine makes it clear that
theory touches the "real world" only at the edges.
The value one gives to a variable is a function of the values given to
other variables in the system. As such the value of a variable is only
one of a set of plausible values it can validly assume when the entire
"web of belief" is considered. This is not only the basis of Quine's
indeterminacy of translation hypothesis it is, I think, in large part the
rationale underlying the notion of situated cognition. Thus even if it
was possible (which, due to the number of propositions involved, it's not)
to apply your rationalist philosophy, different instantiations lead to
different (even contradictory) conclusions.
In short, the best one can hope for in your rationalist utopia is internal
consistency within a highly restricted closed system of beliefs.
Cheers,
- David Yeo (Applied Cognitive Science, University of Toronto)
David Longley
In article <Pine.SOL.3.91.970206184449.16269B-100000@tortoise>
dyeo@tortoise "David Yeo" writes:
> On Thu, 6 Feb 1997, David Longley wrote:
>
> > What I am saying is that there is a problem giving anything the
> > status of existence unless one can give it the value of a
> > variable. In contexts where this is not possible, one literally
> > doesn't know what one is talking about, (nor can anyone else). As
> > a consequence, rational analysis and prediction (and predication)
> > is impossible.
>
> As I have alluded to in previous postings, this is where your sanitized
> utopian rationalism invariably gets dirty. For Quine makes it clear that
> theory touches the "real world" only at the edges.
>
There is NOTHING utopian or "rationalist" about what I have said. It
is a thoroughly empiricist programme.
If you read it more carefully you will see that I am abvocating a
system which requires one to analyse data put into a database.
The very process of putting the data in requires one to give
observations values. The data dictionary is made up of data types,
variables and valid values.
'We think of a science as comprising those truths which are
expressible in terms of 'and', 'not', quantifiers, variables,
and certain predicates appropriate to the science in
question....To specify a science, within the described mold,
we still have to say what the predicates are to be, and what
the domain of objects is to be over which the variables of
quantification range.'
W.V.O. Quine (1954)
The Scope and Language of Science
The Ways of Paradox and other essays p.242
'Ultimately the objects referred to in a theory are to be
accounted not as the things named by the singular terms, but
as the values of the variables of quantification.'
W.V.O. Quine (1953,1961)
Reference and Modality
From a Logical Point of View p.144-145
'..the standard academic view on databases is that they can
be specified as a set of first order sentences....Almost all
approaches to query evaluation treat queries as first order
formulae.'
'Research on the relationship between database theory and
logic goes back at least to the late 1970s, if not earlier.
However, the principal stimulus for the recent considerable
expansion of interest in the subject seems to have been the
publication in 1984 of a landmark paper by Raymond Reiter,
"Towards a Logical Reconstruction of Relational Database
Theory," which appeared in a book entitled On Conceptual
Modelling: Perspectives from Artificial Intelligence,
Databases, and Programming Languages (eds. Brodie,
Mylopoulos, and Schmidt; Spinger-Verlag, 1984). In that
paper, Reiter characterised the traditional perception of
database systems as model theoretic - by means of which he
meant, speaking very loosely, that:
(a) The database is seen as a set of explicit (i.e. base)
relations, each containing a set of explicit tuples, and
(b) Executing a query can be regarded as evaluating some
specified formula (ie truth-valued expression) over those
explicit relations and tuples.
Reiter then went on to argue that an alternative proof-
theoretic view was possible, and indeed preferable in certain
respects. In that alternative view - again speaking very
loosely - the database is seen as a set of axioms ("ground"
axioms, corresponding to tuples in base relations, plus
certain "deductive" axioms, to be discussed), and executing a
query is regarded as proving that some specified formula is a
logical consequence of those axioms - in other words, proving
that it is a theorem....Consider the following query
(expressed in relational calculus)....
SPX
WHERE SPX.QTY > 250
Here SPX is a tuple variable ranging over the shipments
relation SP. In the traditional (i.e. model-theoretic)
approach, we examine the shipment (SPX) tuples one by one,
evaluating the formula "SPX.QTY > 250" for each one in turn;
the query result then consists of just those shipment tuples
for which the formula evaluates to true. In the proof
theoretic approach, by contrast, we consider the shipment
tuples (plus certain other items) as axioms of a certain
"logical theory"; we then apply theorem-proving techniques to
determine for which possible values of the variable SPX the
formula "SPX.QTY > 250" is a logical consequence of those
axioms within that theory. The query result then consists of
just those particular values of SPX.'
ibid p.267-368
Although there is a degree of confusion in terminology in the area,
Date (1992) suggests that a Deductive Database Management System is:
'a database that supports the proof-theoretic view of a
database, and in particular is capable of deducing additional
facts from the "extensional database" (i.e. the base
relations) by applying specified deductive axioms or rules of
inference to those facts. The deductive axioms, together,
together with the integrity constraints (discussed below),
form what is sometimes called the "intensional database"
(IDB), and the extensional database and the intensional
database together constitute what is usually called the
deductive database (not a very good term, since it is the
DBMS, not the database, that carries out the deductions).
As just indicated, the deductive axioms form one part of the
intensional database. The other part consists of additional
axioms that represent integrity constraints (i.e. rules whose
primary purpose is to constrain updates, though actually such
rules can also be used in the deduction process to generate
new facts)....it now becomes more important than ever that
the extensional database not violate any of the declared
integrity constraints! - because a database that does violate
any such constraints represents (in logical terms) an
inconsistent set of axioms, and it is well known that
absolutely any statement whatsoever can be proved to be
"true" from such a starting point (in other words,
contradictions can be derived. For exactly the same reason,
it is also important that the stated set of integrity
constraints be consistent.'
ibid p.394-5
One might profitably read the above with the failure of Leibniz's Law
within intensional contexts clearly in mind. Similarly, neophyte PQL
programmers soon find that the reason why most of what they want to
achieve fails to materialize is due to errors in their programming,
which invariably come down to them not specifying step by step the
logical and procedural steps of their query. Here again, the actual
user, rather than the casual reader will appreciate the didactic force
of the imperative "stay out of your head, and look at the screen". The
experienced user should appreciate that the keyboard and screen
comprise a very effective system of 'virtual' reality, which is
improved by a mouse.
One of the main advantages of a formal database system is that as
updates are made to the overall data structure, cross referencing
maintains database integrity constraints by only making updates
according to well established update rules. We have seen at length,
the problems which results from failure of substitutivity within
intensional contexts - namely, that deductive inference is not
possible. Within PROBE, deductively driven updates are currently quite
minimal, restricted essentially to PQL 'retrieval updates' which cross
update inmate cell location and prison location across relations 3 and
11. Where further updates are possible, implementation beyond
providing quality control reports has been refrained from in the
interests of maintaining a degree of user input to maintaining overall
system integrity.
Returning to the terminology of relational technology, where a
predicate is a two-place predicate, it is an ordered 2-tuple, or
ordered pair. A tuple is a row, and a relation is a set of predicates
comprising a record type (sometimes called a table). In almost all
instances, whether a retrieval generates a simple list of inmates, or
a multivariate statistical analysis (with post-processing using SPSS
for multiple or logistic regression for example), we are practically
interested in value distributions (Kerlinger and Pedhazur 1973).
Carnap (1959) summarised the situation as follows (although it should
be appreciated that Quine's austere, wholly extensionalist system
developed in Word and Object (1960) was largely a critique of the
intensionalism which remained within Carnap's "Meaning and Necessity"
program):
Intensions and Extensions of the Chief Types of Expressions
Expression Intension Extension
Sentence Proposition Truth-value
Individual constant Individual concept Individual
One-place predicate Property Class of individuals
n-place predicate (n>1) n-place relation Class of ordered n-tuples of
individuals
Functor Function Value-distribution
Carnap (1958)
Introduction to Symbolic Logic and its Applications
In an annex to a short paper entitled 'What is a Relation' Date (1992)
put the situation as follows:
'In the body of this paper, I gave the mathematician's view
of a relation as "An n-ary relation is a set of ordered n-
tuples." In this appendix, I would like to mention an
alternative view very briefly - namely, the logician's view.
In logic, an n-ary relation is simply that which is
designated by an n-place predicate in what is called the
first order predicate calculus. For example, the expression
">(A,b) is a 2-place predicate that designates the "greater
than" relation, and "SP(S#,P#,QTY)" is a three-place
predicate that designates the "shipments" relation in the
usual suppliers and parts database. In general, an n-place
predicate can be thought of as a truth-valued function with n
arguments; a given tuple appears in the corresponding
relation if and only if the function evaluates to true for
the argument values represented by that tuple.
..
When we talk about the foundations of the relational model,
we usually talk in terms of sets and set theory - a
mathematical foundation, in fact. But the forgoing indicates
that it is at least equally possible to talk in terms of a
foundation in logic - specifically, in the first order
predicate calculus - instead. And this alternative perception
does have certain arguments in its favor....some people would
argue that the true foundation of the relational model is
really the first order predicate calculus, not set theory,
and moreover that there is no real need to invoke set-
orientated ideas at all in developing and discussing the
model.'
C. J. Date (1992)
What is a Relation? A Logician's View
Relational Database Writings 1989-1991 p.54-5
Whilst initially unfamiliar, this logical notation, basic to the
predicate or functional calculus, provides an invaluable framework
when designing and managing data base management system's structure,
when planning analyses and programming automated reports. It is
certainly easier to deal with in the author's view than the more
commonly encountered set theoretic terminology, and renders the links
with work in theoretical logic (e.g. Quine 1960, 1992) much easier.
All database systems must be reduced to 'normal form' in the interests
of being able to analyse the modelled domain at its most fundamental
levels. Through Quine's critique of analyticity (1951, 1960), coupled
with the axiomatic nature of Leibniz's Law the language of science
(Quine 1954) has little choice but to dismiss intensional notions such
as 'sense' (Frege 1883), or 'individual concept' (attribute, property,
meaning, content etc; Carnap 1947; Church 1951). Intensional contexts
are indeterminate, and thereby unable to occupy positions of bound
variables (Quine 1943;1956) in any form of scientific analysis
(computer or otherwise).
In 1994, we simply do not know how to use formal logic (Information
Technology) to quantify reliably into intensional contexts (such as
the propositional attitudes), and attempts to do so using techniques
such as Repertory Grids (the 'Fragmentation Corollary' aside) and
Factor Analysis may prove to be creative rather than analytical as a
consequence. Less formally, we do not know how to reason within such
contexts without falling into rhetoric and sophistry. Until we are
shown otherwise, extensional systems render us incapable of analysing
inmates by anything other than the classes which they fall into. We
can do no more than use quantification theory to extensionally
identify the functional relations which exist between such classes,
and manage behaviour according to such functions.
Compound predicates, or n-ary relations e.g. Governor's reports can be
created such as 'Rule_Paragraph', 'Date_of_Infraction',
'Time_of_Infraction', 'Location_in_Prison' and a unique
'Inmate_Case_Identifier' (the constant, or when quantified, a variable
x). Each predicate returns one, and only one value, and together they
comprise a vector which can be analysed like the values of any simple
or atomic predicate. In this way, it is possible, using relational
technology, to define the arity of relations or predicates using the
logical connectives within a fourth generation retrieval language and
thereby expand or restrict relations or predicates to certain times,
dates, places, or to inmates with certain classes of index offence,
ages, or whatever the algorithm written, actually 'satisfies' (Tarski
1931) through the tuples meeting the specified value criteria of the
well-formed formula (wff). That is, an instance (or instantiation) of
a clause is obtained by applying a substitution to the clause, and a
substitution is an assignment of terms to variables (Kowalski 1979).
An example to illustrate the above should clarify the terminology and
illustrate the potential of working within this framework, given our
understanding of Leibniz's Law.
We will take record three of PROBE, Behavior at The Current Prison
(CURPRIS). There are (34 Records in all, several one-many (eg. reports
movements, segregation periods, attainment assessments).
Key
'Variable' 'Variable Label'
01 a NATNUM NATIONAL NUMBER
02 b PRESCAT PRESENT SECURITY CATEGORY
a 03 c EDRCPRIS EDR or NPD CURRENT PRISON
r 04 d PRISON CURRENT ESTABLISHMENT
g 05 e DOR DATE OF RECEPTION
u 06 f WINGINST CURRENT WING
m 07 g TPPSYC PSYCHIATRIC DIAGNOSIS AT CURRENT PRISON
e 08 h TPDRUGS EVIDENCE OF DRUGS THIS PRISON
n 09 i ELIST PLACED ON E LIST THIS PRISON
t 10 j NEWHOST HOSTAGE TAKER AT THIS PRISON
11 k TPR43OR RULE 43(OR) SEGREGATIONS THIS PRISON
p 12 l TPR43GO RULE 43(GOAD) SEGREGATIONS THIS PRISON
l 13 m TPC1074 CI1074/3790 TRANSFER FROM THIS PRISON
a 14 n TPSTVIO (PROVEN) STAFF ASSAULTS THIS PRISON
c 15 o TPINVIO (PROVEN) INMATE ASSAULTS THIS PRISON
e 16 p TPADJ (PROVEN) ADJUDICATIONS THIS PRISON
17 q PSYMON3 PSYMON vs F1150 FLAG(3)
18 r DATMOD03 MODIFIED
Relation Name = Curpris
Argument Positions (arity) = 18
As an 18-ary relation:
A R G U M E N T P O S I T I O N S
1 1 1
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 7 8
T Curpris(113386,2,01011700,LLC,05041991,A,0,0,0,0,..... ,0 10041991)
U Curpris(119085,1,01011700,LLC,14111991,Z,0,0,0,0,..... ,0 01061993)
P Curpris(122004,2,01011700,LLC,14101988,B,1,0,0,0,..... ,0 30011989)
L Curpris(132016,1,01111988,LLC,01021979,E,0,0,0,0,..... ,1 01051988)
E Curpris(132687,1,01011700,LLC,30101989,S,0,0,0,0,..... ,0 29031990)
S Curpris(133616,2,01011700,LLC,11051982,F,0,0,0,0,..... ,0 01061993)
Or as a series of binary predicates:
01 Natnum(113386,Curpris)
02 Natnum(119085,Curpris)
P 03 Natnum(122004,Curpris)
R 04 Natnum(132016,Curpris)
E 05 Natnum(132687,Curpris)
D 06 Natnum(133616,Curpris)
I 07 Prescat(113386,2)
C 08 Prescat(119085,1)
A 09 Prescat(122004,2)
T 10 Prescat(132016,1)
E 11 Prescat(132687,1)
S 12 Prescat(133616,2)
13 Etc., etc.
14 Etc., etc.
Queries can then be expressed in 'clausal form' as:
Answer(x)
Answer(x) Inmate(x, Curpris) AND Prescat(x,1)
or
Answer(x)
Answer(x) Curpris(x,y,z,a,b,c,d,e,f,g,h,i,j,k,l,m,n,o)
AND
Curpris(x,1,z,a,b,c,d,e,f,g,h,i,j,k,l,m,n,o)
Here, the value '1' is substituted for the variable b in order to list
all inmates with a value of 1 for Present Security Category (Prescat).
This presentation should make it graphically clear why some query
languages are given the name 'Query By Example'. The same format is
followed of course when instantiating queries with predicates drawn
from other relations such as Person, Utadata, Curpris, Reports and so
on. As covered at length in Volume 1 and the early parts of this
volume, the fundamental value of relational, deductive technology,
lies in the failure of effective substitutivity of identicals, 'salva
veritate', within intensional contexts. The failure of Leibniz's Law
within epistemic and other intensional contexts renders anything and
everything inferable given the violation of the law of contradiction,
or failure of truth-functionality within such contexts.
Comprehensive relational modelling and extensional deductive analysis
within a domain, or universe of discourse comprises a science of that
domain. The application of the theorems derived from analysis back
into the domain, comprises a technology. There can be nothing
controversial about this claim once the logical basis of relational
theory and scientific method are clearly understood in conjunction and
the significance of the failure of Leibnitz Law within intensional
contexts is fully appreciated.
At the end of Volume 1, and certainly within Volume 2, we used
functional notation rather than the language of relations and
predicates, so before leaving the subject, we show how functional
notation expresses predicates or relations. Recall that in his
discovery of the Predicate Calculus (his 'Begriffsschrift') in 1879,
Frege wrote that his discovery of the quantifiers was in large part a
consequence of rejecting the old Predicate-Argument notation, and
selecting instead an extended concept of the mathematicians notion of
function-argument, at the same time, we will deal with the important
issue of equality or identity.
We can express Times(x,y,z)
as x * y = z
or Father(x,y)
as x = father(y)
Relational calculus query language uses function symbols and equality:
prescat(x) = y
in place of Prescat(x,y)
winginst(x) = y
in place of Winginst(x,y)
The following is taken from Kowalski (1979), and effectively brings us
full circle to the leitmotif of these volumes, beginning with the
quote at the beginning of Volume 1: the identity of indiscernibles and
the failure of Leibniz's Law within intensional contexts.
'Equality is necessary whenever an individual has more than
one name. For example:
Jove = Jupiter .
It is also necessary, even in the relational notation, to
express that one argument of a relation is a function of the
others. For example:
x = y Father(x,z) , Father(y,z)
To show that a set of clauses S containing the equality
symbol is inconsistent, the set of clauses needs to contain
the following axioms characterising the equality relation,
for every function symbol f and every predicate symbol P
occurring in S, (including the equality symbol).
E1 x = x
E2 P(x 1 ,.....,x m ) P(y 1 ,......,y m ), x 1 =y 1 , ..., x m =y m
E3 f(x 1 ,.....,x m ) = f(y 1 ,......,y m ) x 1 =y 1 , ..., x m =y m
for example, to demonstrate that the assumptions
J1 Jekyl = Hyde
J2 father(John) = Hyde
J3 Member(father(John), birthday club)
imply the conclusion
member(Jekyl, birthday club)
it is necessary to deny the conclusion
J4 Member(Jekyl, birthday club)
and add the appropriate axioms for the equality relation:
J5 x = x
J6 Member(x 1 ,x 2 ) Member(y 1 ,y 2 ), x 1 =y 1 ,x 2 =y 2
J7 x 1 = x 2 y 1 = y 2 , x 1 = y 1 , x 2 = y 2
J8 father(x) = father(y) x = y
The following set of clauses J1-8 is inconsistent because J1-3 are
"obviously" inconsistent with the instances
Hyde = Hyde
birthday club = birthday club
Member(Jekyl, birthday club) Member(father(John), birthday club),
Jekyl = father(John),
birthday club = birthday club
Jekyl = father(John) Hyde = Hyde, Jekyl = Hyde, father(John) = Hyde
of J5-7. Clause 8 in this example does not contribute to the inconsistency.
R. Kowalski (1979)
Representation in Clausal Form: Equality
Logic for Problem Solving
In managing and designing and developing the PROBE system, special
care has been taken to ensure that these extensional, ie truth-
functional principles are followed and that referential integrity
constraints or rules on data entry are built in to optimize quality
control. Training has emphasised the pitfalls of clinical judgement
(Volume 1) as evidence of the failure of quantification within
intensional contexts. At times this has been extremely difficult,
since many users still regard databases as 'nothing more than' a
research data storage medium. This can only stem from a poor
conception of the technology behind record (table) design, the power
of 'normal form' or 'clausal form' as an artificial language, and a
very limited practical use of the such systems, e.g. the production of
simple lists rather than full relational analyses. This functional
specification is designed to suggest how the PROBE system might be
used in support of an applied behaviour science and technology, which
in turn supports effective inmate management, not, it must be said, as
an all purpose MIS. Any failure to fully appreciate these points will
inevitably lead to great financial investments with very little in the
way of productive returns. Without a sound appreciation of logic, such
systems simply will not be used effectively. This is a simple lesson
from research in descriptive (folk) psychology (Volume 1).
For those who are sceptical about the value of checklists for
instance, it is important perhaps to point out that the prison rules
can be listed as 21 paragraphs under Rule 47, ie as a series of
observation statements. An inmate will always be charged under one, or
another paragraph of the Rule (each as a separate event or offence).
The paragraphs serve as a set of declarative statements (32 binary
predicates or a 32-ary relation if the circumstances such as date and
time, place etc. are included in the tuple). The Rule 47 system
effectively operate as a behaviour checklist, or criterion referencing
system. Where no offences have occurred it is as if null entries were
entered for each inmate, date, time and place - something which is
made graphically clear when actual offences are plotted against time.
Construed from the perspective of relational theory, this removes in
one move, any objections to 'box ticking' as a means of assessment,
since it can readily be seen that all inmate management must be based
on such predicate or relational systems, albeit sometimes of quite
high arity, and therefore for memory capacity constraints, quite a
bewildering i.e. impossible task for working memory as outlined in
Volume 1 and elsewhere (Miller 1956; Attneave 1959; Cherniak 1986,
Stich 1990).
Based on this conception of a Data Base Management System, PROBE's
second phase of development work between 1991 and 1994 enabled the
system to map entire prison regimes using the relational concepts
outlined above (and as illustrated in Volume 2). A system of Sentence
Management was designed whereby staff are able to continuously define
(and up to a point, dynamically refine) the regime functions they are
responsible for supervising, be these elements of wing routines or the
requirements (performance criteria) of specific inmate activities such
as education courses, periods in prison industries, special programmes
etc. Within the PROBE Sentence Management system, staff are required
to define declarative statements (predicates/regime propositional
functions/relations) or 'Attainment Criteria' which can be assessed as
being true or false of an inmate, at specific stages of programmes, on
specified dates. Just as the truth or falsehood (guilt or innocence)
of a prison rules infraction is ascertained by an expert on the prison
rules (a Governor), so too, the level of attainment an inmate has
attained is ascertained by, ideally, an accredited, expert supervisor.
This system allowed us to expand the arity of the relations available
within the PROBE relational Data Base Management System almost
infinitely without having to make physical changes to the system's
data dictionary (the schema - Volume 5). Such a criterion referencing
system can develop flexibly, with individuals being profiled with
reference to such criteria at any stage of their prison career.
Together, therefore, the predicates/relations/functions and truth
values within PROBE serve as a Knowledge Base for the production of
comprehensive inmate career profiles which are descriptive,
declarative reports of inmate behaviour relative to fixed reference
criteria. Such extensional reports have clear reference criteria and
are produced by algorithms written using the 4GL (PQL) provided within
the DBMS. The skilled work within such a system lies in the writing of
retrievals.
Furthermore, such retrievals can be written to incorporate parameters
of the population from which the inmate is drawn, such parameters
thereby serving as reference classes. PROBE routinely provides
profiles which provide information at both the individual (Section
3.2) and group (Section 3.3) levels. As the technical work is
primarily on the design and use of PQL algorithms in the management of
inmate's as a function of the classes they fall into and the
characteristics of those classes (e.g. age group and report rate),
PROBE is basically an actuarial system (Dawes, Faust and Meehl 1989,
1993), as well as an application of Artificial Intelligence research.
Risk assessment in all areas of inmate management becomes largely a
matter of ascertaining what classes an individual belongs to, and the
characteristics of such classes. Providing that all concerned
appreciate that individual assessment must always, albeit often
implicitly, be assessment relative to some class or another, and that
class membership is a dynamic function of ongoing behaviour, it
becomes clear that the PROBE technology amounts essentially to no more
than an MIS to support effective inmate management based on actuarial
rather than clinical judgment.
As outlined above in the context of quantification, Vickers (1988) and
Lukasiewicz (1909) have generalized the Fregian concept of truth
function:
'The truth value of an indefinite proposition is "...the
ratio between the number of values of the variables for which
the proposition yields true judgements and the total number
of values of the variables" (p.17). The relative
(conditional) truth value of indefinite propositions is the
quotient of the truth value of their conjunction and that of
the antecedent. Lukasiewicz then argues that these truth
values provide an adequate account of probability, free from
many of the difficulties that plague subjectivistic and
empirical views.'
J. M. Vickers (1988)
Chance and Structure:
An Essay on the Logical Foundations of Probability p.149
Statistical technology is covered little in these volumes since most
readers will have already undertaken the course which complements
these volumes. However, for the sake of what follows it is important
that the reader appreciates that we are, at least in part, following
Vickers (1988) in his treatment of Fregian quantification:
'The major motivating principle of probability quantifiers is
the development of probability within pure or general logic
to the extent that this is possible. The great difficulty of
precisely defining general logic can perhaps be avoided by
agreeing that however it is defined, the semantics of first-
order logic as developed by Frege and Tarski fall quite
within its confines. Then, as the above remarks suggest, the
question is just to what extent such notions as "the
proportion of objects falling under a concept" or "the
proportion of assignments satisfying a formula" can be given
a meaning in general logic.'
J. M. Vickers (1988)
Chance & Structure: An Essay on the Logical Foundations of
Probability
Probability quantifiers:principles and semantics p.153
From another point of view, a basic rationale justifying the
development and maintenance of the PROBE system should surely be that
effective (computational) inmate management must be based on the same
principles which accounted for their being convicted and given a
custodial sentence in the first place, namely recorded behaviourial
evidence, and rational processing of such evidence by explicit rules
(the law). In the case of the PROBE system, this relies on trained
staff recording their observations (encapsulated and context specific
though they may be) and then subjecting those observations to logical
and statistical (ie actuarial) analysis (Dawes, Faust and Meehl 1989).
The fundamental task is one of professionally describing behaviour
without 'going beyond the information given' (Bruner 1957,1973). Such
work, it is argued, requires the skill of behaviour scientists for
reasons which should become clear below.
In the introduction to the most influential piece of work in logic
since the development of Aristotelian logic, Frege (1879) introduced
his Begriffsschrift as follows:
'Now when I turned to the question... I first had to
determine how far one could go in arithmetic through
inferences alone....So that nothing intuitive could enter
unnoticed, everything had to depend on keeping the chain of
inference free of gaps.'
G. Frege (1879)
Begriffsschrift p.x
So a major objective of the PROBE project is to use computerised,
elementary logic (the propositional and predicate calculus), to
collate and deductively (extensionally) analyse inmate behaviour with
as little inductive (intensional) 'gap filling' inference as possible.
'Frege saw that the general, neutral concept of a function
must be made the principal one in his proposed system for
symbolically representing the forms of "pure thought". The
way in which a function can be defined, or represented, by
giving an expression (as in the above examples) for its
result as a computable or constructible combination of its
arguments, is known as abstraction; and Frege's great insight
was to see that the activity of "pure thought" he wanted to
represent consisted of acts of abstraction of functions from
expressions, interwoven with acts of application of functions
to arguments, formulated as acts of evaluation of
expressions. The interplay between abstraction, application
and evaluation is the whole story of the thought that Frege
wanted to analyze, explain, and represent.'
...
These functions and entities are the logical ones: truth,
falsehood, negation, conjunction, disjunction, universal and
existential generalisation, and exemplification.
....
Once this formalism is understood, the reader can then easily
entertain, and follow the development of a proposition that
has entranced students of logic for centuries: that deductive
reasoning can be mechanised - literally, performed by a
machine - just as many of the routine tasks of numerical
computation can be and have been. It was not Frege's main
motivation to help make the mechanization of deductive
reasoning a practical possibility. He was very much aware,
however, of the attempts of earlier thinkers such as Hobbes
and Leibniz to argue that this could and must be done, and he
well knew that his own work was an indispensable step.'
J A Robinson (1979)
Logic, Form & Function:
The Mechanization of Deductive Reasoning
A convicted, long term prisoner's time in custody will usually include
movements between several prisons, probably one a year on average,
during which time he may come into conflict with the requirements of
the regime, sometimes extensively. The majority of inmates do not,
they complete their sentences without serious incident. However, a
small minority, perhaps no more than 1% do not co-operate, and these
comprise the system's 'control problems'. Most inmates are relatively
well behaved, and as a consequence, their time in custody will be
relatively uneventful. They will spend their time in several prison
activities, averaging little more than a couple of months in each, and
little more than 4 hours a day. They will progress from high to low
secure conditions throughout their sentence, many going on Home Leave
towards the end of their sentence and being granted early release on
parole.
PROBE is designed to serve as a system of 'helpful extensional
strategies' for professionally trained Behaviour Scientists. Extensive
coverage of the empirical research on the heuristics and biases which
comprise the descriptive subject matter of contemporary
(methodologically solipsistic) psychology, from classical and
instrumental conditioning to decision making under uncertainty, ie
clinical (intensional), 'gap-filling', judgment, contrasted with
actuarial (extensional) analysis, is available elsewhere.
Quine's work revealing the failure of quantification within contexts
of propositional attitude (1943, 1956) shows that there is a very
important limit to what we can truth-functionally infer within
psychological and other intensional contexts. Yet when we record
observations within a data base, we give those observations truth
values, namely, that a particular class of behaviour was the case at a
specific time and date. Deductive (extensional) analysis of such
observation statements, their conjunctions, negation and
quantification, therefore represents the limit of the contribution of
the Behaviour Analyst. It should also be clear that all of the work
within the PROBE system is constrained to extensional analysis of
material regimented within the language of predicate logic. However,
even within such constraints we can manage inmates, establishments,
and entire estates. Nevertheless, nothing we deductively infer allows
us to conclude that the subjects themselves are privy to the relations
we extensionally identify, and manage via. Deductive inferences can be
made on the basis of behaviour profiles which individuals themselves
are unaware of, such inferences may be valid, and true nonetheless.
The routines which support PROBE impose constraints on what can, and
cannot, effectively (computationally) be done. For instance, all data
entry and analysis depends on decisive data entry. Whatever led to
those truth functions (data values) is largely independent of the work
of the Behaviour Scientist's work, since the entered data, (assuming
it is entered accurately) will be the consequence of the sentence of
the court, the assessments of workshop staff, and so on. If the system
reveals useful functional relations between classes of behaviour, it
is quite irrelevant whether inmates or others 'believe' or 'know' of
such relations. Behaviour can, and generally is, managed on the basis
of such relations.
Applied behaviour science eschews intensionalism and methodological
solipsism. They also abandon (Quine 1951), the notion of analyticity,
synonymy, and all of its other subtle cognates such as identity or
similarity (see preface). This is no more than to adopt a thorough
going empiricism. The 'Five Milestones of Empiricism' (Quine 1981)
represent a progressive shift from the 'idea' to 'the word', to 'the
sentence' to 'systems of sentences' and finally to 'methodological
monism' (the abandonment of the analytic-synthetic distinction) and
'naturalism'.
'Naturalism does not repudiate epistemology, but assimilates
it to empirical psychology.......The naturalistic philosopher
begins his reasoning within the inherited world theory as a
going concern. He tentatively believes all of it, but
believes also that some unidentified portions are wrong. He
tries to improve, clarify, and understand the system from
within. He is the busy sailor adrift on Neuraths's boat.'
W. V. O. Quine (1975)
Five Milestones of Empiricism
Theories and Things (1981)
All effective reasoning (computing) must therefore be deductive
inferential reasoning as Frege (1879) proposed in his Begriffsschrift
and which Church 1936; Turing 1937 so forcefully elaborated as
computer programming. Reasoning, it appears, is not a psychological
process at all, but a physical, algorithmic process like any other
behaviour. However, attempts at reasoning within intensional
(psychological) contexts are therefore only to be expected to be
fraught with difficulty, primarily because of the unreliability of
logically 'quantifying in' (Quine 1956). This conclusion immediately
raises problems for strategies designed to improve thinking beyond
teaching specific, context-relevant behaviours.
What we are left with is the application of Information Technology as
computerised deductive logic and scientific method (the application of
predicates and functions - recursive function theory) to specific
domains of concern, ie classes of physical behaviour. In the case of
the Prison Service, and the PROBE system, the domain comprises those
classes of human behaviour which led inmates to offending behaviour,
conviction, and subsequent behaviour whilst in custody. What inmates
'think', 'want', 'believe' etc. can be of no concern, except as de
dicto, ie directly quoted, dated, verbal behaviours (Quine 1992). This
is simply because, as far as the PROBE project is concerned,
intensional material is not amenable to reliable quantitative analysis
for reasons outlined above (Kneale & Kneale 1962; Place 1987; Nelson
1992), and elsewhere (Volume 1). What is directly observed and
recorded in relation to other observables is all that can be
systematically analysed truth functionally. This means that inmate
reports, and any discussion or analysis of such reports in case
conferences must respect the basic principle of extensionality
outlined here and elsewhere (Volume 1).
The rejection of analyticity (Quine 1951) has profound implications
for non-behavioural psychology. Written reports on inmates must be
verbatim transcripts of what is said and observed, with the
interviewer's assessments and comments distinctly identifiable as
such. These constraints must also be respected when discussing such
reports. That is, in the interest of truth and accuracy, all such
material must be analysed using effective, computationally sound,
extensional logic if falsehood and fiction is to be avoided. This
requires, at minimum, a commitment to verbatim recording of behaviour,
leaving deductive analysis of that data to formal systems which we
have developed to perform that function. Psychological processes,
narrowly construed, in the terms outlined in this section, are no more
than that set of intrusive, intensional heuristics which behaviour
scientists have gone to such lengths to document over the past 30
years. Such heuristics generally serve only to distract from
penetrative extensional analysis, and are often no more than gap-
filling rhetoric or sophistry. Such heuristics, are only contextually
effective, and have nothing to do with sound analysis (Tversky &
Kahneman 1973; Dawes, Faust and Meehl 1989). In the absence of
distributional data, behaviour scientists can do no more than request
that such systems are created as a sine qua non for them to practice
their profession effectively.
However, and this caveat is critical, behaviour science is not co-
extensive with Information Technology, since all scientists use
Information Technology to analyze their data drawn from their domain
of concern. For this reason, the technology discussed in this document
must remain in the hands of those who specialise in the scientific
recording and analysis of inmate behaviour if it is to continue to be
a service in Behaviour Science. It is a category mistake, and
therefore an administrative mistake to dogmatically conceive of
Information Technology as an independent service, except as a source
of hardware and software procurement. The application of Information
Technology to any domain is fundamentally no more than the application
of algorithmic methods to render tasks effective, and it is therefore
impossible to make specialists of such a service beyond that of the
scientific and technical services provided by any professional, be
they accountants, medical practitioners, architects or behaviour
scientists. This argument, whilst superficially simple, goes to the
heart of the nature of the relationship between expert systems and
professional services.
It is important for what follows that the reader appreciates that
descriptors or declarative statements used to classify behaviour are
not variables (even though they are labelled as such within SIR and
SPSS). What they are in fact is propositional functions, predicates,
relations or just functions. Failure to appreciate this fact,
discovered by Frege in 1879, can account for considerable confusion
through a blurring of the distinction between deductive and inductive
inference. The issue can be explicated somewhat by reference to a
language closely related to that of the 4GL under discussion:
'The query is written as one or more predicates (with
arguments, separated by commas and terminated with as full
stop. Unlike in predicate definitions, any variables are
existentially quantified, and the interpreter will attempt to
find values for them that satisfy the conjunction of the
predicates....The Prolog interpreter starts by trying the
first definition of the predicate, and substituting the
values for the variables...'
P. Gray (1984)
Logic, Algebra and Databases p.74:
Representing programs by clauses: Prolog
Note that this is an entirely extensional procedure, substitutions are
made in terms of truth-conditions. What may seem a little strange to
the novice is that in working as above, particularly when writing
retrievals to generate inmate reports (Volume 1,2) he or she is
actually using 'proof theory', since:
'..proof theory specifies how we can obtain new sentences
(theorems) from assumed ones (axioms) by means of pure symbol
manipulation (inference rules) .... answering questions is in
fact no different from proving theorems.'
P. Flanch (1994)
Logic and Logic Programming p.17
Simply Logical: Intelligent Reasoning by Example
Some of the difficulty for those new to the work lies in the fact that
when using a 4GL with a database such as PROBE, one's programming is
both declarative and procedural.
'Logic programming is the name of a programming paradigm
which was developed in the 70s. Rather than viewing a
computer program as a step-by-step description of an
algorithm, the program is conceived as a logical theory, and
a procedure call is viewed as a theorem of which the truth
needs to be established. Thus executing a program means
searching for a proof. In traditional (imperative)
programming languages, the program is a procedural
specification of how a problem needs to be solved. In
contrast, a logic program concentrates on a declarative
specification of what the problem is. Readers familiar with
imperative programming will find that Logic Programming
requires a quite different way of thinking. Indeed, their
knowledge of the imperative paradigm will be partly
incompatible with the logic paradigm.
This is certainly true with regard to the concept of a
program variable. In imperative languages, a variable is a
name for a memory location which can store data of certain
types. While the contents of the location may vary over time,
the variable always points to the same location. In fact, the
term 'variable' is a bit of a misnomer here, since it refers
to a value that is well-defined at every moment. In contrast,
a variable in a logic program is a variable in the
mathematical sense, i.e. a placeholder that can take on any
value. In this respect, Logic Programming is therefore much
closer to mathematical intuition than imperative programming.
Imperative programming and Logic Programming also differ with
respect to the machine model they assume. A machine model is
an abstraction of the computer on which programs are
executed. The imperative paradigm assumes a dynamic, state-
based machine model, where the state of the computer is given
by the contents of its memory. The effect of a program
statement is a transition from one state to another. Logic
Programming does not assume such a dynamic machine model.
Computer plus program represent a certain amount of knowledge
about the world, which is used to answer queries.'
P. Flanch (1994)
Logic and Logic Programming p.1-2
Simply Logical: Intelligent Reasoning by Example
The key elements here have been expressed by Kowalski's (1979) equation:
algorithm = logic + control
where 'logic' refers to declarative programming or knowledge, and
'control' refers to procedural programming or knowledge. To use a
system such as PROBE effectively, one requires both classes of skills,
although, within a 4GL, the emphasis is on the logic component:
'For inexperienced database users it is desirable that
queries be expressed in a formalism as close to natural
language as possible. Since logic originates from the
analysis of natural language, it is not surprising that
database query languages express only the logic component of
algorithms. Restricting query languages to the logic
component has other advantages. It has the consequence that
storage and retrieval schemes can be changed and improved in
the control component without affecting the user's view of
the data as defined by the logic component. In general. the
higher the level of the programming language and the less
advanced the level of the programmer, the more the system
needs to assume responsibility for efficiency and to exercise
control over the use of the information given.
The notion that: computation = controlled deduction
was first proposed by Hayes (1973) and more recently by Bibel
(1978), Kowalski (1976), Pratt (1977) and Schwarz (1977). The
similar thesis that database systems be decomposed into a
relational component which defines the logic of the data, and
a control component which manages data storage and retrieval
has been advocated by Codd (1970)...
Natural Language = Logic + Control
The procedural interpretation of Horn clauses reconciles the
classical role of logic in the analysis of language with the
interpretation of natural language statements as programs
(Winograd 1972). Like algorithms, natural language combines
logic with control. The sentence:
If you want Mary to like you then give her presents and be
kind to animals
combines the declarative information:
Mary likes you if you give her presents and are kind to
animals.
with the advice that it be used top-down to solve problems of
being liked by Mary to subproblems of giving her presents and
being kind to animals.'
R. Kowalski (1979)
The Procedural Interpretation of Horn Clauses
Logic for Problem Solving
The language of science can, as Quine has clearly shown, get by
without the psychological idioms which can not be regimented within
the langauge of the Predicate Calculus, or the subset of that known as
Horn Clauses. Once one accepts the inevitability of this conceptual
framework (reduction to Conjunctive Normal Form, and Clause Form) it
should be clear that there exists a technology for asking questions
explicitly and unambiguously, and that it is no longer practically
possible (as Hahn 1933 made clear) to practice psychology
intensionally. It is only possible to analyse behaviour extensionally.
At this stage, it should also be clear what is meant by saying that
this is so because 'variables' are what we seek to have 'satisfied'
(Tarski 1956; Barwise & Etchemendy 1992) by the constraints of our
well formed formulae (PQL retrievals). Variables are argument
positions which we substitute values into when passing the data base
data 'through' the logical conditions which comprise our retrievals.
That is, variables are:
'...place holders that indicate relationships between
quantifiers and the argument positions of various
predicates.'
J. Barwise & J. Etchemendy (1992)
The Language of First-Order Logic p.115
If not as predicates, our descriptors might be called 'attributes',
but not 'variables'. With computerised quantification, the power of a
system such as PROBE should become apparent. 'Sentence_Length', for
example, is better conceived as a description of an individual, ie a
declarative statement, a predicate, or as a function of a specific
arity. Our queries, whether in PROLOG, SQL or PQL are satisfied by
conditions which meet the conditions of quantifiers (instantiation,
existential or universal).
'To describe when quantified sentences are true, we need to
introduce the auxiliary notion of satisfaction. The basic
idea is simple, and can be illustrated with a few examples.
We say that an object satisfies the atomic wff Cube(x) if and
only if the subject is a cube. Similarly, we say an object
satisfies the complex wff Cube(x) U Small(x) if and only if
it is both a cube and small. As a final example, an object
satisfies the wff Cube(x) V ~Large(x) if and only if it is
either a cube or not large (or both).'
Ibid p.119-20
As to the "real world" at its edges, there is much more to "the
real world" than what one immediately sees with ones unaided
perceptual systems.
> The value one gives to a variable is a function of the values given to
> other variables in the system. As such the value of a variable is only
> one of a set of plausible values it can validly assume when the entire
> "web of belief" is considered. This is not only the basis of Quine's
> indeterminacy of translation hypothesis it is, I think, in large part the
> rationale underlying the notion of situated cognition. Thus even if it
> was possible (which, due to the number of propositions involved, it's not)
> to apply your rationalist philosophy, different instantiations lead to
> different (even contradictory) conclusions.
You have run off on your own agenda here (as you have frequently quite
lately). If you seriously wanty to discuss these issues I am happy to
do so, but please make the effort to read what I have written in the
first place.
>
> In short, the best one can hope for in your rationalist utopia is internal
> consistency within a highly restricted closed system of beliefs.
>
This is nonsense. The data dictionary is open to new observations.
ESPECIALLYT via the systyem of Sentehce Management which is covered in
section 9 of FRAGMENTS.
--
David Longley
David Yeo
On Fri, 7 Feb 1997, David Longley wrote:
> In article <Pine.SOL.3.91.970206184449.16269B-100000@tortoise>
> dyeo@tortoise "David Yeo" writes:
>
> > As I have alluded to in previous postings, this is where your sanitized
> > utopian rationalism invariably gets dirty. For Quine makes it clear that
> > theory touches the "real world" only at the edges.
> >
>
> There is NOTHING utopian or "rationalist" about what I have said. It
> is a thoroughly empiricist programme.
That is where you delude yourself. For all your pretences to empiricism,
your programme merely restates the rationalist ideal "... that reason has
precedence over other ways of acquiring knowledge or, more strongly, that
it is the unique path to knowledge" (Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy).
More kindly, your minimisation of the role (and perils) associated with
empiricist tenet that "the senses are primary with respect to knowledge"
(ibid) gives the false and even misleading impression that science is the
sterile logical manipulation of accepted propositions.
To show how rooted in rationalism your programme really is, contrast with
the view that induction is the essence of science, and that the deduction
merely tests the merits of those inductions.
> If you read it more carefully you will see that I am abvocating a
> system which requires one to analyse data put into a database.
If YOU read more carefully what *I* (and others) write, you will see that
this "analysis" involves more than merely counting events or assigning
probability. I suggest you read (and understand the implications of) the
literature on induction and concept formation before responding.
<marginally related extract from "Fragments" snipped>
> As to the "real world" at its edges, there is much more to "the
> real world" than what one immediately sees with ones unaided
> perceptual systems.
It is just this sort of comment that shows how much to the rationalist
end of the empiricist-rationalist continuum your philosophy lies.
>
> > The value one gives to a variable is a function of the values given to
> > other variables in the system. As such the value of a variable is only
> > one of a set of plausible values it can validly assume when the entire
> > "web of belief" is considered. This is not only the basis of Quine's
> > indeterminacy of translation hypothesis it is, I think, in large part the
> > rationale underlying the notion of situated cognition. Thus even if it
> > was possible (which, due to the number of propositions involved, it's not)
> > to apply your rationalist philosophy, different instantiations lead to
> > different (even contradictory) conclusions.
>
> You have run off on your own agenda here (as you have frequently quite
> lately). If you seriously wanty to discuss these issues I am happy to
> do so, but please make the effort to read what I have written in the
> first place.
Since we are debating a point, unless I mindlessly spew out quotes <g>,
how could what I say be anything other than my own agenda? This sort of
ad hominem "retort" merely evades the issues (which are based on Quine).
>
> >
> > In short, the best one can hope for in your rationalist utopia is internal
> > consistency within a highly restricted closed system of beliefs.
> >
>
> This is nonsense. The data dictionary is open to new observations.
Yes, but what is observed? And what is the network of assumptions which
supports (determines) the eventual classification of these observations?
These are important, indeed fundamental, questions your doctrine ignores.
Anders N Weinstein
>There is no ordinary use of propositional attitudes. There is
>ordinary use of ordinary language. Some people, who are committed to
>silly ideas, claim that this involves propositional attitudes. But
>there is no need to pay much attention to such silliness.
"Propositional attitude" can be used as a fairly neutral label. It is
taken to be a feature of everyday use of language that many
psychological verbs can be used with sentential complements to create
non-extensional contexts. Sentences using these verbs are then the
statements of "propositional attitudes". What's so silly about that?
I guess you mean a certain *theory*, the theory that these verbs
express relations to Platonic objects which are propositions. But one
does better to think of a proposition as an equivalence class of
synonymous potential utterances, where the standard of "synonymy" used
depends on the context and purposes of the ascription.
Anders N Weinstein
In article <5ddq4u$h...@ux.cs.niu.edu>, Neil Rickert <ric...@cs.niu.edu> wrote:
> Physical scientists mostly have little to do with
>philosophy, because the recognize that what philosophers write has
>little relevance to their work. Psychology will never be much of a
>science until it breaks its ties with academic philosophy.
"But you say that as if it's a negative thing" (Woody Allen in Annie Hall).
I can't help wondering why you think there should be a scientific
*psychology*? What's wrong with something like Davidson's anomalous
monism? According to that view, lawfulness is relative to a description,
and there are no laws under psychological (intentional) descriptions,
although the same events might fall under laws under other descriptions.
I say this because it seems to me the desire to try to emulate the
methods of the exact sciences is the *problem* in thinking about mental
states, not the solution. It seems to be a prime source of causal and
mechanistic thinking, of the confusion of normative epistemic relations
with causal ones, of the idea of "The Mind" as a queer sort of inner
component, perhaps even a cognitive *organ*, at any rate something with
a *design*; further, the belief that we relate to the everyday world by
way of representing it in a theory, the uncritical adoption of
scientistic jargon like "input" and "output", and so on. All of which
conceptions simply do not fit the nature of the subject being
described, at least in my view.
On a lesser note, immersion in the scientific milieu seems to be behind
the exaggerated significance once given to abstract formal game-playing
like solving logic puzzles, playing chess, or solving algebra
problems.
Just to be provocative: why not leave *scientific* explanations of
behavior to neuroscience and leave intentional reason-giving
explanations to common-sense or the interpretive disciplines? Why must
it be a region that the methods of *science* are fit to study?
It seems to me that what people call cognitive science is at it best
*not* mainly concerned with the explanation of human behavior in the
manner of physics. It is rather concerned with how manifest human
competences can be realized or implemented. You might have a cognitive
science in this sense but it does not really seem to be a psychology,
since most of it does not deal with mental states but rather with
sub-organismic states. It seems to be at least one level down from the
mental in a hierarchy of explanatory levels.
David Longley
In article <Pine.SOL.3.91.970207102226.10079A@tortoise>
dyeo@tortoise "David Yeo" writes:
> On Fri, 7 Feb 1997, David Longley wrote:
>
> > In article <Pine.SOL.3.91.970206184449.16269B-100000@tortoise>
> > dyeo@tortoise "David Yeo" writes:
> >
> > > As I have alluded to in previous postings, this is where your sanitized
> > > utopian rationalism invariably gets dirty. For Quine makes it clear that
> > > theory touches the "real world" only at the edges.
> > >
> >
> > There is NOTHING utopian or "rationalist" about what I have said. It
> > is a thoroughly empiricist programme.
>
> That is where you delude yourself. For all your pretences to empiricism,
> your programme merely restates the rationalist ideal "... that reason has
> precedence over other ways of acquiring knowledge or, more strongly, that
> it is the unique path to knowledge" (Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy).
Think about this carefully...... you are quite clearly IGNORING
what has been presented at length, and all because it doesn't fit
in with some preconceptioons you have. The whole programme I have
been outlining is premised on the FAILURE of the rationality
assumption (the fallibility of human reasoning). If it were not
for that, Dennett's "Intentional Stance" would not be in such bad
shape.
"During the early 1800s, when mathematical theories of
probability were only a little over a century old,
Pierre Laplace argued that probability theory was "only
good sense reduced to calculus" (Laplace, 1814/1951, p.
196). When theories of probability conflicted with the
intuitions of "reasonable men', mathematicians went back
to the drawing board and changed their theories: a clash
between probability theory and intuition meant the
theory was wrong, not the intuition (Dalton. 1980.
1988).
By the 1970s, this view of the relationship between
intuition and probability theory had been reversed. In
cognitive psychology, we began to view clashes between
intuition and probability theory as evidence that our
intuitions were wrong not the theory. According to
Kahneman and Tversky, for example, 'The presence of an
error of judgment is demonstrated by comparing people's
responses either with an established fact (e.g., that
the two lines are equal in length) or with an accepted
rule of arithmetic, Iogic, or statistics ' (1989. p.
123). In a series of seminal papers on inductive
reasoning, Kahneman and Tversky used evidence of such
clashes to reject the theory that good sense' embodied a
calculus of probability:
In making predictions and judgments under
uncertainty. people do not appear to follow
the calculus of chance or the statistical
theory of prediction. Instead. they rely on a
Emoted number of heuristics which sometimes
yield reasonable judgments and sometimes lead
to severe and systematic errors. (Kahneman &
Tversky 1973, p. 237)
The view that people's untutored intuitions do not
follow a calculus of probability has become the
conventional wisdom in psychology today. The literature
on human judgment under uncertainty has become a catalog
of "cognitive biases" and "normative fallacies", and
terms such as "base-rate fallacy", "overconfidence" and
"conjunction fallacy" have entered the lexicon of
cognitive psychology. In studies of Bayesian reasonings
for example, psychologists argue about whether people
ignore base rates entirely or sometimes use them
slightly, but not about whether untutored sub jects
follow the calculus of Bayes' rule. It is presumed that
they do not."
L Cosmides & J Tooby (1996)
Are Humans Good Intuitive Statisticians After All?
Rethinking Some Conclusions From The literature on
Judgment Under Uncertainty
Cognition 58, p 1-73
Now the above authors go on to look at some subtle aspects of this
issue which do NOT directly bear on the thesis I have advocated. What
you and others have to appreciate that there are SEVERAL themes which
I am pressing simultaneously here, which challenge some pretty well
ingrained ideas held by many contemporary psychologists.
I know this because I've had to teach the material for 8 years & have
seen students surprised by the literature when I have presented it.
You have GOT to entertain the possibility that COGNITION has been, and
still is misconceived by the status quo.
'The most characteristic thing about mental life, over
and beyond the fact that one apprehends the events of
the world around one, is that one constantly goes beyond
the information given'.
J Bruner (1957)
Going Beyond The Information Given
(in H Gulber and others (eds)
Contemporary Approaches to Cognition)
ON LOGICAL VS. INTUTIVE JUDGMENT
I thought the following may be of some interest (even if only as a
source of a few useful quotes). It is an extract from a piece of work
I put together last year as part of a large project entitled 'A System
Specification for PROfiling BEhaviour (PROBE)'. This extract, (taken
from Section C of Volume 1) is largely a review of the 'Clinical vs.
Actuarial issue in decision making, written primarily with applied
Criminological Psychologists working within the British Prison Service
in mind. It was also written to provide an infrastructure for
practising applied statistics - ie within the context of a large
relational database management system which focused on records of
behaviour.
EXTRACT
It will help if an idea of what we mean by 'clinical' and 'actuarial'
judgement is provided. The following is taken from a an early (Meehl
1954), and a relatively recent review of the status 'Clinical vs.
Actuarial Judgement' by Dawes, Faust and Meehl (1989):
'One of the major methodological problems of clinical
psychology concerns the relation between the "clinical"
and "statistical" (or "actuarial") methods of
prediction. Without prejudging the question as to
whether these methods are fundamentally different, we
can at least set forth the main difference between them
as it appears superficially. The problem is to predict
how a person is going to behave. In what manner should
we go about this prediction?
We may order the individual to a class or set of classes
on the basis of objective facts concerning his life
history, his scores on psychometric tests, behavior
ratings or check lists, or subjective judgements gained
from interviews. The combination of all these data
enables us to CLASSIFY the subject; and once having made
such a classification, we enter a statistical or
actuarial table which gives the statistical frequencies
of behaviors of various sorts for persons belonging to
the class. The mechanical combining of information for
classification purposes, and the resultant probability
figure which is an empirically determined relative
frequency, are the characteristics that define the
actuarial or statistical type of prediction.
Alternatively, we may proceed on what seems, at least,
to be a very different path. On the basis of interview
impressions, other data from the history, and possibly
also psychometric information of the same type as in the
first sort of prediction, we formulate, as a psychiatric
staff conference, some psychological hypothesis
regarding the structure and the dynamics of this
particular individual. On the basis of this hypothesis
and certain reasonable expectations as to the course of
other events, we arrive at a prediction of what is going
to happen. This type of procedure has been loosely
called the clinical or case-study method of prediction'.
P. E. Meehl (1954)
The Problem: Clinical vs. Statistical Prediction
'In the clinical method the decision-maker combines or
processes information in his or her head. In the
actuarial or statistical method the human judge is
eliminated and conclusions rest solely on empirically
established relations between data and the condition or
event of interest. A life insurance agent uses the
clinical method if data on risk factors are combined
through personal judgement. The agent uses the actuarial
method if data are entered into a formula, or tables and
charts that contain empirical information relating these
background data to life expectancy.
Clinical judgement should not be equated with a clinical
setting or a clinical practitioner. A clinician in
psychiatry or medicine may use the clinical or actuarial
method. Conversely, the actuarial method should not be
equated with automated decision rules alone. For
example, computers can automate clinical judgements. The
computer can be programmed to yield the description
"dependency traits", just as the clinical judge would,
whenever a certain response appears on a psychological
test. To be truly actuarial, interpretations must be
both automatic (that is, prespecified or routinized) and
based on empirically established relations.'
R. Dawes, D. Faust & P. Meehl (1989)
Clinical Versus Actuarial Judgement Science v243, pp
1668-1674 (1989)
As long ago as 1941, Lundberg made it clear that any argument between
those committed to the 'clinical' (intuitive) stance and those arguing
for the 'actuarial' (statistical) was a pseudo-argument, since all the
clinician could possibly be making his or her decision on was his or
her limited experience (database) of past cases and outcomes.
'I have no objection to Stouffer's statement that "if
the case-method were not effective, life insurance
companies hardly would use it as they do in
supplementing their actuarial tables by a medical
examination of the applicant in order to narrow their
risks." I do not see, however, that this constitutes a
"supplementing" of actuarial tables. It is rather the
essential task of creating specific actuarial tables. To
be sure, we usually think of actuarial tables as being
based on age alone. But on the basis of what except
actuarial study has it been decided to charge a higher
premium (and how much) for a "case" twenty pounds
overweight, alcoholic, with a certain family history,
etc.? These case-studies have been classified and the
experience for each class noted until we have arrived at
a body of actuarial knowledge on the basis of which we
"predict" for each new case. The examination of the new
case is for the purpose of classifying him as one of a
certain class for which prediction is possible.'
G. Lundberg (1941)
Case Studies vs. Statistical Methods - An Issue Based
on Misunderstanding. Sociometry v4 pp379-83 (1941)
A few years later, Meehl (1954), drawing on the work of Lundberg
(1941) and Sarbin (1941) in reviewing the relative merits of clinical
vs. statistical prediction (judgement) reiterated the point that all
judgements about an individual are always referenced to a class, they
are always therefore, probability judgements.
'No predictions made about a single case in clinical
work are ever certain, but are always probable. The
notion of probability is inherently a frequency notion,
hence statements about the probability of a given event
are statements about frequencies, although they may not
seem to be so. Frequencies refer to the occurrence of
events in a class; therefore all predictions; even those
that from their appearance seem to be predictions about
individual concrete events or persons, have actually an
implicit reference to a class....it is only if we have a
reference class to which the event in question can be
ordered that the possibility of determining or
estimating a relative frequency exists.. the clinician,
if he is doing anything that is empirically meaningful,
is doing a second-rate job of actuarial prediction.
There is fundamentally no logical difference between the
clinical or case-study method and the actuarial method.
The only difference is on two quantitative continua,
namely that the actuarial method is more EXPLICIT and
more PRECISE.'
P. Meehl (1954)
Clinical vs. Statistical Prediction:
A Theoretical Analysis and a Review of the Evidence
There has, unfortunately, over the years, been a strong degree of
resistance to the actuarial approach. It must be appreciated however,
that the technology to support comprehensive actuarial analysis and
judgment has only been physically available since the 1940s with the
invention of the computer. Practically speaking, it has only been
available on the scale we are now discussing since the late 1970s with
the development of sophisticated DBMS's (databases with query
languages based on the Predicate Calculus; Codd 1970; Gray 1984;
Gardarin and Valduriez 1989, Date 1992), and the development and mass
production of powerful and cheap microcomputers. Minsky and Papert
(1988) in their expanded edition of 'Perceptrons' (basic pattern
recognition systems) in fact wrote:
'The goal of this study is to reach a deeper
understanding of some concepts we believe are crucial to
the general theory of computation. We will study in
great detail a class of computations that make decisions
by weighting evidence.....The people we want most to
speak to are interested in that general theory of
computation.'
M. L. Minsky & S. A. Papert (1969,1990)
Perceptrons p.1
The 'general theory of computation' is, as elaborated elsewhere,
'Recursive Function Theory' (Church 1936, Kleene 1936, Turing 1937),
and is essentially the approach being advocated here as evidential
behaviourism, or eliminative materialism which eschews psychologism
and intensionalism. Nevertheless, as late as 1972, Meehl still found
he had to say:
'I think it is time for those who resist drawing any
generalisation from the published research, by
fantasising about what WOULD happen if studies of a
different sort WERE conducted, to do them. I claim that
this crude, pragmatic box score IS important, and that
those who deny its importance do so because they just
don't like the way it comes out. There are few issues in
clinical, personality, or social psychology (or, for
that matter, even in such fields as animal learning) in
which the research trends are as uniform as this one.
Amazingly, this strong trend seems to exert almost no
influence upon clinical practice, even, you may be
surprised to learn, in Minnesota!...
It would be ironic indeed (but not in the least
surprising to one acquainted with the sociology of our
profession) if physicians in nonpsychiatric medicine
should learn the actuarial lesson from biometricians and
engineers, whilst the psychiatrist continues to muddle
through with inefficient combinations of unreliable
judgements because he has not been properly instructed
by his colleagues in clinical psychology, who might have
been expected to take the lead in this development.
I understand (anecdotally) that there are two other
domains, unrelated to either personality assessment or
the healing arts, in which actuarial methods of data
combination seem to do at least as good a job as the
traditional impressionistic methods: namely, meteorology
and the forecasting of security prices. From my limited
experience I have the impression that in these fields
also there is a strong emotional resistance to
substituting formalised techniques for human judgement.
Personally, I look upon the "formal-versus-judgmental"
issue as one of great generality, not confined to the
clinical context. I do not see why clinical
psychologists should persist in using inefficient means
of combining data just because investment brokers,
physicians, and weathermen do so. Meanwhile, I urge
those who find the box score "35:0" distasteful to
publish empirical studies filling in the score board
with numbers more to their liking.'
P. E. Meehl (1972)
When Shall We Use Our Heads Instead of the Formula?
PSYCHODIAGNOSIS: Collected Papers (1971)
In 1982, Kahneman, Slovic and Tversky, in their collection of papers
on (clinical) judgement under conditions of uncertainty, prefaced the
book with the following:
'Meehl's classic book, published in 1954, summarised
evidence for the conclusion that simple linear
combinations of cues outdo the intuitive judgements of
experts in predicting significant behavioural criteria.
The lasting intellectual legacy of this work, and of the
furious controversy that followed it, was probably not
the demonstration that clinicians performed poorly in
tasks that, as Meehl noted, they should not have
undertaken. Rather, it was the demonstration of a
substantial discrepancy between the objective record of
people's success in prediction tasks and the sincere
beliefs of these people about the quality of their
performance. This conclusion was not restricted to
clinicians or to clinical prediction:
People's impressions of how they reason, and how well
they reason, could not be taken at face value.'
D. Kahneman, P. Slovic & A. Tversky (1982)
Judgment Under Conditions of Uncertainty: Heuristics and
Biases
Earlier in 1977, reviewing the Attribution Theory literature evidence
on individuals' access to the reasons for their behaviours, Nisbett
and Wilson (1977) summarised the work as follows:
'................................... there may be little
or no direct introspective access to higher order
cognitive processes. Ss are sometimes (a) unaware of the
existence of a stimulus that importantly influenced a
response, (b) unaware of the existence of the response,
and (c) unaware that the stimulus has affected the
response. It is proposed that when people attempt to
report on their cognitive processes, that is, on the
processes mediating the effects of a stimulus on a
response, they do not do so on the basis of any true
introspection. Instead, their reports are based on a
priori, implicit causal theories, or judgments about the
extent to which a particular stimulus is a plausible
cause of a given response. This suggests that though
people may not be able to observe directly their
cognitive processes, they will sometimes be able to
report accurately about them. Accurate reports will
occur when influential stimuli are salient and are
plausible causes of the responses they produce, and will
not occur when stimuli are not salient or are not
plausible causes.'
R. Nisbett & T. Wilson (1977)
Telling More Than We Can Know: Public Reports on Private
Processes
Such rules of thumb or attributions, are of course the intensional
heuristics studied by Tversky and Kahneman (1973), or the 'function
approximations' computed by neural network systems discussed earlier
as connection weights (both in artificial and real neural nets, cf.
Kandel's work with Aplysia).
Mathematical logicians such as Putnam (1975,1988); Elgin 1990 and
Devitt (1990) have long been arguing that psychologists may, as
Skinner (1971,1974) argued consistently, be looking for their data in
the wrong place. Despite the empirical evidence from research in
psychology on the problems of self report, and a good deal more drawn
from decision making in medical diagnosis, the standard means of
obtaining information for 'reports' on inmates for purposes of review,
and the standard means of assessing inmates for counselling is on the
basis of clinical interview. In the Prison Service this makes little
sense, since it is possible to directly observe behaviour under
relatively natural conditions of everyday activities. The clinical
interview, is still the basis of much of the work of the Prison
Psychologist despite the literature on fallibility of self-reports,
and the fallibility and unwitting distortions of those making
judgments in such contexts has been consistently documented within
psychology:
'The previous review of this field (Slovic, Fischoff &
Lichtenstein 1977) described a long list of human
judgmental biases, deficiencies, and cognitive
illusions. In the intervening period this list has both
increased in size and influenced other areas of
psychology (Bettman 1979, Mischel 1979, Nisbett & Ross
1980).'
H. Einhorn and R. Hogarth (1981)
The following are also taken from the text:
'If one considers the rather typical findings that
clinical judgments tend to be (a) rather unreliable (in
at least two of the three senses of that term), (b) only
minimally related to the confidence and amount of
experience of the judge, (c) relatively unaffected by
the amount of information available to the judge, and
(d) rather low in validity on an absolute basis, it
should come as no great surprise that such judgments are
increasingly under attack by those who wish to
substitute actuarial prediction systems for the human
judge in many applied settings....I can summarize this
ever-growing body of literature by pointing out that
over a very large array of clinical judgment tasks
(including by now some which were specifically selected
to show the clinician at his best and the actuary at his
worst), rather simple actuarial formulae typically can
be constructed to perform at a level no lower than that
of the clinical expert.'
L. R. Goldberg (1968)
Simple models or simple processes?
Some research on clinical judgments
American Psychologist, 1968, 23(7) p.483-496
'The various studies can thus be viewed as repeated
sampling from a uniform universe of judgement tasks
involving the diagnosis and predication of human
behavior. Lacking complete knowledge of the elements
that constitute this universe, representativeness cannot
be determined precisely. However, with a sample of about
100 studies and the same outcome obtained in almost
every case, it is reasonable to conclude that the
actuarial advantage is not exceptional but general and
likely to encompass many of the unstudied judgement
tasks. Stated differently, if one poses the query:
Would an actuarial procedure developed for a particular
judgement task (say, predicting academic success at my
institution) equal or exceed the clinical method?", the
available research places the odds solidly in favour of
an affirmative reply. "There is no controversy in social
science that shows such a large body of qualitatively
diverse studies coming out so uniformly....as this one
(Meehl J. Person. Assess, 50,370 (1986)".'
The distinction between collecting observations and integrating it is
further brought out vividly by Meehl (1989):
'Surely we all know that the human brain is poor at
weighting and computing. When you check out at a
supermarket you don't eyeball the heap of purchases and
say to the clerk, "well it looks to me as if it's about
$17.00 worth; what do you think?" The clerk adds it up.
There are no strong arguments....from empirical
studies.....for believing that human beings can assign
optimal weight in equations subjectively or that they
apply their own weights consistently.'
P. Meehl (1986)
Causes and effects of my disturbing little book
J Person. Assess. 50,370-5,1986
'Distributional information, or base-rate data, consist
of knowledge about the distribution of outcomes in
similar situations. In predicting the sales of a new
novel, for example, what one knows about the author, the
style, and the plot is singular information, whereas
what one knows about the sales of novels is
distributional information. Similarly, in predicting the
longevity of a patient, the singular information
includes his age, state of health, and past medical
history, whereas the distributional information consists
of the relevant population statistics. The singular
information consists of the relevant features of the
problem that distinguish it from others, while the
distributional information characterises the outcomes
that have been observed in cases of the same general
class. The present concept of distributional data does
not coincide with the Bayesian concept of a prior
probability distribution. The former is defined by the
nature of the data, whereas the latter is defined in
terms of the sequence of information acquisition.
The tendency to neglect distributional information and
to rely mainly on singular information is enhanced by
any factor that increases the perceived uniqueness of
the problem. The relevance of distributional data can be
masked by detailed acquaintance with the specific case
or by intense involvement with it........
The prevalent tendency to underweigh or ignore
distributional information is perhaps the major error of
intuitive prediction. The consideration of
distributional information, of course, does not
guarantee the accuracy of forecasts. It does, however,
provide some protection against completely unrealistic
predictions. The analyst should therefore make every
effort to frame the forecasting problem so as to
facilitate utilising all the distributional information
that is available to the expert.'
A. Tversky & D. Kahneman (1983)
Extensional Versus Intuitive Reasoning: The Conjunction
Fallacy in Probability Judgment Psychological Review
v90(4) 1983
'The possession of unique observational capacities
clearly implies that human input or interaction is often
needed to achieve maximal predictive accuracy (or to
uncover potentially useful variables) but tempts us to
draw an additional, dubious inference. A unique capacity
to observe is not the same as a unique capacity to
predict on the basis of integration of observations. As
noted earlier, virtually any observation can be coded
quantitatively and thus subjected to actuarial analysis.
As Einhorn's study with pathologists and other research
shows, greater accuracy may be achieved if the skilled
observer performs this function and then steps aside,
leaving the interpretation of observational and other
data to the actuarial method.'
R. Dawes, D. Faust and P. Meehl (1989)
ibid.
> More kindly, your minimisation of the role (and perils) associated with
> empiricist tenet that "the senses are primary with respect to knowledge"
> (ibid) gives the false and even misleading impression that science is the
> sterile logical manipulation of accepted propositions.
You are taking a DICTIOARY definition and misapplying it!
>
> To show how rooted in rationalism your programme really is, contrast with
> the view that induction is the essence of science, and that the deduction
> merely tests the merits of those inductions.
You're just playing with anarchronistic notions which you clearly
don't understand. Rationalism put great store by the natural
powers of human innate intuitive reasoning.
>
> > If you read it more carefully you will see that I am abvocating a
> > system which requires one to analyse data put into a database.
>
> If YOU read more carefully what *I* (and others) write, you will see that
> this "analysis" involves more than merely counting events or assigning
> probability. I suggest you read (and understand the implications of) the
> literature on induction and concept formation before responding.
Reading what you and a few others are writing is like watching
game show contestants spout out what they THINK are the correct
answers and then strangely DEMAND that their incorrect answers
are correct!.
Quite frankly, the responses are getting more and more ludicrous.
Don't presume to already know what I am saying - you might learn
something!
--
David Longley
Neil Rickert
In <5dfpdf$k...@usenet.srv.cis.pitt.edu> ande...@pitt.edu (Anders N Weinstein) writes:
>>There is no ordinary use of propositional attitudes. There is
>>ordinary use of ordinary language. Some people, who are committed to
>>silly ideas, claim that this involves propositional attitudes. But
>>there is no need to pay much attention to such silliness.
>"Propositional attitude" can be used as a fairly neutral label.
However, if it is being used in this neutral way, then the
consequences that trouble Longley need not be any concern.
Neil Rickert
In <5dfrkl$l...@usenet.srv.cis.pitt.edu> ande...@pitt.edu (Anders N Weinstein) writes:
>> Physical scientists mostly have little to do with
>>philosophy, because the recognize that what philosophers write has
>>little relevance to their work. Psychology will never be much of a
>>science until it breaks its ties with academic philosophy.
>"But you say that as if it's a negative thing" (Woody Allen in Annie Hall).
>I can't help wondering why you think there should be a scientific
>*psychology*?
Certainly there is some good scientific psychology that is done.
I don't personally see much point in a non-scientific psychology.
But if psychologists want it that way, and can earn a living doing
it, I don't suppose I would object, except to the extent that they
tried to pretend it was scientific where it was not.
> What's wrong with something like Davidson's anomalous
>monism? According to that view, lawfulness is relative to a description,
>and there are no laws under psychological (intentional) descriptions,
>although the same events might fall under laws under other descriptions.
But then that only suggests that psychology as a science should not
be making intentional descriptions central to what it does. That
still leaves plenty for psychologists to do.
>I say this because it seems to me the desire to try to emulate the
>methods of the exact sciences is the *problem* in thinking about mental
>states, not the solution.
I agree with that. But psychology can try to emulate sciences such
as biology and geology, rather than physics and chemistry. There is
plenty that can be done with classification of behaviors, measurement
of learning rates under varied conditions, etc. Indeed, a lot of
good scientific psychology is done in that way. If psychology wants
to be scientific, it should probably be cautious about doing anything
with 'mental states.'
>On a lesser note, immersion in the scientific milieu seems to be behind
>the exaggerated significance once given to abstract formal game-playing
>like solving logic puzzles, playing chess, or solving algebra
>problems.
I'll agree that exaggerated significance is given to these. Some of
that exaggerated significance can be found in AI, mathematics, and
physics, not to mention Longley-style behaviorism. I wonder how much
of this derives from the exaggerated importance that philosophy gives
to logic.
>Just to be provocative: why not leave *scientific* explanations of
>behavior to neuroscience
I think that by itself, neuroscience is not up to the task. The
neural system is too complex for the neuroscientists to have much
likelihood of complete success with their methods. They need help
from other disciplines.
> and leave intentional reason-giving
>explanations to common-sense or the interpretive disciplines?
I don't have any serious problems with that.
> Why must
>it be a region that the methods of *science* are fit to study?
If science cannot give a causal basis for their being intentional
reason-giving, then it has not completed its work. The intentional
reason-giving itself need not be science, but there should be a
scientific basis for intentional behavior.
>It seems to me that what people call cognitive science is at it best
>*not* mainly concerned with the explanation of human behavior in the
>manner of physics. It is rather concerned with how manifest human
>competences can be realized or implemented.
Or perhaps it is concerned with tapping into the purses of funding
agencies. (Or am I being too cynical).
> You might have a cognitive
>science in this sense but it does not really seem to be a psychology,
>since most of it does not deal with mental states but rather with
>sub-organismic states.
That would be ok with me. I suspect you are construing "psychology"
too narrowly. "Psychology" should refer to what psychologists do,
and consideration of sub-orgasmic states is some of what they do.
David Longley
In article <5dfrkl$l...@usenet.srv.cis.pitt.edu>
ande...@pitt.edu "Anders N Weinstein" writes:
> In article <5ddq4u$h...@ux.cs.niu.edu>, Neil Rickert <ric...@cs.niu.edu> wrote:
> > Physical scientists mostly have little to do with
> >philosophy, because the recognize that what philosophers write has
> >little relevance to their work. Psychology will never be much of a
> >science until it breaks its ties with academic philosophy.
>
> "But you say that as if it's a negative thing" (Woody Allen in Annie Hall).
>
> I can't help wondering why you think there should be a scientific
> *psychology*? What's wrong with something like Davidson's anomalous
> monism? According to that view, lawfulness is relative to a description,
> and there are no laws under psychological (intentional) descriptions,
> although the same events might fall under laws under other descriptions.
1) There should be a science of psychology (behaviour) because
behaviour is there like anything else which is subject to
scientific investigation. SCIENCE per se is just anoter workd for
KNOWING.
2) There are anachronisms which make clear thinking about these
matters difficult. We have learned over the past three hundred
years to develop a method which does better than our
adventitiiously conditioned "common sense", and we have, since
the beginning of this century, largely through teh work of the
positivists, developed scientific method to the level when it is
definitely to be trusted before intuition.
3) As a consequence, the study of how we make judgements WITHOUT
the support oif the extensional stance (SCIENCE) is really a bit
of a curiosity. Psychology, thus conceived is really either
cultural anthropology or ethology. Whatever BIOLOGICAL mechanisms
we, as animals, have developed as "wetware" looks, from empirical
ressearch to be prone to reasonably well understood biases. ANN
research is doing a good job at modelling these mechanisms, based
as it is on the mathematical model of the individual neurone and
its topological connections.
4) We need a science and technology of behaviour because there
are areas where we need to effecively manage and change
behaviour.
>
> I say this because it seems to me the desire to try to emulate the
> methods of the exact sciences is the *problem* in thinking about mental
> states, not the solution. It seems to be a prime source of causal and
> mechanistic thinking, of the confusion of normative epistemic relations
> with causal ones, of the idea of "The Mind" as a queer sort of inner
> component, perhaps even a cognitive *organ*, at any rate something with
> a *design*; further, the belief that we relate to the everyday world by
> way of representing it in a theory, the uncritical adoption of
> scientistic jargon like "input" and "output", and so on. All of which
> conceptions simply do not fit the nature of the subject being
> described, at least in my view.
This is a muddle, it is not a matter of EMULATING the exact
sciences, but APPLYING science per se. This is why I have devoted
so much time to the issue of quantification. If one does not
give ones variable determinate values, how on earth can one
establish determinate relations and laws? EXACT science is just
the application of science where predicates have truth values
(valid values).
The fact that some people claim that what they do is SCIENCE
does not make it so.....one thing that makes work in "cognitive"
science such nonsense is the widespread use of Null Hypothesis
statistical testing which does NOT SUPPORT POINT PREDICTION.
>
> On a lesser note, immersion in the scientific milieu seems to be behind
> the exaggerated significance once given to abstract formal game-playing
> like solving logic puzzles, playing chess, or solving algebra
> problems.
>
> Just to be provocative: why not leave *scientific* explanations of
> behavior to neuroscience and leave intentional reason-giving
> explanations to common-sense or the interpretive disciplines? Why must
> it be a region that the methods of *science* are fit to study?
>
Because we NEED a science of behaviour as I have said elsewhere.
> It seems to me that what people call cognitive science is at it best
> *not* mainly concerned with the explanation of human behavior in the
> manner of physics. It is rather concerned with how manifest human
> competences can be realized or implemented. You might have a cognitive
> science in this sense but it does not really seem to be a psychology,
> since most of it does not deal with mental states but rather with
> sub-organismic states. It seems to be at least one level down from the
> mental in a hierarchy of explanatory levels.
>
It's not Anders, it's just an enormous muddle.......we need to
abandon it in favour of applying science to behaviour and to do
this one needs predicates which are, as the term is designed to
indicate, truth functions. To see the problem, read the
following:
The Methodological Plight of Intensional (Cognitive) Psychology
Inductive inferential technology par excellence, ie Neyman-Pearson
hypothesis testing, or more accurately, conclusions drawn from using
that technology, has not been without its critics, and it is on this
point that we end this section. The conclusion to be drawn from the
following may well be that the most valuable contribution of
specialists are their skills in deductive rather than inductive logic.
Rather than training staff in the use of heuristics, we should perhaps
be providing them with specific formal roles, ie functions, which
require the practice of formal deductive skills. Here is how Meehl
(1978) reviewed the standard (inductive) methodological approach
adopted by most psychologists:
'I suggest to you that Sir Ronald has befuddled us,
mesmerised us, and led us down the primrose path. I
believe that the most universal reliance on merely
refuting the null hypothesis as the standard method for
corroborating substantive theories in the soft areas is
a terrible mistake, is basically unsound, poor
scientific strategy, and one of the worst things that
ever happened in the history of psychology'.
P. E. Meehl
Theoretical Risks and Tabular Asterisks:
Sir Karl and Sir Ronald and The Slow Progress of Soft Psychology.
J Consulting and Clinical Psychology 1978,45,4,p806-34
The contrasting approach of point prediction refutation is the
falsificationism of Sir Karl (Popper). In 1967, Meehl made the point
very clearly:
'I conclude that the effect of increased precision,
whether achieved by improved instrumentation and
control, greater sensitivity in the logical structure of
the experiment, or increasing the number of
observations, is to yield a probability approaching 1/2
of corroborating our substantive theory by a
significance test, *even if the theory is totally
without merit*. That is to say, the ordinary result of
improving our experimental methods and increasing our
sample size, proceeding in accordance with the
traditionally accepted method of theory-testing by
refuting a directional null hypothesis, yields a prior
probability = 1/2 and very likely somewhat above that
value by an unknown amount. It goes without saying that
successfully negotiating and experimental hurdle of this
sort can constitute only an extremely weak corroboration
of any substantive theory, quite apart from currently
disputed issues of the Bayesian type regarding the
assignment of prior probabilities to the theory itself.
So far as I am able to discern, this methodological
truth is either unknown or systematically ignored by
most behaviour scientists. I do not know to what extent
this is attributable to confusion between the
substantive theory T and the statistical hypothesis H1,
with the resulting mis-assignment of the probability (1-
p) complementary to the significance level p attained,
to the "probability" of the substantive theory; or to
what extent it arises from insufficient attention to the
truism that the point-null hypothesis H0 is [quasi]
always false. It seems unlikely that most social science
investigators would think in their usual way about a
theory in meteorology which "successfully predicted"
that it would rain on the 17th of April, given the
antecedent information that it rains (on the average)
during half the days in the month of April.
But this is not the worst of the story. Inadequate
appreciation of the extreme weakness of the test to
which a substantive theory T is subjected by merely
predicting a directional statistical difference d > 0 is
then compounded by a truly remarkable failure to
recognize the logical asymmetry between, on the one
hand, (formally invalid) "confirmation" of a theory via
affirming the consequent in an argument of form [T > H1,
H1, infer T], & on the other hand the deductively tight
REFUTATION of the theory *modus tollens* by a falsified
prediction, the logical form being: [T > H1, ~H1, infer
~T].
While my own philosophical predilections are somewhat
Popperian, I dare say any reader will agree that no
full-fledged Popperian philosophy of science is
presupposed in what I have just said. The destruction of
a theory *modus tollens* is, after all, a matter of
deductive logic; whereas that the "confirmation" of a
theory by its making successful predictions involves a
much weaker kind of inference. This much would be
conceded by even the most anti-Popperian "inductivist".
The writing of behavior scientists often reads as though
they assumed - what it is hard to believe anyone would
explicitly assert if challenged - that successful and
unsuccessful predictions are practically on all fours in
arguing for and against a substantive theory.'
P. E. Meehl (1967)
Theory Testing in Psychology and Physics: A Methodological Paradox.
Philosophy of Science, p.111-2 June 1967
Rozeboom (1960), Bolles (1962), Bakan (1966) and Lykken (1968) made
similar points throughout the 1960s. Cohen (1990), in a remarkably
well written paper reviewed the dire situation as follows:
'Over the years, I have learned not to make errors of
the following kinds:
When a Fisherian null hypothesis is rejected with an
associated probability of, for example, .026, it is
*not* the case that the probability that the null
hypothesis is true is .026 (or less than .05, or any
other value we can specify). Given our framework of
probability as long-run relative frequency -as much as
we might wish it to be otherwise - this result does not
tell us about the truth of the null hypothesis, given
the data. (For this we have to go to Bayesian or
likelihood statistics, in which probability is not
relative frequency but degree of belief.) What it tells
us is the probability of the data, given the truth of
the null hypothesis - which is not the same thing, as
much as it may sound like it.
If the p value with which we reject the Fisherian null
hypothesis does not tell us the probability that the
null hypothesis is true, it certainly cannot tell us
anything about the probability that the *research* or
alternative hypothesis is true. In fact, there *is* no
alternate hypothesis in Fisher's scheme: Indeed, he
violently opposed its inclusion by Neyman and Pearson.
Despite widespread misconceptions to the contrary, the
rejection of a given null hypothesis gives us no basis
for estimating the probability that a replication of the
research will again result in rejecting that null
hypothesis.
Of course, everyone knows that failure to reject the
Fisherian null hypothesis does not warrant the
conclusion that it is true. Fisher certainly knew and
emphasized it, and our textbooks duly so instruct us.
Yet how often do we read in the discussion and
conclusions of articles now appearing in our most
prestigious journals that "there is no difference" or
"no relationship"?
The other side of this coin is the interpretation that
accompanies results that surmount the .05 barrier and
achieve the state of grace of "statistical
significance". "Everyone" knows that all this means is
that the effect is not nil, and nothing more. Yet how
often do we see such a result to be taken to mean, at
least implicitly, that the effect is *significant*, that
is, *important, large*. If a result is *highly*
significant, say p<0.001, the temptation to make this
misinterpretation becomes all but irresistible.
Let's take a close look at this null hypothesis - the
fulcrum of the Fisherian scheme - that we so earnestly
seek to negate. A null hypothesis is any precise
statement about a state of affairs in a population,
usually the value of a parameter, frequently 0. It is
called a "null" hypothesis because it means "nothing
doing". Thus, "The difference in the mean score of U.S.
men and women on an Attitude Toward the U.N. scale is
zero" is a null hypothesis. "The product-moment r
between height and IQ in high school students is zero"
is another. "The proportion of men in a population of
adult dyslexics is .50" is yet another. Each is a
precise statement - for example, if the population r
between height and IQ is in fact .03, the null
hypothesis that it is zero is false. It is also false if
the r is .01, .001, or .000001!.
A little thought reveals a fact widely understood by
statisticians: The null hypothesis, taken literally (and
that's the only way you can take it in formal hypothesis
testing), is always false in the real world. It can only
be true in the bowels of a computer processor running a
Monte carlo study (and even then a stray electron may
make it false. If it is false, even to a tiny degree, it
must be the case that a large enough sample will produce
a significant result and lead to its rejection. So if
the null hypothesis is always false, what's the big deal
about rejecting it?'
J. Cohen (1990)
What I Have Learned (So Far)
American Psychologist, Dec 1990 p.1307-1308
Lykken (1968) had simply pointed out:
'Most theories in the areas of personality, clinical,
and social psychology predict no more than the direction
of a correlation, group difference, or treatment effect.
Since the null hypothesis is never strictly true, such
predictions have about a 50-50 chance of being confirmed
by experiment when the theory in question is false,
since the statistical significance of the result is a
function of the sample size.'
It is this contrast between testing, ie falsifying, a
theory or hypothesis by such a weak criterion as the
above, compared to making point predictions (testing
conjunctions of statements by modus tollens) as Popper
urges that led Meehl to write his paper on Theoretical
Risks and Tabular Asterisks in 1978, lamenting on the
slow progress in soft psychology which is the
consequence of not appreciating how weak a test the
Neyman-Pearson actually procedure is.'
But perhaps the worst of it that although Cohen (1962)
undertook a power (power=1-beta, where beta is the
likelihood of a type II error) survey of the articles in
the 1960 volume of the Journal of Abnormal and Social
Psychology in which he found that the median power to
detect a medium effect size under representative
conditions was only .46 (ie worse than chance),
Sedlmeier and Gigerenzer (1989) published a paper
entitled "Do studies of Statistical Power Have an Effect
on the Power of Studies." in which they replicated the
study on the 1984 Journal of abnormal Psychology and
found that the median power under the same conditions
was .44, a little worse than the original .46. Apart
from no improvement over the years, and providing
substantial empirical evidence for what Lakatos has to
say below, what does this mean? Cohen had this to say:
'When I finally stumbled onto power analysis, and
managed to overcome the handicap of a background with no
working math beyond high school algebra (to say nothing
of mathematical statistics), it was as if I had died and
gone to heaven. After I learned what noncentral
distributions were and figured out that it was important
to decompose noncentrality parameters into their
constituents of effect size and sample size; I realized
that I had a framework for hypothesis testing that had
four parameters; the alpha significance criterion, the
sample size, the population effect size, and the power
of the test. For any statistical test, any one of these
was a function of the other three. This meant for
example, that for a significance test of a product-
moment correlation, using a two-sided .05 alpha
criterion and a sample size of 50 cases, if the
population correlation is .30, my long-run probability
of rejecting the null hypothesis and finding the sample
correlation to be significant was .57, a coin flip. As
another example, for the same alpha=.05 and population
r=0.30, if I want to have .80 power, I could determine
that I needed a sample size of 85.'
J. Cohen (1990) p.1308
And this was Lakatos' earlier conclusion:
'The requirement of continuous growth...hits patched-up,
unimaginative series of pedestrian "empirical"
adjustments which are so frequent, for instance in
modern social psychology. Such adjustments may, with the
help of so-called "statistical techniques" make some
"novel" predictions and may even conjure up some
irrelevant grains of truth in them. But this theorising
has no unifying idea, no heuristic power, no continuity.
They do not add up to a genuine research programme and
are on the whole, worthless..
After reading Meehl (1967) and Lykken (1968) one wonders
whether the function of statistical techniques in the
social sciences is not primarily to provide a machinery
for producing phoney corroborations and thereby a
semblance of "scientific progress" where, in fact, there
is nothing but an increase in pseudo-intellectual
garbage.'
I Lakatos (1978) p88-9
Falsification and the methodology of scientific research programs
The Methodology of Scientific Research Programs: Imre Lakatos
philosophical papers (vol 1 pp 139-67) Eds. Worrall & Currie.
Guttman (1976;1985) has made similar remarks within the professional
statistical literature:
'Many practitioners have become disillusioned with
declarative inference, especially that of hypothesis
testing. For example, according to Carver 'statistical
significance testing has involved more fantasy than
fact. The emphasis on statistical significance over
scientific significance in education and research
represents a corrupt form of the scientific method.
Educational research would be better off if it stopped
testing its results for statistical significance'. The
'significance' testing referred to here is largely
according to Neyman-Pearson theory. We shall marshall
arguments against such testing, leading to the
conclusion that it be abandoned by all substantive
science and not just by educational research and other
social sciences which have begun to raise voices against
the virtual tyranny of this branch of inference in the
academic world.'
L. Guttman (1985)
The Illogic of Statistical Inference for Cumulative Science
Applied Stochastic Models and Data Analysis Vol 1, 3-10
Things have not changed much recently:
'It is not at all clear why researchers continue to
ignore power analysis. The passive acceptance of this
state of affairs by editors and reviewers is even more
of a mystery. At least part of the problem may be the
low level of consciousness about effect size: It is as
if the only concern about magnitude in much
psychological research is with regard to the statistical
test result and its accompanying p value, not with
regard to the psychological phenomenon under study.'
J. Cohen (1992)
A Power Primer: Quantitative Methods in Psychology:
Psychological Bulletin 112,1,155-159
If not via the classic, albeit 'hybrid' (Gigerenzer 1993), methodology
of inductive inferential hypothesis testing, what practical form can a
naturalistic science and technology of behaviour take? The solution
being urged in the PROBE project is a) historical, b) descriptive and
c) deductive. It requires psychologists to simply record and
extensionally analyse a history of behaviour (including 'de dicto'
content-clauses) categorised according to finite reference classes
(specific valid values) in conjunction with dates, times and
locations. In effect, to adopt a Quinean (1960,1992), Observation
Statement/Observation Categorical testing, and relational approach to
the analysis of behaviour. The majority of staff employed by the
Prison Service are already performing tasks which could be classed as
work in behaviour management. However, what is required is a service
in behaviour analysis using behaviour science and technology. If
psychologists limited themselves to recording and analysing behaviour
*as functions of the regime* in which they occur (Ross and Nisbett
1991), the Service would have an effective science and technology of
behaviour, and a clear framework for both recruitment and staff
training. In recent years, a good number of academics have recommended
some such approach. Cohen (1990) for instance had the following to
say:
'Despite my career-long identification with statistical
inference, I believe, together with such luminaries as
Meehl (1978), Tukey (1977), and Gigerenzer (Gigerenzer
and Murray 1987), that hypothesis testing has been
greatly overemphasized in psychology and in the other
disciplines that use it. It has diverted our attention
from crucial issues. Mesmerized by a single all-purpose,
mechanized, "objective" ritual in which we convert
numbers into other numbers and get a yes-no answer, we
have come to neglect close scrutiny of where the numbers
came from....So, how should I use statistics in
psychological research? First of all, descriptively.
John Tukey's (1977) Exploratory Data Analysis is an
inspiring account of how to effect graphic and numerical
analyses of the data at hand so as to understand them.
The techniques, although subtle in conception, are
simple in application, requiring no more than paper and
pencil (Tukey says if you have a hand-held calculator,
fine).......he manages to fill 700 pages with techniques
of "mere" description, pointing out in the preface that
the emphasis on inference in modern statistics has
resulted in a loss of flexibility in data analysis.'
J. Cohen (1990) American Psychologist Dec p.1310
As Gigerenzer (1987, 1988, 1993) has pointed out, some of the
bewilderment one experiences in teaching statistics mentioned at the
beginning of this volume can be accounted for by Latent Inhibition,
i.e. students have largely been *badly taught* as undergraduates. In
1986, Meehl proposed a thesis which he urges us to take literally:
'Thesis: Owing to the abusive reliance upon significance
testing - rather than point or interval estimation,
curve shape, or ordination - in the social sciences, the
usual article summarizing the state of the evidence on a
theory (such as appears in the Psychological Bulletin)
is nearly useless.....I think it is scandalous that
editors still accept manuscripts in which the author
presents tables of significance tests without giving
measures of overlap or such basic descriptive statistics
as might enable the reader to do rough computations,
from means and standard deviations presented, as to what
the overlap is.'
P. E. Meehl (1986)
What Social Scientists Don't Understand
in Metatheory in Social Science: Eds D. W. Fiske & R. A.
Shweder p.325
However, the main difficulty lies perhaps in the context specificity
of all learning, - the failure of Leibniz's Law within epistemic
contexts. I've illustrated a practical alternative in section 9 of
"Fragments" where the analytical and management technology is
declarative, criterion referenced, deductive, and extensional. Its
detailed presentation is provided in Volume 2 of "A System
Specification For PPROfiling BEhaviour" which almost exclusively
presents the findings as Tukey box plots and other descriptive
statistics.
--
David Longley
David Yeo
On Fri, 7 Feb 1997, David Longley wrote:
> In article <Pine.SOL.3.91.970207102226.10079A@tortoise>
> dyeo@tortoise "David Yeo" writes:
>
> > That is where you delude yourself. For all your pretences to empiricism,
> > your programme merely restates the rationalist ideal "... that reason has
> > precedence over other ways of acquiring knowledge or, more strongly, that
> > it is the unique path to knowledge" (Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy).
>
> Think about this carefully...... you are quite clearly IGNORING
> what has been presented at length, and all because it doesn't fit
> in with some preconceptioons you have. The whole programme I have
> been outlining is premised on the FAILURE of the rationality
> assumption (the fallibility of human reasoning). If it were not
> for that, Dennett's "Intentional Stance" would not be in such bad
> shape.
Where does the rationality assumption enter into anything I said? It is
increasingly apparent that you respond to keywords, not concepts.
You advocate a logic-based model of cognition. I contend that WHAT YOU
HAVE PRESENTED AT LENGTH (ad nausium) indicates that you maintain that
reason takes precedence over other ways of acquiring knowledge. As the
provided dictionary definition shows, this is rationalism (your pretences
to empiricism notwithstanding).
<snip>
>
> > More kindly, your minimisation of the role (and perils) associated with
> > empiricist tenet that "the senses are primary with respect to knowledge"
> > (ibid) gives the false and even misleading impression that science is the
> > sterile logical manipulation of accepted propositions.
>
> You are taking a DICTIOARY definition and misapplying it!
Specifically, in what way am I misapplying it? These obtuse rebuttals are
hardly the logical form of scientific thought to which you claim to aspire.
>
> >
> > To show how rooted in rationalism your programme really is, contrast with
> > the view that induction is the essence of science, and that the deduction
> > merely tests the merits of those inductions.
>
> You're just playing with anarchronistic notions which you clearly
> don't understand. Rationalism put great store by the natural
> powers of human innate intuitive reasoning.
I understand the notions advanced ... I advanced them. Now show how well
YOU understand them by refuting what I have said (if you can).
BTW which rationalists "put great store by the natural powers of human
innate intuitive reasoning"? In fact, is there such a thing as "innate
intuitive reasoning"? (what empirical evidence is there that it exists)
>
> >
> > > If you read it more carefully you will see that I am abvocating a
> > > system which requires one to analyse data put into a database.
> >
> > If YOU read more carefully what *I* (and others) write, you will see that
> > this "analysis" involves more than merely counting events or assigning
> > probability. I suggest you read (and understand the implications of) the
> > literature on induction and concept formation before responding.
>
> Reading what you and a few others are writing is like watching
> game show contestants spout out what they THINK are the correct
> answers and then strangely DEMAND that their incorrect answers
> are correct!.
>
> Quite frankly, the responses are getting more and more ludicrous.
> Don't presume to already know what I am saying - you might learn
> something!
Given the number of people you claim don't understand you and the volume
you post, you seem to have a serious problem expressing yourself clearly.
Rather that urging everyone to read, perhaps you should learn to write.
Neil Rickert
>2) There are anachronisms which make clear thinking about these
>matters difficult. We have learned over the past three hundred
>years to develop a method which does better than our
>adventitiiously conditioned "common sense", and we have, since
>the beginning of this century, largely through teh work of the
>positivists, developed scientific method to the level when it is
>definitely to be trusted before intuition.
No, that is quite wrong.
We have not developed any method which does better than common
sense. There are very limited domains where we have developed
methods which do better than an untrained common sense within that
domain. But even in those domains, experts depend on their educated
common sense. Positivists, as far as I can tell, have mostly
developed absurd "Just so" stories which do not come close to
describing the way scientists actually work.
>3) As a consequence, the study of how we make judgements WITHOUT
>the support oif the extensional stance (SCIENCE) is really a bit
>of a curiosity.
It should be more than "a bit of a curiosity." Although there can be
serious mistakes in judgement, overall human judgement is
surprisingly good. And expert judgement is important even within
science and mathematics. You cannot explain scientific judgement
entirely on the basis of the application of logic.
> Psychology, thus conceived is really either
>cultural anthropology or ethology.
A standard Longley slogan.
> Whatever BIOLOGICAL mechanisms
>we, as animals, have developed as "wetware" looks, from empirical
>ressearch to be prone to reasonably well understood biases.
"Reasonably well understood" could amount to a very weak claim.
> ANN
>research is doing a good job at modelling these mechanisms, based
>as it is on the mathematical model of the individual neurone and
>its topological connections.
ANN research has mostly dealt with toy problems which do not come
close to representing typical situations faced by actual organisms.
> This is why I have devoted
>so much time to the issue of quantification. If one does not
>give ones variable determinate values, how on earth can one
>establish determinate relations and laws?
A good question indeed, and one which your positivistic ideas cannot
answer. But science rarely has determinate values for its
variables. At best, its variables have a range of possible values
dictated by the imprecision of the method of measuring. If it
required determinate values to arrive at determinate laws, then we
ought not have any determinate laws.
>The fact that some people claim that what they do is SCIENCE
>does not make it so.....
Perhaps we should keep that principle in mind when Longley claims
that what he does is science.
Anders N Weinstein
In article <5dfv4c$r...@ux.cs.niu.edu>, Neil Rickert <ric...@cs.niu.edu> wrote:
>If science cannot give a causal basis for their being intentional
>reason-giving, then it has not completed its work. The intentional
>scientific basis for intentional behavior.
In some sense, of course. But the "causal basis" for a person's
intentional activity need not itself involve something like an *inner*
rational or intentional activity. In that sense the causal basis for
human conduct need not itself be mind-like in the least.
>That would be ok with me. I suspect you are construing "psychology"
>too narrowly. "Psychology" should refer to what psychologists do,
No point fighting over labels as long as the concepts are clear. But
the term "psychology" would seem to be a misnomer if the inquiry does
not have something to do with the mental.
>and consideration of sub-orgasmic states is some of what they do.
^^^^^^^^^^^^
Yes, I find a lot of it sub-orgasmic too, with the possible exception
of Masters and Johnson. :-)
My original term "sub-organismic" was intended to be a generalization to
other organisms of Dennett's "sub-personal".
andrew babian
In article <Pine.SOL.3.91.970207102226.10079A@tortoise>, David Yeo <dyeo@tortoise> says:
>Yes, but what is observed? And what is the network of assumptions which
>supports (determines) the eventual classification of these observations?
>These are important, indeed fundamental, questions your doctrine ignores.
That's the real trick, adding "new observations". just glossed over by
Longley. I suppose the hope was that if he said it briefly, it would
just be a small, negligible issue. Perhaps also, that if is only done
rarely under constant watch of the human supervisor, it wouldn't really
be a serious issue. And i guess in small enough batches, it wouldn't
even seem like "going beyond the information given" because the
observations would be so "obvious". But the creation of new features
is a critical part of any system of ideas.
andrew babian
A thought that is a little of topic, but relates to the question of
a system of purely existensional meaning vs intensional. Any system
in which meaning is not completely determined, but is open to
mistakes and misinterpretation also has the ability to more easily create
new and better meanings by mistake in an evolutionary sense. Pure
rationality is a closed system, and it is much more desirably to have
an easily expandable system than a totally accurate one. DNA that never
mutates is totally useless. Developing separate systems of correcting
mistakes is not even a bad price over having a useless closed system.
andrew babian
In article <5ded5f$i...@ux.cs.niu.edu>, ric...@cs.niu.edu (Neil Rickert) says:
>
>In <855285...@longley.demon.co.uk> Da...@longley.demon.co.uk (David Longley) writes:
>>In article <5de3e8$h...@ux.cs.niu.edu> ric...@cs.niu.edu "Neil Rickert" writes:
>
>>> >At present, I'm trying to EDUCATE, not "communicate".
>
>>> No, you are trying to indoctrinate. And at that you will never
>>> succeed.
>
>>Education, indoctrination..... it's basically the same thing.
>
> the difference between education and indoctrination.
>
Personally i try to be more understanding (which is different from
agreeing).
Longley has this specific goal: that psychologists should stop using
intensional language as a means of understanding. Intensional language
is usually not rigorous, has multiple interpreations, is confusing,
et whatever, and this lack of precision is especially when trying
to analyze an unknown complex system like the mind. Luckily, the lack
of precision is not as dangerous in other areas of discourse where
feedback from the objects in question usually makes reliable discourse
possible. Seen as a call to greater rigor in psychology, Longley's
stance has at least some reasonableness.
Longley, of course, suggest that a system of purely extensional meaning
is a more suitable system to develop as an ai than a system using
a more general system of meaning which includes an intensional
understanding. Perhaps as a noble attempt to simplify the problem
and create a more reliable ai this has value, But it seems clear
that this approach would miss a lot of what is really considered
intelligent.
For it really seems that Longley's proposal really has a problem with
new ideas, since it denies induction and "going beyond the information
given". There is a suggestion of adding new primitive variables,
but that seems reopen that question, and the full implications of that
subtle yet significant ability are not explored.
Anyway, there is a question of having system of meaning with great
rigor and precision versus one with adaptability and proneness to
error. Longley seems to believe that absolute rigor is the clear
and obvious choice, whereas, for some subtle reasons, it is not
the necessary choice, and it wouldn't even be my choice, but there
are really many options. But it seems that perhaps Longley is
consceving of some kind of 100% rigid system, which i would hold
is simply absurd, and probably not what he had in mind, anyway.
Just trying to make sense of it all. (and hoping some of those long
posts will go away)
Neil Rickert
In <5dgaq8$o...@usenet.srv.cis.pitt.edu> ande...@pitt.edu (Anders N Weinstein) writes:
>In article <5dfv4c$r...@ux.cs.niu.edu>, Neil Rickert <ric...@cs.niu.edu> wrote:
>>If science cannot give a causal basis for their being intentional
>>reason-giving, then it has not completed its work. The intentional
>>reason-giving itself need not be science, but there should be a
>>scientific basis for intentional behavior.
>In some sense, of course. But the "causal basis" for a person's
>intentional activity need not itself involve something like an *inner*
>rational or intentional activity. In that sense the causal basis for
>human conduct need not itself be mind-like in the least.
If the causal basis for intentional behavior is itself some type of
intentional activity, there would seem to be an infinite regress. So
that would be out in any case. I was thinking more like an
algorithmic basis in the neural activity.
>>That would be ok with me. I suspect you are construing "psychology"
>>too narrowly. "Psychology" should refer to what psychologists do,
>No point fighting over labels as long as the concepts are clear. But
>the term "psychology" would seem to be a misnomer if the inquiry does
>not have something to do with the mental.
Lots of words change their meanings over time. I don't see any point
in fighting the natural variations in language.
>>and consideration of sub-orgasmic states is some of what they do.
> ^^^^^^^^^^^^
>Yes, I find a lot of it sub-orgasmic too, with the possible exception
>of Masters and Johnson. :-)
Apologies for the typo.
Neil Rickert
>In article <5dfrkl$l...@usenet.srv.cis.pitt.edu>
> ande...@pitt.edu "Anders N Weinstein" writes:
> Let's take a close look at this null hypothesis - the
> fulcrum of the Fisherian scheme - that we so earnestly
> seek to negate. A null hypothesis is any precise
> statement about a state of affairs in a population,
> usually the value of a parameter, frequently 0.
That sort of thing is bad statistics. You should not take X=0 as the
null hypothesis. Instead you should take X<a (for example X<1.5).
And you should choose the a large enough that rejecting the null
hypothesis is meaningful. For example, if some behavioral therapy
were being tested for lowering blood pressure, then a decrease in
blood pressure of 1 is pretty meaningless. A decrease of 10 would be
quite important, and a decrease of 5 would at least be interesting.
So one should take a to be 10, or at least to be 5.
> A little thought reveals a fact widely understood by
> statisticians: The null hypothesis, taken literally (and
> that's the only way you can take it in formal hypothesis
> testing), is always false in the real world.
If the null hypothesis is always false, then a bad null hypothesis
has been used. If you take the null hypothesis to be X<a, where a is
chosen to give a meaningful hypothesis, then the problems Cohen
describes do not arise. Ideally, research journals should not accept
papers which abuse statistics in that way.
Neil Rickert
In <E597u...@cruzio.com> aba...@cruzio.com (andrew babian) writes:
>In article <5ded5f$i...@ux.cs.niu.edu>, ric...@cs.niu.edu (Neil Rickert) says:
>>Definition: A radical behaviorist -- is someone who cannot tell
>> the difference between education and indoctrination.
>Personally i try to be more understanding (which is different from
>agreeing).
Normally I would agree. But Longley does not reciprocate any attempt
to be more understanding.
>Longley has this specific goal: that psychologists should stop using
>intensional language as a means of understanding.
That would be fine, if Longley limited himself to working for that
goal. But I am not a psychologist, and I am not doing any of the
things that so trouble Longley. Yet he throws his tiresome rhetoric
at what I say whenever I disagree with anything he posts. He
apparently cannot tolerate disagreement with his opinion, yet is
unwilling to argue in support of his position. So he just repeats
his charges of intensional sin.
>For it really seems that Longley's proposal really has a problem with
>new ideas, since it denies induction and "going beyond the information
>given". There is a suggestion of adding new primitive variables,
>but that seems reopen that question, and the full implications of that
>subtle yet significant ability are not explored.
Yes, I think your criticism is on target.
Neil Rickert
In <5dgqsg$q...@usenet.srv.cis.pitt.edu> ande...@pitt.edu (Anders N Weinstein) writes:
>I don't think we get very far with a broad-brush claim like "people are
>irrational". Of course it is completely absurd to say that human beings
>are machines doomed by their hard-wired nature to be irrational. For
>then no human being would ever be able to transcend this nature to to
>formulate a normative theory of rationality. Yet the logicians and
>probability theorists who do so are after all human beings exercising
>their own innate human capabilities.
Yes, I agree.
Incidently I have tried to use a similar argument regarding free will
-- that if we do not have free will, it is difficult to see how we
could come up with useful theories of causality and determinism such
as are used to argue against free will. Somehow those who argue
against our having free will have trouble grasping that argument, so
they usually dismiss it.
>Still: an adding machine is more reliable than a human calculator,
Only to a certain extent. A human is more reliable at noting that
the result seems absurd, and so some data entry error must have crept
in.
> The work Longley cites claims human
>beings are poor intuitive statisticians; again, for certain sorts of
>problems -- where a normative theory is applicable and the calculations
>are feasible -- then carefully trained reasoners likewise know to
>distrust their own intuitions, and leave it to a machine to work out
>the result.
I agree with that. My disagreement with Longley, is that he wants to
assume that this applies to all reasoning.
>Now Leibniz famously hoped his envisaged universal logical language would
>enable human beings to resolve all their disputes in a similar fashion, by
>saying: "calculemos", let us calculate, and working out the consequences.
>Longley is clearly in the grip of some similar formalist fantasy.
Right. To some extent, symbolic AI has a similar problem.
>The problem, I think, is that Longley seems to think a complete formal
>normative theory of rationality is *already in our possession*.
Your diagnosis seems about right. Symbolic AI assumes the weaker "a
complete normative theory could, at least in principle, be in our
possession." I'm skeptical about even that.
> So now we
>have reached the Leibnizian utopia where all inferential problems are
>purely technical ones of applying this normative calculus to this or that
>domain. (BTW such a view was once called "logical positivism").
That is the implication of Longley's assumptions. I have suggested
that he is describing a static science, with no significant new
discovery.
>Now the main reason to study the history of AI in the critical manner
>of Dreyfus, it seems to me, is to understand why this formalist vision,
>fostered by immersion in the formal sciences, is so comically out of
>touch with the reality of AI's achievements (which responsible AI
>experts acknowledge as limited).
Agreed. I should add that there are plenty of computer scientists
who are as skeptical of AI's claims as is Dreyfus, although they
might not agree with everthing Dreyfus says. Similarly there is a
lot of skepticism about formalist methodologies such as proofs of
correctness of computer programs.
> Indeed AI does not seem to me to have moved off the origin on
>the common-sense knowledge problem, its progress has all been along
>an orthogonal dimension, I would say.
I would agree.
>Moreover, If Longley were correct, then inferential calculators
>programmed to operate the normative calculus should be replacing human
>experts in every field of human endeavor by virtue of their
>demonstrably superior performance. They would replace human experts as
>adding machines replaced clerks.
Your comment reminds me of a colloquium here about 10 years ago. The
speaker was a proponent of expert systems. His catchphrase was "we
have already automated clerical work. Now we are automating
intellectual work." After listening to his talk, I suggested that we
were merely automating the clerical aspects of intellectual work.
>Yet still my C++ compiler gives me 50 error messages due to one missed
>declaration, something I could diagnose and fix at a glance.
>I would be interested in trying to diagnose the problem better. By
>"the problem", I mean the mismatch between the formalist fantasy of an
>intelligent agent as a walking formal system operating a caclulus
>according to strict rules, and the actual reality of paradigmatically
>intelligent human conduct.
>Put another way, I would be interested in informed comments in response
>to the following question: given that we know so much about logic and
>formalization, why is human-level AI so beyond us?
My response:- It is because logic solves the wrong problem. Given a
formalized situation, and appropriate premises, logic is marvellous
at finding implications. But what is important about human
intelligence, is our ability to find suitable formalizations of
natural problems, and to propose appropriate premises. Logic does
not even touch that, and logic cannot begin until that step is
complete.
Or look at it in computational terms. Logic begins with symbolized
information, and uses clever methods to produce outputs. Human
intelligence can begin with an unsymbolized natural problem, and
devise a way of generating symbolized information. This is why human
intelligence and logic machines complement one another rather well.
To give a third response: human perception starts with raw reality,
and produces symbolized (conceptualized) representations of that
reality. The heart of intelligence is in the perceptual processes,
not in symbolic computational processes. And Marr's ideas about
perception don't help at all here. Gibson is not all that helpful
either.
My fourth answer: We are able to represent information symbolically,
or geometrically. A map is an example of geometric representation.
Descartes showed how to get from geometry to symbols. But Cartesian
coordinates only work because Euclidean geometry has a great deal of
mathematical regularity. Graphical or geometric methods are very
general, and work where there are no mathematically simple laws.
Symbolic methods only work when there are suitably simple laws which
are computationally tractable. Computers use symbolic methods, while
the human brain uses graphical methods.
Anders N Weinstein
In article <5ctdqk$c...@lastactionhero.rs.itd.umich.edu>,
>Neil Rickert (ric...@cs.niu.edu) wrote:
>: But with such a fuzzy definition of 'rational', you could never
>: really prove that people are irrational.
I don't think we get very far with a broad-brush claim like "people are
irrational". Of course it is completely absurd to say that human beings
are machines doomed by their hard-wired nature to be irrational. For
then no human being would ever be able to transcend this nature to to
formulate a normative theory of rationality. Yet the logicians and
probability theorists who do so are after all human beings exercising
their own innate human capabilities. And ultimately their own claims
must be validated by checking them against human intuitions.
Still: an adding machine is more reliable than a human calculator, and
a human being who has to do an arithmetic problem knows the value of
checking the answer by machine. The work Longley cites claims human
beings are poor intuitive statisticians; again, for certain sorts of
problems -- where a normative theory is applicable and the calculations
are feasible -- then carefully trained reasoners likewise know to
distrust their own intuitions, and leave it to a machine to work out
the result.
Now Leibniz famously hoped his envisaged universal logical language would
enable human beings to resolve all their disputes in a similar fashion, by
saying: "calculemos", let us calculate, and working out the consequences.
Longley is clearly in the grip of some similar formalist fantasy.
The problem, I think, is that Longley seems to think a complete formal
normative theory of rationality is *already in our possession*. It is
pretty completely captured by the Predicate Calculus, the probability
caclulus and decision theory. (Longley doesn't quite understand the
need for "inductive logic", but we might add some of that). So now we
have reached the Leibnizian utopia where all inferential problems are
purely technical ones of applying this normative calculus to this or that
domain. (BTW such a view was once called "logical positivism").
Now the main reason to study the history of AI in the critical manner
of Dreyfus, it seems to me, is to understand why this formalist vision,
fostered by immersion in the formal sciences, is so comically out of
touch with the reality of AI's achievements (which responsible AI
experts acknowledge as limited). We understand logic and symbolic
computation pretty damned well, we have quite powerful computing
engines, and some great but circumscribed achievements of
formalization, like automatic chess-move-finding calculators that can
emit expert-level output in real time. Yet nothing AI has produced by
applying this formalist fantasy has the survival ability of a hamster
or the linguistic competence or common-sense knowledge of a small
child. Indeed AI does not seem to me to have moved off the origin on
the common-sense knowledge problem, its progress has all been along
an orthogonal dimension, I would say.
Moreover, If Longley were correct, then inferential calculators
programmed to operate the normative calculus should be replacing human
experts in every field of human endeavor by virtue of their
demonstrably superior performance. They would replace human experts as
adding machines replaced clerks.
Yet still my C++ compiler gives me 50 error messages due to one missed
David Longley
<DY>
>
> Given the number of people you claim don't understand you and the volume
> you post, you seem to have a serious problem expressing yourself clearly.
> Rather that urging everyone to read, perhaps you should learn to write.
>
What......me and everyone else that I cite <g>.......?
--
David Longley
David Longley
In article <5dfssu$r...@ux.cs.niu.edu> ric...@cs.niu.edu "Neil Rickert" writes:
> In <5dfpdf$k...@usenet.srv.cis.pitt.edu> ande...@pitt.edu (Anders N Weinstein)
> writes:
> >In article <5dcvj0$b...@ux.cs.niu.edu>, Neil Rickert <ric...@cs.niu.edu> wrote:>
> >>There is no ordinary use of propositional attitudes. There is
> >>ordinary use of ordinary language. Some people, who are committed to
> >>silly ideas, claim that this involves propositional attitudes. But
> >>there is no need to pay much attention to such silliness.
>
> >"Propositional attitude" can be used as a fairly neutral label.
>
> However, if it is being used in this neutral way, then the
> consequences that trouble Longley need not be any concern.
>
>
Positive? negative? neutral? - What logical notions are these?
--
David Longley
David Longley
Take some time to think about this carefully.....It comes down to
giving that which one is interested in analysing a determinate
value. That's the basic point of extensionalism. One has to work
with valid values of variables - if one doesn't, there's so much
slippage that it won't be clear what one's talking about.
Natural language slips over what one is talking about to a very
large extent, and it does so for all sorts of reasons - all of
which are anathema to science.
--
David Longley
David Longley
In article <5dgaq8$o...@usenet.srv.cis.pitt.edu>
ande...@pitt.edu "Anders N Weinstein" writes:
> In article <5dfv4c$r...@ux.cs.niu.edu>, Neil Rickert <ric...@cs.niu.edu> wrote:
> >If science cannot give a causal basis for their being intentional
> >reason-giving, then it has not completed its work. The intentional
> >reason-giving itself need not be science, but there should be a
> >scientific basis for intentional behavior.
>
> In some sense, of course. But the "causal basis" for a person's
> intentional activity need not itself involve something like an *inner*
> rational or intentional activity. In that sense the causal basis for
> human conduct need not itself be mind-like in the least.
>
> >That would be ok with me. I suspect you are construing "psychology"
> >too narrowly. "Psychology" should refer to what psychologists do,
>
> No point fighting over labels as long as the concepts are clear. But
> the term "psychology" would seem to be a misnomer if the inquiry does
> not have something to do with the mental.
Exactly....and unless we can make what we are talking about
quantifiable into (the value of bound variables), what hope can
there be for a science of it?
--
David Longley
David Longley
> In article <Pine.SOL.3.91.970207102226.10079A@tortoise>, David Yeo
> <dyeo@tortoise> says:
> >
> >Yes, but what is observed? And what is the network of assumptions which
> >supports (determines) the eventual classification of these observations?
> >These are important, indeed fundamental, questions your doctrine ignores.
>
> That's the real trick, adding "new observations". just glossed over by
> Longley. I suppose the hope was that if he said it briefly, it would
> just be a small, negligible issue. Perhaps also, that if is only done
> rarely under constant watch of the human supervisor, it wouldn't really
> be a serious issue. And i guess in small enough batches, it wouldn't
> even seem like "going beyond the information given" because the
> observations would be so "obvious". But the creation of new features
> is a critical part of any system of ideas.
>
I have devoted a whole section of "Fragments" to this issue. It
is in fact the most sophisticated and active part of the whole
programme:
Delinquency, *simply construed*, is a failure to co-operate with the
some social requirements. As an alternative to a purely custodial
model, the following outlines a positive incentive approach to
structuring time in custody. It is designed to map on to all elements
of inmate programmes, providing a systematic way of collating and
managing progress as reported by experts, which is analysed
objectively to produce reports based on actual behaviour rather than
casual judgement. It is, by design, a system which will allow
management of behaviour to be based on individual merit and
performance.
Regime & Sentence Management as a POSITIVE Behaviour Management System
An R & D Proposal
Introduction
Research between 1989 and 1991 led to the conclusion that Sentence
Planning will require such a fundamental, systematic, and nationally
implemented information base and that this can most efficiently be
derived from the management of inmate activities throughout the
estate. According to this view, Sentence Planning needs to be
supported by a system of 'Sentence Management' which focuses on the
structure and functions of available and potential inmate activities.
In this way, Sentence Planning would be integrated with the Regime
Monitoring System, effectively developing within the framework of
'accountable regime;. This implies that the most effective way to
launch Sentence Planning is not as an additional task grafted onto the
regime, but as a natural development and improvement of inmate review
and reporting practices.
The system specified below is efficient and cost-effective with the
potential infrastructure to support and integrate several initiatives
which have begun since the re-organisation. Although not covered in
this note, two of the most significant are Prisoners Pay, and The
Place of Work in the Regime.
In broad outline, what is proposed has much in common with the
Department of Education and Science's 1984 initiative Records of
Achievement and has the benefit of using this nationally implemented
programme in behaviour assessment as a source of best practice. Whilst
the initiative outlined below is an independent development which took
its cue from recommendations published in the 1984 HMSO CRC Report,
from which the PROBE (PROfiling Behaviour) project developed, results
of R&D work over the past 6 years are reassuringly compatible with the
work done throughout the English education system during the same
period. In this context, what is outlined below focuses on what the
Department of Education and Science refered to as Formative Profiling
(continuous assessment and interactive profiling involving the inmate
throughout his career) rather than Summative Profiling (which provides
a review somewhat akin to the parole review, or more locally, Long
Term Reviews). In all that follows, the recommendations of the 1984
HMSO CRC Report are seen to be integrally related.
Broad Outline
The system, for national implementation, across all sentence groups
can be specified as a 5 step cycle:
1. Inmates are observed under natural conditions of activities.
2. Observed behaviour is rated and recorded (continuous assessment).
3. Profiles of behaviour become the focus for interview dialogues/contracts.
4. Inmates are set targets based on the behaviour ratings/observations.
5. Elements of problem behaviour are addressed by apposite allocation.
Some immediate comments follow.
With little intrusion into the running of Inmate Activities, behaviour
which is central to these activities can be monitored and recorded
more directly to identify levels of inmate competence across the range
of activities. The records of competence would guide the setting and
auditing of individual targets.
Targets will be identified within the Activity Areas supported by the
regime. This requires continuous assessment of inmates within
activities, and the setting of targets based on a set of possible
attainments drawn from those activities. Such attainment profiles
would serve to identify and audit targets and would enable allocation
staff to judge the general standard of attainment within and across
activities, thereby enhancing both target-setting and auditing.
The frequency of behaviour assessment within activities and routines,
and the auditing of the whole process must be driven by what is
practicable. The system requires assessment of attainment to be
undertaken monthly, in order to ensure standardisation in collection
of Regime Monitoring data. Targets set are to be based on observations
of behaviour which are already fundamental to the running of
activities and routines, and the progress in achieving targets will be
discussed with the inmate, guiding allocation to activities within and
between prisons. These steps are in accordance with the policy
guidelines. Whilst the targets set will be individual, and when
collated will comprise a set of short and long term objectives
defining the 'Sentence Plan', they will fall into some broad areas
(social behaviour, health, performance at work, and so on).
By making more systematic use of the information which is already
being used to select, deselect and manage inmates within activities
and with respect to routines, Sentence Planning will become a natural
co-ordinating feature of the prison's regime.
Specific programmes for problem behaviour (e.g. sex offenders) can be
seen as particular inmate activities with their own, more intensive
assessment, activity and target setting procedures explicitly designed
to address problem behaviour. Development of, and allocation to such
programmes will be integrated with other activities. These programmes
are seen as both drawing on and informing 'Risk Assessment'.
Specific Details
Fundamental to the system outlined above is the fact that classes of
behaviour (as opposed to properties of inmates) are taken as the basic
data. These classes of behaviour are demanded by activities and
routines, and should serve as basic data for Regime Monitoring.
Observations of inmate behaviour are observations of an inmate's level
of attainment with respect to characteristics that staff responsible
for the activities have specified in advance as essential to the task.
Activities and routines have a structure quite independent of the
particular inmates who are subject to the demands of activities and
routines. Perhaps the defining feature of Sentence Management is that
it comprises a process of objective continuous assessment, where what
are assessed are levels of attainment with respect to pre-set aims and
objectives, themselves defining activities and routines. Since the
focus is on classes of behaviour rather than attributes of inmates,
all of the assessments are of progress with respect to pre-determined
classes of behaviour which are requirements of activities and
routines.
Attainment Areas
Each activity area can be specified in terms of classes of behaviour
which the activity requires. These classes of behaviour are basic
skill areas which are fundamental to the nature of the activity, which
in combination account for activities being distinguishable from each
other. These basic skill areas will be referred to as Attainment
Areas. They need to be carefully selected as they will be taken to be
the defining features of the activity. From this point of view, any
part of the daily routines should be specifiable in these terms, and
staff should be encouraged to think about how best their area of
inmate supervision could be so sub-classified. Whilst the
identification of Attainment Areas may, at first glance seem a
demanding or unfamiliar task, it is soon appreciated that the
identification of Attainment Areas is in fact a pre-requisite to the
establishment of any activity in prison, be it an education course,
industrial activity or simple housework.
Attainment Criteria
Each Attainment Area can be further classified into up to five levels
of attainment. These are levels of the same skill, progressing from a
low level of competence to a high level of competence. These must be
described in a series of direct statements, specifying particular
skills of graded sophistication which can be observed, and checked as
having been observed. Levels of competence are therefore NOT to be
specified as a scale from LOW to HIGH, but rather as a series of
specific, and observable behaviours. These are the Attainment Criteria
of the activity or routine. Just as Attainment Areas are naturally
identified by staff who design activities, so too are Attainment
Criteria natural pre-requisites for day to day supervision.
Competence Checklists (SM-1s)
For each set of Attainment Areas the Attainment Criteria comprises a
COMPETENCE CHECKLIST, against which performance can be monitored.
Competence Checklists are referred to within the system as SM-1s.
Record of Targets (SM-2s)
Targets are identified using a second form, referred to as SM-2.
Targets will generally be identified from the profile of Attainment
Criteria within Activities, (Competence Checklists being completed on
a monthly basis provide a record of progress). But Targets may also be
identified outside of standard activities, based on an analysis of
what is available within the Regime Digest, or Directory which will be
a natural product of the process of defining Attainment Areas and
Attainment Criteria, and the printing of the Competence Checklists
The two forms, ATTAINMENTS (SM-1) and RECORD OF TARGETS (SM-2)
comprise the building blocks of the system. These forms are now
available as final drafts (and will incidentally be machine readable).
Both forms are designed to be stored in the third element of the
system, the inmate's Sentence Management Dossier. This is simply a
'pocket file' to hold the sets of the two forms, and the proposal is
that the Head of Inmate Activities and his staff be responsible for
maintaining the system.
Through an analysis of the SM-1s both within and across activity
areas, Heads of Inmate Activities would have a better picture of the
structure of the activities, and of the relative progress of inmates
within activities. With inmates actively involved in the process of
target negotiation, and with the system being objective, problems of
confidentiality so characteristic of subjective reports, would become
substantially reduced. Whilst the system can run as a paper system,
once computerised, the data collected via SM-1s and SM-2s will form
the basis of automated reports.
Relationship to the Regime Monitoring System
The proposed procedure for recording Sentence Management is intimately
related to Regime Monitoring, as it is largely based on the same
Reporting Points within Activity areas making up the RMS. This will be
even more apparent when regime Monitoring embraces more activities
that it does at present. It has the promise also of providing the more
qualitative measure of regime delivery in that the record of
attainments will be an objective record of achievement.
The design of SM-1 form enables the capture of the basic data required
for maintenance of the Regime Monitoring System (RMS). The form
provides an efficient means of collecting such data since each SM-1
records an inmate's daily attendance in the activity via a 1-28 day
register covering each morning and afternoon session attended.
Since the form is designed to record attendance and attainment data
each month, it implicitly allows the number of hours to be calculated
for each inmate, each reporting point, and at a higher level of
aggregation to produce data on the number of inmates for each activity
area, sub-establishment and so on.
In terms of paperwork, this is not a demanding task, and in
capitalising on what is already done at Reporting Points (where daily
logs are maintained already) it promises to be an efficient and
accurate way of collecting the required data.
For a Reporting Point with 15 inmates, the system would require 15 SM-
1s to be completed and returned to the Head of Inmate Activities each
month. As mentioned above, the design of the forms renders them
potentially able to be processed by an Optical Mark Reader, allowing
the data to be converted to computer storable data, thereby making the
whole system easier to manage and audit.
Fundamental to the design of the SM-1 is the fact that the Attainment
Criteria are generated by staff who will be using them, each SM-1
being tied specifically to an activity. The content of the form is
'user definable'.
More than one SM-1 form will be completed per inmate per month since
the inmate will be assessed at more than one Reporting Point. To
record behaviour in daytime activities and domestically on the wings,
one SM-1 would be completed each month as a record of attainment at
the allocated work/education Reporting Point, and another on the
wings, the latter providing an assessment of the inmate's level of co-
operation/contribution to the general running of the routines, though
not necessarily contributing to the overall Regime Monitoring figures.
Although inextricably linked to the Regime Monitoring System (RMS),
the focus is at a more fundamental level of the regime - the recording
of attainment levels of individual inmates - with the RMS data being
logically compiled or deduced from those individual assessments. In
defining Attainment Areas and Attainment Criteria by staff supervising
the Reporting Point, in consultation with the HIA, the SM-1s and SM-2s
would allow staff to define the nature and objectives of the Reporting
Points, storing them within the proposed Sentence Management System to
serve as the basic statements for any subsequent computer profiling
of the inmate's progress as well as serving as the basic material for
a local and national directory or digest of activities and their
curricula.
A significant benefit is in the potential for automatic machine-
generated reports of inmate progress. These could save many thousands
of officer-hours. The practicality of such reports is already being
demonstrated in HMP Parkhurst.
Coverage of Non-Standard Inmate Activities
The SM-1 form is designed to allow all staff to formally assess any
programme of activity in a standard manner (ie, marking whether
behaviour in the activity matches the attainment criteria on the
Competence Checklist). This form has provision to record a Checklist
Code, along with the activity and reporting point identifier. This
Checklist Code will allow more than one checklist to be generated for
each Reporting Point if the extent or modular nature of the activity
requires multiple checklists for comprehensive assessment of the
skills which the activity offers.
Similarly, the SM-2 form allows targets to be identified by staff both
within an activity, or from a knowledge of what the regime has on
offer. The Head of Inmate Activities, in building a library of
Attainment Areas and Attainment Criteria, (the Regime Digest, or
Directory) will be able to provide interested staff, such as Review
boards, with a digest of what activities are available and how they
are broken down by attainment areas and criteria.
In this way, short duration intervention programmes can be included in
the 'Sentence Management Dossier' in the same way as are the more
formal activities. Formal activities (as currently defined within the
Regime Monitoring System) are so regarded because they tend to occupy
large groups of inmates in activities which are basically structured
to have inmates participate for a relatively fixed period (8 weeks to
several years).
Using this form of assessment, the staff wishing to run ad hoc
programmes, occupying either small groups or single inmates in short
modules would be tasked with defining Attainment Areas and Attainment
Criteria as a sine qua non for running the proposed programme,
submitting the proposal to the HIA to be considered as an element of
the regime.
The fact that each SM-1 has an attendance register will permit the
system to capture the extent of all activity throughout the regime,
thereby contributing to a more comprehensive profile of activity
within each establishment and the estate in general. The Head of
Inmate Activies' task would more clearly become one of co-ordinating
Attainment Areas to bring about a balanced and appropriately monitored
regime, and the data would serve as a sound information base from
which staff could build Sentence Plans.
--
David Longley
David Longley
In article <5dgqsg$q...@usenet.srv.cis.pitt.edu>
ande...@pitt.edu "Anders N Weinstein" writes:
>
> Put another way, I would be interested in informed comments in response
> to the following question: given that we know so much about logic and
> formalization, why is human-level AI so beyond us?
>
Define your problem effectively and it will be implemented <G>...
If you don't, what makes you think it's intelligent?
--
David Longley
David Longley
> Longley has this specific goal: that psychologists should stop using
> intensional language as a means of understanding. Intensional language
> is usually not rigorous, has multiple interpreations, is confusing,
> et whatever, and this lack of precision is especially when trying
> to analyze an unknown complex system like the mind. Luckily, the lack
> of precision is not as dangerous in other areas of discourse where
> feedback from the objects in question usually makes reliable discourse
> possible. Seen as a call to greater rigor in psychology, Longley's
> stance has at least some reasonableness.
>
> Longley, of course, suggest that a system of purely extensional meaning
> is a more suitable system to develop as an ai than a system using
> a more general system of meaning which includes an intensional
> understanding. Perhaps as a noble attempt to simplify the problem
> and create a more reliable ai this has value, But it seems clear
> that this approach would miss a lot of what is really considered
> intelligent.
>
> For it really seems that Longley's proposal really has a problem with
> new ideas, since it denies induction and "going beyond the information
> given". There is a suggestion of adding new primitive variables,
> but that seems reopen that question, and the full implications of that
> subtle yet significant ability are not explored.
>
> Anyway, there is a question of having system of meaning with great
> rigor and precision versus one with adaptability and proneness to
> error. Longley seems to believe that absolute rigor is the clear
> and obvious choice, whereas, for some subtle reasons, it is not
> the necessary choice, and it wouldn't even be my choice, but there
> are really many options. But it seems that perhaps Longley is
> consceving of some kind of 100% rigid system, which i would hold
> is simply absurd, and probably not what he had in mind, anyway.
>
> Just trying to make sense of it all. (and hoping some of those long
> posts will go away)
>
It has nothing to do with a penchant for precision for its own
sake, rather it's a recognition that unless one knows what one is
talking about, one isn't saying anything of substance at all.
That's what "quantifying in" is all about. Mind you - if you read
the long posts - you'd realise that......
--
David Longley
David Longley
> normative theory of rationality is *already in our possession*. It is
> pretty completely captured by the Predicate Calculus, the probability
> caclulus and decision theory. (Longley doesn't quite understand the
> need for "inductive logic", but we might add some of that). So now we
> have reached the Leibnizian utopia where all inferential problems are
> purely technical ones of applying this normative calculus to this or that
> domain. (BTW such a view was once called "logical positivism").
As you know, I regard all claims that Logical Empiricism was a
failure to be no more than propaganda. I regard Quine's work as
being the most radical continuation of the movement (something he
himself says).
Rationality is an ever growing set of operations or behaviours,
people can be taught some of those operations, computers can be
programmed in a similar way - but the range of operations is so
large that it's probably just a hopeless dream to think that it
can all be instantiated.
There can be no "complete formal normative theory" so long as we
have an unending quest as science. There are many other
impediments to its effective use. In any area, one needs teams of
well disciplined scientists to put any of the technology (AI) we
have into practice. For better or worse, scientists still tend
not to have a lot of political clout......but it's changing....
--
David Longley
David Yeo
No ... just you. <g>
David Yeo
On 7 Feb 1997, Neil Rickert wrote:
> ANN research has mostly dealt with toy problems which do not come
> close to representing typical situations faced by actual organisms.
IMO one of the best replies to the "ANN's can only deal with toy problems"
claim comes from none other than Minsky and Papert (1988):
Perhaps the scale of toy problems is that on which, in physiological
actuality, much of the functioning of intelligence operates. ... We have
used the phrase "society of mind" to refer to the idea that mind is made
up of a large number of components, or "agents", each of which would
operate on the scale of what, if taken in isolation, would be little more
than a toy problem. ... In many situations humans clearly show abilities
far in excess of what could be learned by simple, uniform networks. But
when we take those skills apart, or try to find out how they are learned,
we expect to find that they were made by processes that somehow combined
the work (already done in past) of many smaller agencies, none of which,
separately, need work on scales much larger than do those in PDP.
("Epilog: the new connectionism" in "Neurocomputing 2", p. 591)
----------------
Neil Rickert
>With little intrusion into the running of Inmate Activities, behaviour
>which is central to these activities can be monitored and recorded
>more directly to identify levels of inmate competence across the range
>of activities. The records of competence would guide the setting and
>auditing of individual targets.
Right. But are these activities monitored by AI systems which make
completely automated reports, or are the records entered by humans
with all of their intensional biases. If the latter, your whole
program would seem to be built on the human intensional judgements
that you so often decry.
David Yeo
On Fri, 7 Feb 1997, andrew babian wrote:
> In article <Pine.SOL.3.91>, David Yeo <dyeo@tortoise> says:
> >
> >On Fri, 7 Feb 1997, David Longley wrote:
> >
> >> This is nonsense. The data dictionary is open to new observations.
> >
> >Yes, but what is observed? And what is the network of assumptions which
> >supports (determines) the eventual classification of these observations?
> >These are important, indeed fundamental, questions your doctrine ignores.
>
> That's the real trick, adding "new observations". just glossed over by
> Longley. I suppose the hope was that if he said it briefly, it would
> just be a small, negligible issue. Perhaps also, that if is only done
> rarely under constant watch of the human supervisor, it wouldn't really
> be a serious issue. And i guess in small enough batches, it wouldn't
> even seem like "going beyond the information given" because the
> observations would be so "obvious". But the creation of new features
> is a critical part of any system of ideas.
>
Well put.
Sadly he doesn't see this glaring inconsistency at all. And as his "reply"
to your comments shows, he has no intention of directly addressing these
points. It mearly affords him the opportunity to crank up the quotematic
and spew out marginally related extracts from his "Fragments" bible.
Neil Rickert
In <Pine.SOL.3.91.970208084259.13226C-100000@tortoise> David Yeo <dyeo@tortoise> writes:
>On 7 Feb 1997, Neil Rickert wrote:
>> ANN research has mostly dealt with toy problems which do not come
>> close to representing typical situations faced by actual organisms.
>IMO one of the best replies to the "ANN's can only deal with toy problems"
>claim comes from none other than Minsky and Papert (1988):
I don't have any particular argument with what Minsky & Papert
wrote. But quoting it does not settle the issue. It may indeed be
that intelligence consists of solving many toy problems, and
integrating those solutions into a unified system. But thus far ANN
research has done little with the problem of integration and
unification. And until it does, there is no way of being sure that
it is solving the 'right' toy problems.
David Yeo
> to the following question: given that we know so much about logic and
> formalization, why is human-level AI so beyond us?
>
AI. The GOFAI paradigm has, like the logical positivist doctrine it tried
to implement, largely failed. Ironically, the few (e.g. Longley) who cling
to this obsolete paradigm seek a sanitised model of cognition which holds
AI's earliest programmes (e.g. GPS and, in particular, the Logic Theorist)
as their ideal. But the dirty bits (e.g. learning) keep creeping in and
soiling their utopian, if sterile, wet-dream of "pure thought".
David Yeo
On Sat, 8 Feb 1997, David Longley wrote:
>
> As you know, I regard all claims that Logical Empiricism was a
> failure to be no more than propaganda. I regard Quine's work as
> being the most radical continuation of the movement (something he
> himself says).
Quine defines his variant of philosophy as "naturalism" which is, in turn,
an variant of pragmatism NOT logical empiricism. Given your propensity for
keywords rather than concepts, I suspect you have probably misinterpreted
"radical empiricism" (James, a pragmatist) as "radical logical empiricism"
> Rationality is an ever growing set of operations or behaviours,
> people can be taught some of those operations, computers can be
> programmed in a similar way - but the range of operations is so
> large that it's probably just a hopeless dream to think that it
> can all be instantiated.
That's ONE definition of rationality. Another is the disposition to do
the "right" (adaptive) thing at the "right" (appropriate) time.
David Yeo
On 8 Feb 1997, Neil Rickert wrote:
> I don't have any particular argument with what Minsky & Papert
> wrote. But quoting it does not settle the issue. It may indeed be
> that intelligence consists of solving many toy problems, and
> integrating those solutions into a unified system. But thus far ANN
> research has done little with the problem of integration and
> unification. And until it does, there is no way of being sure that
> it is solving the 'right' toy problems.
Quite right! Connectionist models have, in general, been sadly lacking
with respect to their ability to integrate. In its defence, I suggest
that connectionism has as a first priority the goal of modeling learning.
Fortunately, recently a few theorists have attempted to integrate these
"toy" models into a unified system. One such model works along the lines
of Selfridge's seminal Pandemonium; i.e. a network of "specialists" each
contributing a vote to a "supervisor" (which identifies the largest vote).
IMHO much more needs to be done along these lines.
David Longley
> In <855375...@longley.demon.co.uk> Da...@longley.demon.co.uk (David Longley)
> writes:
>
> >With little intrusion into the running of Inmate Activities, behaviour
> >which is central to these activities can be monitored and recorded
> >more directly to identify levels of inmate competence across the range
> >of activities. The records of competence would guide the setting and
> >auditing of individual targets.
>
> Right. But are these activities monitored by AI systems which make
> completely automated reports, or are the records entered by humans
> with all of their intensional biases. If the latter, your whole
> program would seem to be built on the human intensional judgements
> that you so often decry.
>
Who said anything about "intensional judgements"? If someone has
a curriculum which has pre-specified attainment criteria, it is a
simply matter of matching to sample to ascertain whether
something is or is not present. Here we have professionals
training (programming) and supervising - then assessing
performance (attainment). The work of the behaviour scientist
lies in ensuring that the Attainment Criteria ARE in fact
concrete behaviours which are observable.
As a simple example, if one of the criteria set is to be able to
use trigonometric functions appropriately,m simple tests can be
set and marked. The emphasis is on inculcation and assessment of
skills.
--
David Longley
David Longley
In article <Pine.SOL.3.91.970208090528.13226D-100000@tortoise>
dyeo@tortoise "David Yeo" writes:
> Cheers,
>
> - David Yeo (Applied Cognitive Science, University of Toronto)
>
Oh rubbish. What I quoted was a detailed description of a
computerised system for collecting observation statements
(attainment criteria) as a function of all forms of regime
activity. To understand what I have been saying in "Fragments"
you have to make a bit of an effort to see the fragments all
together <g>...
If you don't understand what I mean by "observation statements",
see "Pursuit of Truth" 1992 or "From Stimulus to Science" 1995.
--
David Longley
David Longley
In article <Pine.SOL.3.91.970208095527.13226F-100000@tortoise>
dyeo@tortoise "David Yeo" writes:
> On Sat, 8 Feb 1997, David Longley wrote:
>
> >
> > As you know, I regard all claims that Logical Empiricism was a
> > failure to be no more than propaganda. I regard Quine's work as
> > being the most radical continuation of the movement (something he
> > himself says).
>
> Quine defines his variant of philosophy as "naturalism" which is, in turn,
> an variant of pragmatism NOT logical empiricism. Given your propensity for
> keywords rather than concepts, I suspect you have probably misinterpreted
> "radical empiricism" (James, a pragmatist) as "radical logical empiricism"
David..... I have told you before, I am quoting Quine ("In
Conversation" ed R Fara) on this point. If you doubt my word on
this, I'll send you an audio clip to prove it. Under the present
circumstances I am rapidly coming to the conclusion that further
discussion with you is likely to be pointless. You have false
preconceptions which are totally resistant to corrective
empirical evidence - ie you are deluded.
You are just WRONG. Furthermore he explicitly rejects being
classified as a pragmatist.
>
> > Rationality is an ever growing set of operations or behaviours,
> > people can be taught some of those operations, computers can be
> > programmed in a similar way - but the range of operations is so
> > large that it's probably just a hopeless dream to think that it
> > can all be instantiated.
>
> That's ONE definition of rationality. Another is the disposition to do
> the "right" (adaptive) thing at the "right" (appropriate) time.
>
I wasn't providng a "definition" .... and I'm not interested in
exchanging definitions either.
--
David Longley
David Longley
In article <Pine.SOL.3.91.970208083436.13226B-100000@tortoise>
dyeo@tortoise "David Yeo" writes:
> On Sat, 8 Feb 1997, David Longley wrote:
>
> > <DY>
> > >
> > > Given the number of people you claim don't understand you and the volume
> > > you post, you seem to have a serious problem expressing yourself clearly.
> > > Rather that urging everyone to read, perhaps you should learn to write.
> > >
> >
> > What......me and everyone else that I cite <g>.......?
>
> No ... just you. <g>
>
> Cheers,
>
> - David Yeo (Applied Cognitive Science, University of Toronto)
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
^
^
Errrrrr yes David.. I understand.
--
David Longley
David Longley
In article <Pine.SOL.3.91.970208091842.13226E-100000@tortoise>
dyeo@tortoise "David Yeo" writes:
> Cheers,
>
> - David Yeo (Applied Cognitive Science, University of Toronto)
>
The above is pure fabrication - which is all one can expect from
an "Applied Cognitive Scientist". If you have ANY evidence at all
to substantiate what you say - cite it verbatim...
Otherwise, make an effort to control your fantasies... What you
are doing is stereotyping because you can't understand what I
have actually been saying. I have been quite clear about how one
should look at the modelling of human cognition, and it has
nothing to do with the GOFAI project. I have been explicitly
critical of that, and pointed to the work of Gluck and Bower as
the appropriate way to undertake such "anthropological" study.
The latter is clearly ANN orientated.
You keep radically misrepresenting what I have written. If you
are going to persist in doing this, please have the decency to
prefix your statements with the caveat that what follows is your
understanding (translation) of what I am advocating.
--
David Longley
David Longley
In article <Pine.SOL.3.91.970208084259.13226C-100000@tortoise>
dyeo@tortoise "David Yeo" writes:
> On 7 Feb 1997, Neil Rickert wrote:
>
> > ANN research has mostly dealt with toy problems which do not come
> > close to representing typical situations faced by actual organisms.
>
> IMO one of the best replies to the "ANN's can only deal with toy problems"
> claim comes from none other than Minsky and Papert (1988):
>
> Perhaps the scale of toy problems is that on which, in physiological
> actuality, much of the functioning of intelligence operates. ... We have
> used the phrase "society of mind" to refer to the idea that mind is made
> up of a large number of components, or "agents", each of which would
> operate on the scale of what, if taken in isolation, would be little more
> than a toy problem. ... In many situations humans clearly show abilities
> far in excess of what could be learned by simple, uniform networks. But
> when we take those skills apart, or try to find out how they are learned,
> we expect to find that they were made by processes that somehow combined
> the work (already done in past) of many smaller agencies, none of which,
> separately, need work on scales much larger than do those in PDP.
>
> ("Epilog: the new connectionism" in "Neurocomputing 2", p. 591)
> ----------------
>
> Cheers,
>
> - David Yeo (Applied Cognitive Science, University of Toronto)
>
Or, even..<From "Fragments of Behaviour: The Extensional Stance">
http://www.uni-hamburg.de/~kriminol/TS/tskr.htm
<grin>
In later sections evidence is presented in the context of clinical vs.
actuarial judgment that human judgement is severely limited to
processing only a few variables. Beyond that, non- linear fits become
more frequent. This is discussed later in the context of connectionist
'intuitive',inductive inference and constraints on short-term or
working memory span (c.f. Kyllonen & Christal 1990 - "Reasoning
Ability Is (LIttle More Than) Working-Memory Capacity?!"), but it is
worth mentioning here that in the epilogue to their expanded re-print
of their 1969 review of neural nets 'Perceptrons - An Introduction to
Computational Geometry', after reiterating their original criticism
that neural networks had only been shown to be capable of solving 'toy
problems', ie problems with a small number of dimensions, using 'hill
climbing' algorithms, Minsky and Papert (1988) effectively did a
'volte face' and said:
'But now we propose a somewhat shocking alternative:
Perhaps the scale of the toy problem is that on which,
in physiological actuality, much of the functioning of
intelligence operates. Accepting this thesis leads into
a way of thinking very different from that of the
connectionist movement. We have used the phrase "society
of mind" to refer to the idea that mind is made up of a
large number of components, or "agents," each of which
would operate on the scale of what, if taken in
isolation, would be little more than a toy problem.'
M Minsky and S Papert (1988) p266-7
and a little latter, which is very germane to the fragmentation of
behaviour view being advanced in this volume:
'On the darker side, they [parallel distributed
networks] can limit large-scale growth because what any
distributed network learns is likely to be quite opaque
to other networks connected to it.'
ibid p.274
This *opacity* of aspects, or elements, of our own behaviour to
ourselves is central to the theme being developed in this volume,
namely that a science of behaviour must remain entirely extensional
and that there can not therefore be a science or technology of
psychology to the extent that this remains intensional (Quine
1960,1992). The discrepancy between experts' reports of the
information they use when making diagnoses (judgments) is reviewed in
more detail in a later section, however, research reviewed in Goldberg
1968, suggests that even where diagnosticians are convinced that they
use more than additive models (ie use interactions between variables -
which statistically may account for some of the non-linearities),
empirical evidence shows that in fact they only use a few linear
combinations of variables (cf. Nisbett and Wilson 1977, in this
context).
--
David Longley
David Longley
In article <Pine.SOL.3.91.970208095527.13226F-100000@tortoise>
dyeo@tortoise "David Yeo" writes:
> On Sat, 8 Feb 1997, David Longley wrote:
>
> >
> > As you know, I regard all claims that Logical Empiricism was a
> > failure to be no more than propaganda. I regard Quine's work as
> > being the most radical continuation of the movement (something he
> > himself says).
>
> Quine defines his variant of philosophy as "naturalism" which is, in turn,
> an variant of pragmatism NOT logical empiricism. Given your propensity for
> keywords rather than concepts, I suspect you have probably misinterpreted
> "radical empiricism" (James, a pragmatist) as "radical logical empiricism"
>
> - David Yeo (Applied Cognitive Science, University of Toronto)
>
The above is PRECISELY the sort of nonsense which is so
characteristic of folk who claim to be working in Cognitive
Science.
What I have said is nothing to do with "interpretation" - it is,
as I have told you before, a direct report.
Elsewhere I have gone to considerable lengths to point out that
this failure to stick with observations and their conjunctions is
precisely what's characteristic of human (at least) "cognition".
'The most characteristic thing about mental life, over
and beyond the fact that one apprehends the events of
the world around one, is that one constantly goes beyond
the information given'.
J Bruner (1957)
Going Beyond The Information Given
(in H Gulber and others (eds)
Contemporary Approaches to Cognition)
Now I have tried to make it clear that there is rationality
outside of "mental life", and that what we call rationality has
little to do with "mental life".
Science requires one to get a grip on observations, and to such
an extent that those observations can be replicated by others. We
have evolved technologies from formal languages, to automation as
instantiations of those formal systems largely because of the
"leakage" which our biological systems are prone to.
It isn't a matter of CREATING models of the world, but one of
discovering how the world works. Furthermore, just because there
have been false models in the past does not mean that we are
doomed never to find TRUE accounts (as a little reflection on the
history of science shows).
The prevailing "constructivist" ideology which is so prevalent
in "Cognitive Science", is, in my view, just a few steps removed
from that of literary criticism and art. Something which
thousands of books and journal articles now to be found in
university bookshops and libraries readily attests.
In my view, it's all just bad science fiction, and it was Quine's
analysis of the indeterminacy of translation and problems of the
intensional which effectively makes most of the goals of what is
now called "Cognitive Science" just IMPOSSIBLE......... something
many reading (and posting to) this newsgroup should give serious
thought to (what I have had to say about the failure of inference
and quantification in such contexts should suffice to put most
onto the corrective, behavioural track.
This is how Bruner sketches this unfortunate peice of history:
------------------------------------
"The Proper Study of Man
I WANT TO BEGIN with the Cognitive Revolution as my point of
departure. That revolution was intended to bring "mind" back
into the human sciences after a long cold winter of
objectivism. But mine will not be the usual account of
progress marching ever forward. I For, at least in my view,
that revolution has now been diverted into issues that are
marginal to the impulse that brought it into being. Indeed,
it has been technicalized in a manner that even undermines
that original impulse. This is not to say that it has failed:
far from it, for cognitive science must surely be among the
leading growth shares on the academic bourse. It may rather
be that it has become diverted by success, a success whose
technological virtuosity has cost dear. Some critics, perhaps
unkindly, even argue that the new cognitive science, the
child of the revolution, has gained its technical successes
at the price of dehumanizing the very concept of mind it had
sought to reestablish in psychology, and that it has thereby
estranged much of psychology from the other human sciences
and the hurnanities.
I shall have more to say on these matters shortly. But before
going on, let me give you the plan of this chapter and the
ones that follow. Once our retrospective glance at the
revolution is done, I then want to turn directly to a
preliminary exploration of a renewed cognitive revolutionpa
more interpretive approach to cognition concerned with
"meaning-making," one that has been proliferating these last
several years in anthropology, linguistics, philosophy,
literary theory, psychology, and, it would almost seem,
wherever one looks these days.3 I rather suspect that this
vigorous growth is an effort to recapture the original
momentum of the first cognitive revolution. In later
chapters, I shall try to fill in this preliminary sketch with
some concrete illustration of research on the boundaries
between psychology and its neighbors in the humanities and
the social sciences, research that recaptures what I have
called the originating impulse of the cognitive revolution.
Now let me tell you first what I and my friends thought the
revolution was about back there in the late 1950s. It was, we
thought, an all-out effort to establish meaning as the
central concept of psychology - not stimuli and responses,
not overtly observable behavior, not biological drives and
their transformation, but meaning. It was not a revolution
against behaviorism with the aim of transforming behaviorism
into a better way of pursuing psychology by adding a little
mentalism to it. Edward Tolman had done that, to little
avail.4 It was an altogether more profound revolution than
that. Its aim was to discover and to describe formally the
meanings that human beings created out of their encounters
with the world, and then to propose hypotheses about what
meaning-making processes were implicated. It focused upon the
symbolic activities that human beings employed in
constructing and in making sense not only of the world, but
of themselves. Its aim was to prompt psychology to join
forces with its sister interpretive disciplines in the
humanities and in the social sciences. Indeed, beneath the
surface of the more computationally oriented cognitive
science, this is precisely what has been happeningpfirst
slowly and now with increasing momentum. And so today one
finds flourishing centers of cultural psychology, cognitive
and interpretive anthropology, cognitive linguistics, and
above all, a thriving worldwide enterprise that occupies
itself as never before since Kant with the philosophy of mind
and of language. It is probably a sign of the times that the
two Jerusalem-Harvard Lecturers in the academic year 1989-90
represent, each in his own way, this very traditionpProfessor
Geertz in anthropology and myself in psychology.
The cognitive revolution as originally conceived virtually
required that psychology join forces with anthropology and
linguistics, philosophy and history, even with the discipline
of law. It is no surprise and certainly not an accident that
in those early years the advisory board of the Center for
Cognitive Studies at Harvard included a philosopher, W. V.
Quine, an intellectual historian, H. Stuart Hughes, and a
linguist, Roman Jakobson. Or that among the Center's Fellows
could be numbered almost as many philosophers,
anthropologists, and linguists as there were proper
psychologistspamong them such exponents of the new
constructivism as Nelson Goodman. As for the law, I must
report that several distinguished members of that faculty
came occasionally to our colloquia. One of them, Paul Freund,
admitted he came because we at the Center, it seemed to him,
were interested in how rules (like rules of grammar, rather
than scientific laws) affected human action and that, after
all, is what jurisprudence is about. I think it should be
clear to you by now that we were not out to "reform"
behaviorism, but to replace it. As my colleague George Miller
put it some years later, "We nailed our new credo to the
door, and waited to see what would happen. All went very
well, so well, in fact, that in the end we may have been the
victims of our success."6
It would make an absorbing essay in the intellectual history
of the last quarter-century to trace what happened to the
originating impulse of the cognitive revolution, how it
became fractionated and technicalized. The full story had
best be left to the intellectual historians. All we need note
now are a few signposts along the way, just enough of them to
give a sense of the intellectual terrain on which we were all
marching. Very early on, for example, emphasis began shifting
from "meaning" to "information," from the construction of
meaning to the processing of information. These are
profoundly different matters. The key factor in the shift was
the introduction of computation as the ruling metaphor and of
computability as a necessary criterion of a good theoretical
model. Information is indifferent with respect to meaning. In
computational terms, information comprises an already
precoded message in the system. Meaning is preassigned to
messages. It is not an outcome of computation nor is it
relevant to computation save in the arbitrary sense of
assignment.
Information processing inscribes messages at or fetches them
from an address in memory on instructions from a central
control unit, or it holds them temporarily in a buffer store,
and then manipulates them in prescribed ways: it lists,
orders, combines, compares precoded information. The system
that does all of these things is blind with respect to
whether what is stored is words from Shakespeare's sonnets or
numbers from a random number table. According to classic
information theory, a message is informative if it reduces
alternative choices.
This implies a code of established possible choices. The
categories of possibility and the instances they comprise are
processed according to the "syntax" of the system, its
possible moves. Insofar as information in this dispensation
can deal with meaning it is in the dictionary sense only:
accessing stored lexical information according to a coded
address. There are other "meaning-like" operations such as
permuting a set of entries in order to test the resultants
against a criterion, as in anagrams or Scrabble. But
information processing cannot deal with anything beyond well-
defined and arbitrary entries that can enter into specific
relationships that are strictly governed by a program of
elementary operations. Such a system cannot cope with
vagueness, with polysemy, with metaphoric or connotative
connections. When it seems to be doing so, it is a monkey in
the British Museum, beating out the problem by a bone-
crushing algorithm or taking a flyer on a risky heuristic.
Information processing needs advance planning and precise
rules.7 It precludes such ill-formed questions as "How is the
world organized in the mind of a Muslim fundamentalist?" or
"How does the concept of Self differ in Homeric Greece and in
the postindustrial world?" And it favors questions like "What
is the optimum strategy for providing control information to
an operator to ensure that a vehicle will be kept in a
predetermined orbit?" We shall have much more to say later
about meaning and the processes that create it. They are
surprisingly remote from what is conventionally called
"information processing."
It is not surprising, given that an Information Revolution
was occurring throughout the postindustrial world, that such
an emphasis should have developed. Psychology and the social
sciences generally have always been sensitive, often
oversensitive, to the needs of the society that gives them
shelter. And it has always been rather an intellectual reflex
of academic psychology to redefine man and his mind in the
light of new social requirements. Nor is it surprising that
under such conditions interest should have shifted away,
accordingly, from mind and meaning to computers and
information. For computers and computational theory had by
the early 1950s bccome the root metaphor for information
processing. Given preestablished meaning categories well-
formed enough within a domain to provide a basis for an
operating code, a properly programmed computer could perform
prodigies of information processing with a minimum set of
operations, and that is technological heaven. Very soon,
computing became the model of the mind, and in place of the
concept of meaning there emerged the concept of
computability. Cognitive processes were equated with the
programs that could be run on a computational device, and the
success of one's effort to "understand," say, memory or
concept attainment, was one's ability realistically to
simulate such human conceptualizing or human memorizing with
a computer program.8 This line of thinking was enormously
aided by Turing's revolutionary insight that any
computational program, no matter how complex, could be
"imitated" by a much simpler Universal Turing Machine
computing with a finite set of quite primitive operations. If
one falls into the habit of thinking of those complex
programs as "virtual minds" (to borrow Daniel Dennett's
phrase), then it takes only a small but crucial step to go
the whole way to believing that "real minds" and their
processes, like "virtual" ones and theirs, could be
"explained" in the same way.
This new reductionism provided an astonishingly libertarian
program for the new cognitive science that was being born. It
was so permissive, indeed, that even the old S-R learning
theorist and associationist student of memory could come
right back into the fold of the cognitive revolution so long
as they wrapped their old concepts in the new terms of
information processing. One did not have to truck with
"mental" processes or with meaning at all. In place of
stimuli and responses, there was input and output, with
reinforcement laundered of its affective taint by being
converted into a control element that fed information about
the outcome of an operation back into the system. So long as
there was a computable program, there was "mind."
At first this pun version of mind did not seem to provoke the
traditional antimentalist panic among the seemingly converted
behaviorists. In good time, though, new versions of old
classically familiar controversies began to reemerge,
particularly in connection with debates about the so-called
architecture of cognition: whether it was to be conceived as
a set of grammar-like hierarchically nesting rule structures
for accepting, rejecting, or combining input, or whether,
rather, it could be conceived of as a bottom-up connectionist
network with completely distributed control as in the PDP
(Parallel Distributed Processing) models, a model much like
the old associationist doctrine, minus Herbart's creative
synthesis. The first simulated the top-down, rationalist-
mentalist tradition in psychology and moved easily back and
forth between "real" minds and "virtual" ones; the second was
a new version of what Gordon Allport used to mock in his
lectures as "dustbowl empiricism." East Coast
computationalism dealt with such mindlike terms as rules,
grammars, and the like. The West Coasters wanted no part of
such simulated mentalism.
Soon, the battleground began looking increasingly traditional
and familiar, though the vehicles that were racing over it
had much more speed and much more formalistic horsepower. But
whether their maneuvers had to do with the mind or only with
the theory of computation remained a question that both sides
regarded as infinitely postponable. Time would tell, the
questioners were assured, whether a sow's ear could be turned
into a silk purse.
It was inevitable that with computation as the metaphor of
the new cognitive science and with computability as the
necessary if not sufficient criterion of a workable theory
within the new science, the old malaise about mentalism would
reemerge. With mind equated to program, what should the
status of mental states bepold-fashioned mental states
identifiable not by their programmatic characteristics in a
computational system but by their subjective marking? There
could be no place for "mind" in such a systemp"mind" in the
sense of intentional states like believing, desiring,
intending, grasping a meaning. The cry soon rose to ban such
intentional states from the new science. And surely no book
published even in the heyday of early behaviorism could match
the antimentalist zeal of Stephen Stich's From Folk
Psycholo,gy to Co,grlitive Science.~ There were, to be sure,
statesmanlike efforts to make peace between the fuddy-duddy,
mentalistic cognitivists and the brave new antimentalists.
But they all took the form of either humoring or cajoling the
mentalists. Dennett proposed, for example, that we should
simply act as if people had intentional states that caused
them to behave in certain ways; later we'd find out we didn't
need such fuzzy notions.l2 Paul Churchland grudgingly
admitted that, while it was interestingly problematic why
people hung on so tenaciously to their plainly wrong
mentalism, that was something to be explained rather than
taken for granted. Perhaps, as Churchland put it, folk
psychology seems to describe how things actually go, but how
could a belief, desire, or attitude be a cause of anything in
the physical worldpthat is, in the world of computation?~3
Mind in the subjective sense was either an epiphenomenon that
the computational system outputted under certain conditions,
in which case it could not be a cause of anything, or it was
just a way that people talked about behavior after it had
occurred (also an output), in which case it was just more
behavior and simply needed further linguistic analysis. And
yes, I must include Jerry Fodor's nativism: it could also be
a spinoff of innate processes built into the system, in which
case it was an effect rather than a cause.l4
With the new attack on mental states and intentionality came
a related attack on the concept of agency. Cognitive
scientists, in the main, have no quarrel with the idea that
behavior is directed, even directed toward goals. If
direction is governed by the results of computing the utility
of alternative outcomes, this is perfectly bearable and,
indeed, it is the centerpiece of"rational choice theory." But
cognitive science in its new mood, despite all its
hospitality toward goal-directed behavior, is still chary of
a concept of agency. For "agency" implies the conduct of
action under the sway of intentional states. So action based
on belief, desire, and moral comrnitmentpunless it is purely
stipulative in Dennett's sensepis now regarded as something
to be eschewed by right-minded cognitive scientists. It is
like free will among the determinists.~s There were brave
holdouts against the new antiintentionalism, like the
philosophers John Searle and Charles Taylor, or the
psychologist Kenneth Gergen, or the anthropologist Clifford
Geertz, but their views were marginalized by the
majoritarians of mainstream computationalism.
I am fully aware that I may be giving an exaggerated picture
of what happened to the cognitive revolution once it became
subordinated to the ideal of computability in the edifice of
cognitive science. I note that whenever a proper cognitive
scientist uses the expression "artificial intelligence" (even
if it is only once), it is almost invariably followed by the
capitalized initials "AI" in parentheses: "(AI)." I take this
act of abbreviation to indicate one of two things. The
abbreviated form suggests the shortening required by Zipf's
Law: the length of a word or expression is inverse to its
frequencyp"television" eventually reduced to "TV"pwith the
abbreviation "(AI)" celebrating its comparable ubiquitousness
and market penetration. The boast of AI is that it is about
all mindlike artifacts, even about mind itself, if mind only
be considered as yet another artifact, one that conforms to
principles of computation. Or the abbreviation, on the other
hand, may be a sign of embarrassment: either because there is
an aura of obscenity about the artificialization of something
so natural as intelligence (in Ireland, by the way, AI is the
embarrassed abbreviation for artificial insemination), or
because AI is an abbreviation of what, in its full form,
might seem an oxymoron (the liveliness of intelligence
coupled with the flatness of artificiality). The implied
boast of Zipf's Law and the embarrassment of cover-up are
both merited. There is no question that cognitive science has
made a contribution to our understanding of how information
is moved about and processed. Nor can there be much doubt on
reflection that it has left largely unexplained and even
somewhat obscured the very large issues that inspired the
cognitive revolution in the first place. So let us return to
the question of how to construct a mental science around the
concept of meaning and the processes by which meanings are
created and negotiated within a community.
J Bruner (1990)
Ch.1 The proper Study of Man
Acts of Meaning"
--
David Longley
Neil Rickert
In <855420...@longley.demon.co.uk> Da...@longley.demon.co.uk (David Longley) writes:
>In article <5di3ce$s...@ux.cs.niu.edu> ric...@cs.niu.edu "Neil Rickert" writes:
>> >With little intrusion into the running of Inmate Activities, behaviour
>> >which is central to these activities can be monitored and recorded
>> >more directly to identify levels of inmate competence across the range
>> >of activities. The records of competence would guide the setting and
>> >auditing of individual targets.
>> Right. But are these activities monitored by AI systems which make
>> completely automated reports, or are the records entered by humans
>> with all of their intensional biases. If the latter, your whole
>> program would seem to be built on the human intensional judgements
>> that you so often decry.
>Who said anything about "intensional judgements"? If someone has
>a curriculum which has pre-specified attainment criteria, it is a
>simply matter of matching to sample to ascertain whether
>something is or is not present. Here we have professionals
>training (programming) and supervising - then assessing
>performance (attainment). The work of the behaviour scientist
>lies in ensuring that the Attainment Criteria ARE in fact
>concrete behaviours which are observable.
This is mostly self delusion on your part. Like it or not, your
assessment of attainment is a matter of human judgement which cannot
be given an explicit extensional formulation.
>As a simple example, if one of the criteria set is to be able to
>use trigonometric functions appropriately,m simple tests can be
>set and marked. The emphasis is on inculcation and assessment of
>skills.
Students who have been inculcated in trigonometry and demonstrate
simple skill often go on to fail at more advanced mathematics.
Students who have been educated in trigonometry, and who demonstrate
knowledge and understanding of the subject matter usually do quite
well in more advanced courses.
Of course Longley could never understand this. To him, with his
extreme behaviorism, there is nothing to education other than the
inculcation that can be achieved with a Skinner box, and there is
nothing to knowledge beyond the demonstration of certain stimulus
response reactions.