A Logical Choice: Behaviour Science XOR Psychology
Scott Inglett
|> ....
|> 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.'
|>
|> Quine
|> The Double Standard
|> Flight from Intension
|> Word and Object (1960), p218-221
One may also accept the Brentano thesis as showing the necessity
of an antireductionist stance with respect to empathy, compassion,
etc., while at the same time agreeing with Quine that a science
of intention is empty. In other words, it doesn't imply the
debasement of first person values, perceptions, etc. It only
takes them out of the purview of science.
--
-Scott
rodrigo vanegas
> 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.'
>
> Quine
> The Double Standard
> Flight from Intension
> Word and Object (1960), p218-221
I don't understand the inference from the indispensability of the
intentional idiom to the postulation of objective translation
relations.
I understand that said relations are not objective; what I don't
understand is why they need be objective.
--
Rodrigo Vanegas
<r...@lt.org>
ChrisBig-KahunaRampson
: A Logical Choice: Behaviour Science XOR Psychology.
: The failure of the 11 psychologists to agree on almost
: anything evinces a serious problem in their
: academic discipline. Physicists or biologists asked
: the same question would not concur on everything but
: there would be a substantial commonalty in their
: answers. Can Psychology be taken seriously as science
: if even its leading practitioners cannot agree on recent
: advances?"
Truth is, the brain is SO complex, that looking at only a portion of
its output (behavior,cognition tests,handwriting?) gives you SO little
information, that you can't understand its workings. So therefore,
every study in psychology gets 1% true facts, and 99% conjecture/
philosopy. I have illustrated this in my "hologram analogy" which
follows:
The Holy Grail of psychology is a picture of the true functioning of
the brain/mind. This picture could be a "hologram" - a 3D representation
of this (remember this is an analogy!). A hologram has the unique
properties that if you cut it in half, you can see the entire picture
in either half. This continues ad-infinitum to smaller and smaller
pieces. So, what do you "lose" from this process? Perspective. The very
small piece can view the picture from only a certain angle, even though
you can see the entire picture.
Here's the analogy. Psychology researchers "discover" a piece while doing
research. Since you can "see" the entire "picture" through this piece,
the researcher ASSUMES that he has the "whole" picture (which is obvious
that he doesn't). When more and more researchers examine the piece, you
get a "branch" of psychology - ie Behaviourism. Some researchers will
steer their research in a slightly different way, and find the next
piece. But since THEY can see the whole picture in their "new" piece,
they ignore/denounce the other researchers. But the original researchers
see the entire picture in their "piece", and they react to the "new"
researchers by labeling them mavericks/radicals/not "real" scientists.
This is the human factor in science.
Therefore, the only way to ever get the "whole" picture is either:
1. Assemble all the pieces to get the whole picture (specific to general -
deduction).
2. Get an understanding overall of the whole picture and then fill in the
pieces (induction).
Unfortunently, scientists use the first method, and philosophers use the
second (and both only "scratch" the surface).
--
_/_/_/ _/ _/ Chris "Big Kahuna" Rampson
_/ _/_/_/ _/ _/_/ _/_/_/ cram...@ford.com
_/ _/ _/ _/_/ _/ _/_/ NO cutdowns,flames or insults
_/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/_/ ONLY data as I interpret it
_/_/_/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/_/_/ "NOT an OFFICIAL FORD spokesperson"
David Longley
sing...@atticus.rchland.ibm.com "Scott Inglett" writes:
>
> One may also accept the Brentano thesis as showing the necessity
> of an antireductionist stance with respect to empathy, compassion,
> etc., while at the same time agreeing with Quine that a science
> of intention is empty. In other words, it doesn't imply the
> debasement of first person values, perceptions, etc. It only
> takes them out of the purview of science.
>
> --
>
> -Scott
>
Agreed 100%. That's a point which needs to be made (alas I haven't done so
explicitly enough, though Quine does both in 'World and Object' (1960) and
in 'Pursuit of Truth' (1990,1992).
The objective is solely to be clearer about matters, not to banish them as
'nonsense' (as postivism was once charged with trying to do). They harbour
important human lore which can be made so much more valuable my the process
of reclamation and clarification which Quine is proposing we adopt (only in
this sense does eliminativism in any form make any sense in fact).
--
David Longley
David Longley
But the facts remain that we all practice some sort of applied behaviour
science all the time - as teachers, parents, policemen, lawyers, you name
it.
There are a few things, a few important things that we know are unreliable
ways of making judgments relative to other ways. What I hope to have shown
to some extent at least, is where that something lies. I am *not* offering
anything other than a pointer, and ultimately, the pointer I am offering
isn't even mine - it's W.V.O Quine's. Nevertheless, I consider that what's
preented in 'Fragments of behaviour: The Extensional Stance' posted last
saturday to sci.psychology.theory, is at least the outlines of a response
to Quine's 1978 request that we begin some work on trying to identify some
useful replacements for the idioms of propositional attitude.
I have chosen to do that by first sweeping research in psychology for work
which has in fact already taken some tentative steps (see Fragments..').
--
David Longley
Leonard J. French
Let's talk.....-Len
ljfr...@fast.net
David Longley
Well, I'm persuaded by Quine's 'Two Dogmas of Empiricism' 1951, and
'Epistemology Naturalized' 1968 that epistemology reduces to empirical
psychology, ie behavioural psychology. I think Allan Wagner did a good
job back in 1979 saying that we could look at the Rescorla Wagner 1971
model in the language of Attribution Theory. From there it's a short
step to the clinicial vs actuarial issue which forms a large part of
'Fragments..(sci.psychology.theory 22/7/95).
'Pursuit of Truth' 1990,1992 is really a philosophy of science (which
is 'philosophy enough' according to Quine). We need databases and 4GLs
to store records of behaviour, generate deductive reports based on the
recorded behaviour, and work with people on the basis of statistical
distributions and their relations. The example I provide is just one
area of application. The next most obvious one is education. Wherever
the application, we need behavioural predicates. Most of the work goes
on writing the routines to generate reports, not because the 4GL is
is difficult, but because the task itself is very difficult in any
language!!
--
David Longley
Tom Wetzel
---
David Longley writes:
>'Pursuit of Truth' 1990,1992 is really a philosophy of science (which
>is 'philosophy enough' according to Quine). We need databases and 4GLs
>to store records of behaviour, generate deductive reports based on the
>recorded behaviour, and work with people on the basis of statistical
>distributions and their relations. The example I provide is just one
>area of application. The next most obvious one is education. Wherever
>the application, we need behavioural predicates. Most of the work goes
>on writing the routines to generate reports, not because the 4GL is
>is difficult, but because the task itself is very difficult in any
>language!!
David, it is worth noting that "behaviors" are "intensional entities",
ie. properties.
Tom Wetzel
:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
thomas...@eng.sun.com
David Longley
writes:
work:
'Surely no one would dispute that the basic dimensions
of personality must refer to some objective
psychological reality. But the belief that personality
traits were nothing more than cognitive fictions was
widespread only a few years ago. And ironically,
although it was Mischel's (1968) influential critique
that popularised this idea, earlier research on the
five-factor model provided the most powerful argument
for it.
As shown by D'Andrade (1965) and by Passini and Norman
(1966), the five factor structure of personality could
be recovered from ratings made on complete strangers.
Because nothing was known about actual traits of these
ratees, and thus about the covariation of those traits,
the clear implication of this finding was that the
structure itself must somehow be built into our
cognitive system of person perception, constituting an
implicit personality theory. But this fact itself was
subject to radically different interpretations. At one
extreme, it was seen as evidence that traits were
nothing but fictions, projections of our cognitive
structure onto the impersonal world. At the other, it
was taken as an indication that individuals learned the
true structure of personality from their observations of
the real world and simply applied it to unknown cases.
Borkenau (in press) has recently reviewed the evidence
on these hypotheses and a number of more sophisticated
variants, and concluded that "traits are real and
accurately perceived, provided that the judges have the
necessary information".
This conclusion is based in large part on evidence of
the stability and cross-observer validity of the five
factors. Traits are defined as enduring dispositions
that can be inferred from patterns of behavior; they
should therefore be stable across long periods of time
and be similarly assessed by different observers. By
these criteria, N, E, O, A and C are all indisputably
real traits.'
Costa P.T. & McCrae R.R (1992)
I do 'dispute that the basic dimensions of personality must refer
to some objective psychological reality' The five dimensions the
above personality theorists are referring to are 'Neuroticism',
'Extraversion', 'Openness', 'Agreeableness' and finally,
'Conscientiousness'. The problem is, of course, the 'reality' of
psychological referents.
Bem (1967) stated that there are but three factors which Osgood
extracted from the Semantic Differential (adjectives applied to
nouns) and that this is testament to his, and Skinner's thesis,
that people can only make *limited* discriminations using psycho-
logical terms. The reason being the restricted access the social-
ising & verbal community has to private discriminations.
Today there is talk of 3 or maybe 5 'fundamental' personality
factors (Costa et al 1992, Zuckerman, 1992 and see Eysenck
1992). However, if you look carefully at the actual
behaviour involved in deriving these factors you will see
that what they represent is 3 or 5 factors, or dimensions, which
people use to DESCRIBE themselves (and in some rating stuies,
others). They are not, in fact, factors of personality at all,
they are dimensions which folk purportedly use when classifying
other folk or themselves.
These dimensions may correlate with behaviour measures (such as
reactive inhibition, drug taking, 'sensation seeking' and so
on) but to the extent that they are derived from questionnaires
which ask people to recall instances of their own behaviour
(propositional attitudes) or to apply such intensional locutions
to others, they are more accurately described as factors which
lay people use to DESCRIBE or CLASSIFY themselves and others.
They are of course, 'folk psychological' concepts. And everything
said so far with respect to folk psychology applies here.
Why we should expect the vernacular of natural language to
adequately suffice to describe lawful relationships of behaviour
is totally beyond my comprehension. Presumably, the same
rationale justifies a factor analysis of folk-physical terms??
Interestingly, Zuckerman himself provides evidence in support of
the dimensions being a product of the constraints of the lexicon.
'I have suggested some criteria for a basic trait of
personality (Zuckerman 1991). The first is reliable
identification of the dimension factor across methods,
genders, ages , and cultures. The "big five" model has
achieved its "born again" prominence because of the
identification of the factors by many investigators in
different cultures. But most studies have used trait
ratings rather than questionnaire scales, leading to the
question of whether we are describing the general
language system of traits or the actual way social
behaviour is organised. When we develop a state scale
for Sensation Seeking using adjectives alone we found a
paucity of appropriate single words to describe this
trait (Nearly 1975, described in Zuckerman 1979). We
found a few like "daring, adventurous, zany, curious,
and playful", but most were less specific referring to
surgent or positive affect. Only questionnaire items
were capable of delineating the trait in terms of he
specific and well replicated four subfactors. Costa and
McCrae (1992) comment on a similar paucity of adjectives
describing the trait of openness. Most of the adjectives
they found referred to the cognitive elements of the
trait leading lexigraphical researchers to call the
trait "intellect". But perhaps Costa and McCrae were
unduly influenced by this conception in developing their
own construct of openness. There is no guarantee that
the encoding of personality traits in language is
proportional to the behavioral importance of the traits
or their biological relevance. This is why the
questionnaire studies of personality are more
interesting. Questionnaires can designate actions more
specifically than single word ratings.'
Zuckerman (1992)
We know that self-report and ostensive records of behaviour do
not correlate well. The argument here is that this is bound to
be the case because the minimalist self-report dimensions are not
under the same degree of control by the socialising community as
is behaviour itself. However, neither are the terms used to
describe other folk's behaviour in psychological terms.
Psychology itself just has not, to date, come up with a
reliable set of behaviour predicates. Note, 'psychology' has not,
but areas of behaviour science have. The poor correlation between
self-report and behaviour is, I assert, only to be expected.
This being so, why bother using the self report dimensions at all
when behaviour itself is available ? As I have said many times
now, I consider this dependency on self-report material (using
psychological terms) to be nothing other than a consequence of
actual behaviour being rather stereotyped (under control of
explicit SDs) and of low availability in many assessment
contexts. (interviews, clinical or otherwise).
Consider the implications of the extract from the Dawes, Faust
and Meehl (1989) paper:
'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.' -
Dawes, Faust and Meehl (1989)
Clinical Versus Actuarial Judgment
Science,243, p.1671
References
----------
Costa P.T & McCrae R.R (1992) Four ways five factors are basic
Pers. and Indiv. Diff. 13,6,
pp. 653-665
Eysenck H.J.(1992) Four ways five factors are NOT basic
ibid. pp 667-673
Zuckerman M. (1992) What is a basic factor and which
factors are basic? Turtles all the
way down.
ibid. pp.675-681
[written in 1992 prior to 'Fragments..']
--
David Longley
Tom Wetzel
---
David Longley writes:
>> David, it is worth noting that "behaviors" are "intensional entities",
>> ie. properties.
>>
>I am not sure that is true. Here's how the issue pans out in practical
>work:
[..]
> you will see
>that what they represent is 3 or 5 factors, or dimensions, which
>people use to DESCRIBE themselves (and in some rating stuies,
>others). They are not, in fact, factors of personality at all,
>they are dimensions which folk purportedly use when classifying
>other folk or themselves.
>
>These dimensions may correlate with behaviour measures (such as
>reactive inhibition, drug taking, 'sensation seeking' and so
>on) but to the extent that they are derived from questionnaires
>which ask people to recall instances of their own behaviour
>(propositional attitudes) or to apply such intensional locutions
>to others, they are more accurately described as factors which
>lay people use to DESCRIBE or CLASSIFY themselves and others.
Longley shows that he is completely confused about
the word "property." Somehow he takes this -- totally weirdly --
to be a thesis about the alleged accuracy of introspective reports
about dispositional psychological properties!!!! I think part of the
problem here is that Longley is confusing "intensional" with "intentional."
Most properties are not intentional. For example, weighing six pounds
or being a conductor.
Moreover, what do the phrases "reactive inhibition", "drug taking",
"'sensation seeking'" refer to if not properties? Surely not to
*particulars*. He may reply, "I take these things to be classes". Fine,
but in that case he is simply accepting a highly implausible
*reduction* of properties to classes-in-extension. But if you reduce Fs
to Gs, then it follows that if you think there are Gs, you are
committed to their being Fs. Nowhere does Longley reply to the
well-known objections to a reduction of properties to
classes-in-extension. For example, given that the best available
account of nomicity is in terms of relations between properties, taking
these "in intension" (that is, not as classes), Longley has left
himself in the unenviable position of trying to defend the hopeless
Humean regularity theory of laws.
Tom Wetzel
:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
thomas...@eng.sun.com
Tom Wetzel
---
Here I want to comment on two of David Longley's points: (1) that the
fact that he is able to implement research-data recording via a
relational database somehow is evidence for his thesis that "the
language of science" is FOL, and (2) the fact that Longley's own
descriptions make use of second-order logic, and is therefore inconsistent.
(2) Longley talks about "behaviors", and "traits", such as "drug-taking",
"'sensation-seeking'", and so on. Note that this is not a language that
he is entitled to if he is to stick to FOL, since he is here taking
properties to be included in the domain of discourse. "...is a trait"
and "...is a behavior" are second-order predicates in that they have
properties in their extension. That is what "traits" and "behaviors"
are. This means that he won't be able to quantify over traits and behaviors
if he sticks to FOL. Let me take an example:
Joey takes drugs
Joey is an inmate in block 6
Joey eats lots of chocolate
George takes drugs
George is an inmate in block 6
George eats lots of chocolate
From this data we can infer:
(*) Drug-taking is a behavior of at least two inmates in block 6
(**) At least two behaviors of inmates in block 6 involve ingesting
substances
We need second-order logic for these inferences.
(1) Now to point (1) about use of relational databases. This proves
absolutely nothing because both second-order and first-order
descriptions/logics are capable of computerization and representation
in relational databases. Both obviously have a syntax...rules of
well-formedness, rules of transformation, etc. Computation operates
solely on representations, that is, at the level of syntax. Semantics
and interpretation is contributed by users, programmers, designers, via
the intended interpretation and use. For example, here where I work
we do network management software, and we represent network devices
and their attributes in databases. Consider one of these attributes,
such as the number of interfaces a network device has. The data structure
represents this as an INT, and if it has a value of 2 for a particular
device, this means that device has two interfaces. This is used,
for example, in network search algorythms which will assume a device
on the net is a router if it has more than one interface. So, you get
a router icon on your console if a device's IfNum attribute "value" is greater
than 1. That is still at the level of syntax. But the intended interpretation
here is that we represent "natural kinds" of network beasts and
store their various "traits."
Tom Wetzel
:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
thomas...@eng.sun.com
David Longley
writes:
> ---
I'd like to spend some time on this matter if possible. With respect
to Tom's point 2, I think he is confusing a critical article I wrote
on the use of Factor Analysis with what I am positively advocating
for PROBE. The article is in one of these newsgroups, and looks at
the extraction of 5 personality dimensions ('the big 5'). I criticise
this work on the grounds that the factors are basically data
reductions of propositional attitudes. PROBE on the other hand is a
case-based system where the case ID is a unique inmate id (his number)
and the data dictionary (schema) a set of 1 place predicates or n-ary
relations (if seen as tables).
For 'Fragments of Behaviour..' I drew on texts by Date (1992), Gray
(1984) and Gardarin & Valduriez (1989) for theoretical accounts
of the relational model in logic rather than set theory. To my
knowledge, the system does not go beyond FOL, but if it does, I could
do with some more explicit help to undrstand how and why it goes
beyond FOL.
Quantifers in natural language refer to the positions in statements
taken by pronouns. They allow us to keep track of who, or what, we are
talking about. In formal, predicate (functional) logic, they demystify
the whole process of deductive inference. In a finite universe of
discourse (which is what we have in PROBE as a database of inmates),
existential (E) quantification can be replaced by a finite series of
disjunctions (V ie ORs), just as universal (z) quantification can be
replaced by a finite series of conjunctions (U ie ANDs). Our queries
can be conceived as clauses written in disjunctive or conjunctive
normal form. When applied to the database, cases either do or do not
meet the specified conditions for class membership, and this serves as
our basis for actuarial analysis of behaviour. Since our database is
finite, we can in fact venture into considering the application of
probability quantifiers (e.g. Vickers 1988), ie the relative frequency
of individuals which meet the conditions of our logical conditions.
'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
Once this way of working with a data base becomes familiar, it is a
simple set of steps from relative frequencies to joint probabilities
and correlations, regressions and the rest of descriptive statistics
which all Prison Psychologists receive systematic training in as part
of their induction MSc training. It should also be clear that work
within the PROBE system is work in the application of extensional
logic to a specific domain within which the Prison Service employs
Behaviour Scientists to provide a technical service within. That
specificity, or specialism is defined by the selection, analysis and
use of the behaviour predicates and functions within a particular
universe of discourse.
In the case of breaches of prison rules, each instance of an
infraction is identified by the paragraph of the prison rules broken.
In turn, further aspects of the infraction can be recorded such as the
date, time and location, resulting in an n-place predicate. Individual
names, or identifiers are syntactically referred to as constants, with
arbitrary individuals being represented as variables. These are
jointly referred to as terms. A term, without variables is known as a
ground term. When we describe an individual, the descriptor is a
predicate of order n, where n is the number of terms which follow. The
predicate and its terms, together, are known as an atom. A ground
atom, is an atom without variables. Semantically, the set of ground
terms is known as the Herbrand Universe, ie the cases within our CASE
based data base which are inmates. The Herbrand base for any retrieval
we may write is the set of ground atoms that we can construct from the
predicates available (often confusingly called variables) and the
ground term in the Herbrand Universe. This encompasses all we can say
about the inmates in our database. A Herbrand Interpretation is a
subset of the Herbrand base, i.e. those assigned the value true.
Ultimately, these notions will be important when we come to use AI
techniques such as the resolution principle to milk implicit
inferences from within our database. Note, that according to the
thesis being developed in these volumes, it is only the failure of
Leibniz's Law within epistemic (intensional) contexts which makes any
of this seem remotely difficult. What we are generally concerned with
is the creation of well formed formulae, simple atomic propositions or
predicates, which when combined by logical connectives, amount to
compound propositions, or complex predicates. Such predicates are
generally described as one-place, two-place or higher indicating how
many argument positions they require. For example, age is one place
predicate, whilst associate_of, is a two place predicate. The PROBE
data dictionary (Volume 5) lists one-place, unary or monadic
predicates. Two place predicates are also referred to as relations.
Two place predicates, known as binary relations do not exist in the
schema. Individual inmates can be regarded as unary relations, a
strange notion, but one which allows one to treat individuals as
classes.
An example or two may help to make the above more concrete at this
point. Age, NIC score, report rate and index offences will suffice to
illustrate the value of working solely extensionally with relations
and classes. Comparison of the distribution of inmates by age group is
one of the population measures provided to the field week as part of
weekly analysis of the Long Term prison system. Such population
parameters readily highlight unplanned discrepancies in allocation.
That there is a functional relationship between NIC score and age, or
age and rate of disciplinary infractions was used in Volume 2 to
highlight how such relations can be used by management in the interest
of maintaining control.
Relations are clearly basic to relational data bases, and it should be
noted that one of the great changes brought about by relativity theory
was that Newtonian monadic predicates were replaced by relations
(Churchland 1989). The logic of relations with quantifiers is perhaps
the greatest breakthrough in human thought to date, and is still one
of the most difficult to fully appreciate. Frege's 'Concept Writing
Script' (his 'Begriffsschrift' or Predicate Calculus) effectively
introduced for the first time, cognition or reasoning, as a formal,
mechanical process. Here is how Carnap (1933) introduced the notion of
the new logic:
'The new logic is distinguished from the old not only by the
form in which it is presented but chiefly also by the
increase of its range....The only form of statements
(sentences) in the old logic was the predicative form:
"Socrates is a man," "All (or some) Greeks are men." A
predicate-concept or property is attributed to a subject-
concept. Leibniz had already put forward the demand that
logic should consider sentences of relational form. In a
relational sentence such as, for example, "a is greater than
b," a relation is attributed to two or more objects, (or, as
it might be put, to several subject-concepts). Liebniz's idea
of a theory of relations has been worked out in the new
logic. The old logic conceived relational sentences as
sentences of predicative form. However, many inferences
involving relational sentences thereby become impossible. To
be sure, one can interpret the sentence "a is greater than b"
in such a way that the predicate "greater than b" is
attributed to the subject a. But the predicate then becomes a
unity; one cannot extract b by any rule of inference.
Consequently, the sentence "b is smaller than a" cannot be
inferred from this sentence. In the new logic, this inference
takes place in the following way: The relation "smaller than"
is defined as the "converse" of the relation "greater than."
The inference in question then rests on the universal
proposition: If a relation holds between x and y, its
converse holds between y and x. A further example of a
statement that cannot be proved in the old logic: "Wherever
there is a victor someone is vanquished." In the new logic,
this follows from the logical proposition: If a relation has
a referent, it also has a relatum. Relational statements are
especially indispensable for the mathematical sciences. Let
us consider as an example the geometrical concept of the
three-place relation "between" (on an open straight line).
The geometrical axioms "If a lies between b and c, b does not
lie between c and a" can be expressed only in the new logic.
According to the predicative view, in the first case we would
have the predicates "lying between b and c" and "lying
between c and a". If these are left unanalyzed, there is no
way of showing how the first is transformed into the second.
If one takes the objects b and c out of the predicate, the
statement "a lies between b and c" no longer serves to
characterise only one object, but three. It is therefore a
three-place relational statement....
Restriction to predicate-sentences has had disastrous effects
on subjects outside logic. Perhaps Russell is right when he
made this logical failing responsible for certain
metaphysical errors.....Above all, we may well assume that
this logical error is responsible for the concept of absolute
space. Because the fundamental form of a proposition had to
be predicative, it could only consist in the specification of
the position of a body. Since Leibniz had recognized the
possibility of relational sentences, he was able to arrive at
a correct conception of space: the elementary fact is not
position of a body but its positional relations relative to
other bodies. He upheld the view on epistemological grounds:
there is no way of determining the absolute position of a
body, but only its positional relations. His campaign in
favor of the relativistic view of space, as against the
absolutistic views of the followers of Newton, had as little
success as his program for logic.
Only after two hundred years were his ideas on both subjects
taken up and carried through: in logic with the theory of
relations (De Morgan 1858; Pierce 1870), in physics with the
theory of relativity (anticipatory ideas in Mach 1883;
Einstein 1905).'
R. Carnap
The Old and the New Logic (1930)
In A.J. Ayer (ed) Logical Positivism (1959)
Throughout these volumes, the case is made that, for PROBE to be used
as an effective system, it will require users to analyse and manage
inmate behaviour exclusively according to an inmate's class
membership, which in turn only makes sense relative to other classes.
The monadic predicate calculus (the calculus of classes), it should be
understood:
'.. consists in characterizing the predicates by their
extension instead of according to their content. To each
predicate corresponds a certain "class" of objects,
consisting of all objects for which the predicate holds. The
case of a class containing no object is of course not
excluded here. Classes are now to be taken as the entities
dealt with by the calculus, which in this interpretation will
be called the calculus of classes.
D. Hilbert & W. Ackermann (1950)
The Principles of Mathematical Logic p.46
As stated above, a list of individuals which can occupy the positions
of an n-place, or n-ary, or degree n predicate, is known as an ordered
n-tuple (n-membered sequence), and this is ultimately what we are
concerned with as behaviour scientists. Date (1992), who along with
E.F. Codd is a major spokesman for relational theory, had this to say
about predicates:
'It is convenient to assume that the predicates "=", ">", " r "
etc, are builtin (i.e they are part of the formal system we
are defining) and that the expressions using them can be
written in the conventional manner, but of course users
should be able to define their own additional predicates as
well. Indeed, that is the whole point, as we will quickly
see: The fact is, in database terms, a user-defined predicate
is nothing more nor less than a user-defined relation.'
...
'The suppliers relation S, for example, can be regarded as a
predicate with four arguments (S#, SNAME, STATUS, and CITY).
Furthermore the expressions S(S1, Smith,20,London) and
S(S6,Green,45,Rome) represent "instances" or invocations of
that predicate that evaluate to true and false respectively.'
C. J. Date (1992)
Logic Based Database Systems: A Tutorial Part II p.378
Relational Database Writings 1989-1991
The import of this statement marks an important step on the route to
widescale practise of logical and actuarial behaviour management
rather than ad hoc clinicalism which as we have seen in Volume 1, can
only be less precise instances of the former, acceptance of this may
be limited solely by the fact that it is all so relatively new:
'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.
The full case for PROBE is presented in sci.psychology.theory as a set
of 9 articles entitled 'Fragments of Behaviour: The Extensional Stance'
which altogether amount to about 400K. These in turn are taken from a
full hardware/software system specification which was written in 1994
entitled 'A System Specification For PROfiling BEhaviour'.
Main ref: 'Fragments of Behaviour: The Extensional Stance'
sci.psychology.theory - - 22 July 1995
--
David Longley
Tom Wetzel
---
David Longley writes:
>Quantifers in natural language refer to the positions in statements
>taken by pronouns. They allow us to keep track of who, or what, we are
>talking about. In formal, predicate (functional) logic, they demystify
>the whole process of deductive inference. In a finite universe of
>discourse (which is what we have in PROBE as a database of inmates),
>existential (E) quantification can be replaced by a finite series of
>disjunctions (V ie ORs), just as universal (z) quantification can be
>replaced by a finite series of conjunctions (U ie ANDs).
This is of course quite true, but, then, the ontological commitments
of your theory will be carried by the singular terms. As I've pointed
out before, Longley admits singular terms referring to properties,
such as behaviors or traits. His rejection of second-order logic is
therefore inconsistent.
>Note, that according to the
>thesis being developed in these volumes, it is only the failure of
>Leibniz's Law within epistemic (intensional) contexts which makes any
>of this seem remotely difficult.
Again, the same use/mention fallacy I've pointed out before. See my
comments below. Intensional contexts don't "violate" Leibniz' Law.
This is simply a confusion.
>The monadic predicate calculus (the calculus of classes), it should be
>understood:
>
> '.. consists in characterizing the predicates by their
> extension instead of according to their content. To each
> predicate corresponds a certain "class" of objects,
> consisting of all objects for which the predicate holds. The
> case of a class containing no object is of course not
> excluded here. Classes are now to be taken as the entities
> dealt with by the calculus, which in this interpretation will
> be called the calculus of classes.
>
> D. Hilbert & W. Ackermann (1950)
Hilbert & Ackermann can say whatever they want, but that is only one interpretation
of monadic predicate logic. We can also interpret the predicates as denoting properties.
Moreover, how do you determine what things are in the membership of a class? You
can't do this without assuming properties. If you see George eating chocolate,
why do you take him to be in the set of chocolate-eaters? You don't see him
being in a set, you see him exhibiting a certain behavior, that is, a certain
property. The property cannot be reduced to the set on pain of vicious infinite regress.
In other words, if you say:
George is a chocolate eater
means
George is a member of S (the set of chocolate-eaters)
Then the same reduction must be applicable to the set-membership relation, and you are
launched on a vicious infinite regress.
>One might profitably read the above with the failure of Leibniz's Law
>within intensional contexts clearly in mind.
As I'v mentioned before, this is an elementary use/mention fallacy.
Longley is confusing a metalinguistic principle of substitutivity
of singular terms with an object language principle about
identity (which is what Leibniz' Law is). In fact, Leibniz' Law
*can't even be statded in FOL*, a little problem Longley ignores.
Leibniz Law is this principle:
(x)(y)( x = y -> (f) (x exemplifies f <-> y exemplifies f)
> 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).
Two points: (1) it is simply false that intensional logic "violates
Leibniz' Law", (2) there are other conceptions of properties and
a logic of properties than the now rather outdated Fregean approach
of Carnap. I've said both these points before but Longley continues
to ignore my points.
>As stated above, a list of individuals which can occupy the positions
>of an n-place, or n-ary, or degree n predicate, is known as an ordered
>n-tuple (n-membered sequence), and this is ultimately what we are
>concerned with as behaviour scientists.
But so can properties, like traits and behaviors. Your language is
therefore second-order.
>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),...
This is simply not true. Read, for example, Zalta's "Intensional Logic
and the Metahysics of Intentionality".
Note that Longley never actually answers my question about how he would account
for the validity of the inferences about behavior that I gave in my original
message.
Tom Wetzel
:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
thomas...@eng.sun.com
David Longley
writes:
>
> Note that Longley never actually answers my question about how he would
> account for the validity of the inferences about behavior that I gave in
> my original message.
>
> Tom Wetzel
> :::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
> thomas...@eng.sun.com
>
It's a moot point as to who is ignoring who. This subject is running in at
least two threads of almost the same name. As far as I am concerned I have
answered the issues you have raised about "use and mention" which, is of
course what started Quine off on the track he has maintained since his
thesis on 'Principia Methematica'. I have not responded to your pseudocode
example because I'm not interested in counting 'properties'.
intensions do NOT determine extension - Putnam has demonstrated that with
his Twin-Earth thought experiment, which is apparently now widely known.
A few points on identity:
'One of the fundamental principles governing identity is
that of substitutivity - or, as it might well be called,
that of indiscernibility of identicals. It provides
that, given a true statement of identity, one of its two
terms may be substituted for the other in any true
statement and the result will be true.'
W V O Quine (1953;1961)
Reference and Modality:
From a Logical Point of View p.139
'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
'We know that Alma is at home or at work, and then we
learn that she is not at home. What can we conclude ? By
the methods of truth-functional logic we can draw the
obvious conclusion that she is at work. But by using new
methods, new kinds of conclusions can be drawn, e.g. the
conclusion that she does not work at home: home NE
workplace.
5-1 IDENTITY
If we write "Ah" for "Alma is at home" and "Aw" for
"Alma is at work," the two inferences under discussion
can be represented as in Examples 1 and 2.
EXAMPLE 1: Old Inference EXAMPLE 2: New Inference
Ah or Aw 1 + Ah or Aw (prem) Ah or Aw 1 +Ah or Aw (prem)
-Ah 2 -Ah (prem) -Ah 2 -Ah (prem)
_______ 3 -Aw (-concl) ______ 3 + - -h=w (-concl)
Aw -h=w
4 Ah Aw (from 1) 4 Ah Aw (from 1)
x x x
5 h=w (from 3)
6 Ah (from 4,5)
x
In examples 1 and 2 we have analysed atomic statements
into parts smaller than statements: place names "h" and
"w" and the predicate letter "A" for "Alma is at." In
the old inference the patterns "Aw" and "Ah" are treated
as if they were unitary statement letters, but in
applying the tree method to the new inference, we split
the first of these (line 4) into subatomic parts "A" and
"w" then replace "w" by "h," and finally reassemble the
parts to get the second atom (line 6).
To get line 6 from lines 4 and 5, we used this rule:
RULE FOR IDENTITY
If an open path contains a full line of form m = n and
also a full line p in which one of the names m, n
appears one or more times, write at the bottom of the
path a statement q obtained by replacing some or all of
the occurrences of that name in p by the other name,
provided q does not already occur in that path as a full
line:
m = n
p
_____
q
The thought is that if m and n really are one and the
same (m = n), then anything true of one of them must be
true of the other as well: q must be true if obtained
from a truth p by substituting equals for equals. To put
the same matter the other way around, if something has a
characteristic and something lacks it, the things must
be distinct. Thus in Example 2, her workplace had the
characteristic of being where Alma was, while home
lacked that characteristic. It followed that the two
places were distinct.
R Jeffrey (1989)
First order Logic: FORMAL LOGIC: Its Scope and Limits
p.86-88
Leibniz's Law, the substitutivity of indenticals 'salva veritate'
(or the identity of indiscernibles), is axiomatic for deductive
inference. In fact, a major thesis of these volumes is that where
Leibniz's Law fails, one invariably finds intensional, modal, or
psychological contexts. A behaviour scientist, by definition,
therefore restricts his or her discourse to extensional analysis
using the formal technology of FOL. The alternative is hopeless:
'Psychological state' and methodological solipsism
...In one sense a state is simply a two-place predicate
whose arguments are an individual and a time... When
traditional philosophers talked about psychological
states (or 'mental' states), they made an assumption
which we may call the assumption of methodological
solipsism. This assumption is the assumption that no
psychological state, properly so called, presupposes the
existence of any individual other than the subject to
whom that state is ascribed....Making this assumption
is, of course, adopting a restrictive program - a
program which deliberately limits the scope and nature
of psychology to fit certain mentalistic preconceptions
or, in some cases, to fit an idealistic reconstruction
of knowledge and the world. Just how restrictive the
program is, however, often goes unnoticed. Such common
or garden variety psychological states as being jealous
have to be reconstructed, for example, if the assumption
of methodological solipsism is retained. For, in its
ordinary use, x is jealous of y entails that y exists,
and x is jealous of y's regard for z entails that both y
and z exist (as well as x, of course). Thus being
jealous and being jealous of someone's regard for
someone else are not psychological states permitted by
the assumption of methodological solipsism. (We shall
call them 'psychological states in the wide sense' and
refer to the states which are permitted by
methodological solipsism as 'psychological states in the
narrow sense'.). The reconstruction required by
methodological solipsism would be to reconstrue jealousy
so that I can be jealous of my own hallucinations, or of
figments of my imagination, etc. Only if we assume that
psychological states in the narrow sense have a
significant degree of causal closure (so that
restricting ourselves to psychological states in the
narrow sense will facilitate the statement of
psychological laws) is there any point in engaging in
this reconstruction, or in making the assumption of
methodological solipsism. But the three centuries of
failure of mentalistic psychology is tremendous evidence
against this procedure, in my opinion.'
H Putnam
The Meaning of 'Meaning' (1975)
p219-221 Mind, Language and Reality
Others have subsequently made similar points, mainly in response
to one of the most influential papers written in recent years on
the subject (Fodor 1980).
The Argument from Methodological Solipsism &
Psychological Autonomy.
'The argument is familiar. It appeals inter alia, to
Twin-Earth considerations to argue that psychology
should advert only to properties that supervene on what
is "inside the skin."
The argument is open to question, as Burge has shown
(1986). Nevertheless I think that it is basically
correct (1989a:387-94). Assume that it is. Then it
establishes that truth-conditional properties are
irrelevant to psychology. These do not supervene on the
brain.'
Michael Devitt (1991)
Why Fodor Can't Have It Both Ways: Meaning In Mind:
Fodor & His Critics p.104
'The doctrine of methodological solipsism holds that
psychology ought to be concerned exclusively with
psychological states in the narrow sense. It is the
burden of Putnam's argument that methodological
solipsism is untenable since it excludes from psychology
such states as knowing the meaning of a term.
Fodor, by contrast, urges that we adopt methodological
solipsism as a research strategy in cognitive
psychology.'
S Stich (1993)
From Folk Psychology to Cognitive Science
The Syntactic Theory of Mind
The methodological behaviourist brings the repertoire of
scientific analysis (the predicate or relational calculus) to
bear on the material made available by reporters and treats all
such de dicto observations as grist for his scientific
(computational/extensional) mill. However, the efficacy of his
work will to a large extent be a function of parsing the
extensional from intensional. From this functional approach has
emerged the superiority of actuarial over clinical judgment in
areas where judgment has been tested (Dawes, Faust and Meehl
1989).
Where the stance of the methodological solipsist is required
therefore, is in the building of models of clinical judgment,
for, although, by itself, a demonstrably inadequate approximation
to judgment based on extensional methodology, it is nonetheless
worth cataloguing such heuristics if only to show that we are
aware of their existence, and improve upon them. In the final
analysis, we can do no better than to follow Quine's (1990,1992)
recommendations with respect to such attempts at reclamation:
'The transparency and efficiency of classical predicate
logic continue unimpaired. As long as extensional
science can proceed autonomously and self-contained,
with no gaps of causality that intensional intrusions
could serve to close, the sound strategy is the
linguistic dualism of anomalous monism.
Efforts to reclaim territory from the intensional side,
by dint of discoveries and reconceptualisations on the
extensional side, are meanwhile to be encouraged and
watched with great interest. I think of the Churchlands
in neurobiology and Raymond Nelson in computers.
Whatever is thus reclaimed is better understood for the
reclaiming. Formulability within the framework of the
predicate calculus is not a sufficient condition of full
intelligibility, but to me it is pretty nearly a
necessary one.'
W V O Quine (1990)
Intension
The Pursuit of Truth
The process of reclamation is of course the process of finding a
suitable extensional model, not a direct translation, but a model
which will do the job just as well if not better. How one handles
the intensional distinguishes different approaches in practical
professional work. This is how Dawes, Faust and Meehl (1989)
reviewed the process:
'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.'
Research on clinical versus statistical judgement has
had little impact on everyday decision making,
particularly within its field of origin, clinical
psychology......The interview remains the sine qua non
of entrance into mental health training programs and is
required in most states to obtain a license to practice.
Despite the studies that show that clinical
interpretation of interviews may have little or no
predictive utility, actuarial interpretation of
interviews is rarely if ever used, although it is of
demonstrated value.
Ultimately, then, clinicians must choose between their
own observations or impressions and the scientific
evidence on the relative efficacy of the clinical and
actuarial methods. The accuracy are exactly those that
scientific procedures, such as unbiased sampling,
experimental manipulation of variables, and blind
assessment of outcome, are designed to counter. Failure
to accept a large and consistent body of scientific
evidence over unvalidated personal observation may be
described as a normal human failing or, in the case of
professionals who identify themselves as scientific,
plainly irrational.
R Dawes, D Faust & P Meehl (1989)
Clinical Versus Actuarial Judgement : Science v243,
p1668-1674
This is a restatement in 1989, of yet another Vienna Circle
member's contribution to psychology. The actuarial-clinical
judgment literature draws considerably on the work which he
initiated (Arkes and Hammond 1987). One of the clearest critics
of methodology adopted by most psychologists today had the
following to say in this respect:
'However, it is only partly true that unconscious
inferences were neglected for almost an entire century.
Between 1930 and 1950, Egon Brunswick transformed the
meaning of Helmholtz' unconscious inferences into
unconscious multiple regression statistics. Brunswick's
conception, however, was rejected by the community of
experimental psychologists at the time....
..He transformed the meaning of unconscious inferences
from probabilistic syllogisms to the calculation of
correlations and multiple regression. And this is the
original meaning of the now popular metaphor of the mind
as an "intuitive statistician", a phrase coined by
Brunswick.'
G Gigerenzer & D J Murray (1987) p.63-65
Perception: History before The Inference Revolution:
Cognition as Intuitive Statistics
Daniel Dennett (1986) has provided perhaps the best account of
folk psychology from the 'Intentional stance' (a pragmatic
vernacular which serves as 'a rough guide to getting on with
life'). In 1969, in 'Content and Consciousness', writing in the
wake of Ryle (1949) and Quine (1960, 1968) he had this to say:
'The point of thinking in terms of propositional
attitudes even where no neat sentences of propositional
attitude can be produced is that Intensional objects,
even under the linguistic interpretation given them
here, lead almost inexorably to metaphysical excess, and
the characteristic of these objects that accounts for
this is one that it can be argued serves precisely to
show that Intentional objects are not any kind of
objects at all. That characteristic is the dependence of
Intentional objects on particular descriptions. As
criterion (3) indicates, to change the description is to
change the object. What sort of thing is a different
thing under different descriptions? Not any object.'
...
'The going scheme of logic, the logic that both works
and is generally supposed to suffice for all scientific
discourse (and, some hold, all significant discourse),
is extensional. That is, the logic is blind to
intensional distinctions; the intersubstitution of
coextensive terms, regardless of their intensions, does
not affect the truth value (truth or falsity) of the
enclosing sentence. Moreover, the truth value of a
complex sentence is always a function of the truth
values of its component sentences. Criteria (2) and (3)
indicate that Intentional sentences do not follow the
rules of extensional, truth functional logic, and hence
they are intensional. This expression of the position
leads us to the central claim of the Intentionalists,
that Intentional phenomena are absolutely irreducible to
physical phenomena. Put in terms of sentences, the claim
is that Intentional sentences cannot be reduced to or
paraphrased into extensional sentences about the
physical world. The claim goes beyond the obvious fact
that Intentional sentences are intensional, and hence
cannot be, as they stand, extensional - to the more
remarkable claim that no sentence or sentences can be
found which adequately reproduce the information of an
Intentional sentence and still conform to extensional
logic.'
D Dennett (1969)
Content and Consciousness, p28-30
Dennett's Quinean stance leads him to be highly critical of
Skinner's claims that psychological states can readily be
translated into physical states (behaviour) as expressed in
'Beyond Freedom and Dignity' (1971). Yet, Dennett's criticism,
given the ubiquity of folk-psychological subscription, is no more
than a purist intellectual spat within the behaviourist camp when
compared to the rift between those who practice a form of
intensional/extensional eclecticism through 'practical,
professional necessity' rather than restricting their work to the
application of extensional methodology to the prediction and
control of behaviour.
The thrust of Dennett's criticism of Skinner is simply that
Skinner has failed to appreciate that there is a body of sound,
logical evidence which strongly suggests that the domain of
intensional idioms is a domain which does not, in fact can not be
mapped into the language of science, and as a consequence, is
inherently indeterminate:
'For Quine's objections to intentional idioms have never
had anything to do with their presupposing rationality
or offering no explanation; rather he has argued that
intentional idioms are to be foresworn because, as
Chisholm argues, we cannot translate sentences
containing intentional idioms into sentences lacking
them. Sentences containing intentional idioms refuse to
"reduce" to the sentences of the physical sciences, so
we must learn to do without them: Skinner on the other
hand is blithely confident that such translations are
possible, and indeed 'Beyond Freedom and Dignity'
consists in large measure of samples of Skinner's
translations.'
D Dennett (1978)
'Skinner Skinned' - Brainstorms
Quine's conclusions can be stated clearly for those psychologists
who insist on unselfconsciously working with propositional
attitudes. The argument leads to the conclusion that for any
practical purposes, what they are doing can have no lawfully
practical, ie no demonstrable physical effect whatsoever. No
effect that is beyond effecting changes in cognition. However,
since such changes must make themselves manifest in behaviour if
they are to come under the control of the 'reinforcing
community', or be observed at all for that matter, and to the
extent that this does occur, such changes must be changes in
behavioural skills. Using the Sentence Management system (Volume
2), which allows us to build a library of regime functions, we
can measure such skill acquisition and change, establishing
empirical relations between behaviours (as we have with age and
report rate for example), and building reports from such
measures.
Unfortunately, although now technically possible, this requires a
considerable amount of austere desk work. Alas, as Dawes, Faust
and Meehl (1989) recognized, few seem prepared to exchange their
current, somewhat hectic, data-distribution free practices for
the required lacklustre alternative:
'Finally, actuarial methods - at least within the
domains discussed in this article - reveal the upper
bounds in our current capacities to predict human
behavior. An awareness of the modest results that are
often achieved by even the best available methods can
help to counter unrealistic faith in our predictive
powers and our understanding of human behavior. It may
well be worth exchanging inflated beliefs for an
unsettling sobriety, if the result is an openness to new
approaches and variables that ultimately increase our
explanatory and predictive powers.'
R Dawes, D Faust & P Meehl (1989)
Clinical Versus Actuarial Judgement : Science v243, p1668-1674
--
David Longley
Tom Wetzel
---
Another of David Longley's howlers:
>intensions do NOT determine extension - Putnam has demonstrated that with
>his Twin-Earth thought experiment, which is apparently now widely known.
Another example of how totally confused David is. Putnam's Twin Earth experiments
had nothing whatever to do with the issue of whether the properties denoted
by predicates determine the set of things that falls in the predicate's
so-called "extension." Longley just doesn't know what he is talking about.
What is it that indicates that the Twin Earthians are not referring to
water but twater? The fact that twater instances have a different nature, XYZ,
whereas water has the nature H20. Note that these are properties. Longley
perennially confuses being a property with being some sort of mental entity.
I.e., he perennially confuses "intensional" entities with "intentional" entities.
But, for example, being electrically conductive is a property, a property
that is a nomic consequence of such properties as being copper, being
iron, etc. Being conductive is obviously not a mental property (not "intentional")
since it would have existed even if there had been no organisms.
Moreover, the Twin Earth thought experiments don't even have any bearing
on whether anything has any "intentional" (mental) properties. Rather, what
these thought experiments show is that intentional properties are *relational*, that is,
they are individuated by what is in the organism's environment. So, for example,
why is it that my Twin Earth double, TomX, is not seeing water right now
but I am? Because twater is the object of his seeing whereas water is
the object of mine, even though there is no "internal", discriminable
difference in our states. This implies that what there is in the environment
is part of what individuates intentional states. Hence, intentional
states cannot be purely monadic, "internal" states of the organism. That
is what I take Putnam's Twin Earth examples to have shown and I think this
is what philosophers generally have taken it to have shown. The problem here
is that Longley thinks that semantic externalism is inconsistent with
the existence of intentionality -- and this is utterly bizarre. He confuses
intentional realism with semantic internalism (ala Searle).
Continuing:
>I have not responded to your pseudocode
>example because I'm not interested in counting 'properties'.
The examples I gave were not "pseudocode" but ordinary English. You're
admitting your philosophy is bankrupt as far as being able to account
for the logic of English. If you're not interested in "counting
properties", then, in the interests of consistency, you will have to henceforth
eschew the predicates "is a trait", "is a behavior" and stop talking
about "behaviors" like "drug-taking" and so on, which designate properties.
Tom Wetzel
:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
thomas...@eng.sun.com
David Longley
On Classification and FOL
'The notion of a property is one of various notions,
called INTENSIONAL, that depend thus on the nebulous
notion of meaning. Other examples are necessity,
possibility, and idioms of propositional attitude such
as belief, hope, regret.'
Quine (1985)
The Time of My Life
'If it makes sense to speak of properties, it should
make clear sense to speak of sameness and differences of
properties; but it does not. If a thing has this
property and not that, then certainly this property and
that are different properties. But what if everything
that has this property has that one as well, and vice
versa? Should we say that they are the same property? If
so, well and good; no problem. But people do not take
that line. I am told that every creature with a heart
has kidneys, and vice versa; but who will say that the
property of having a heart is the same as that of having
kidneys?
In short, coextensiveness of properties is not seen as
sufficient for their identity. What then is? If an
answer is given, it is apt to be that they are identical
if they do not just happen to be coextensive, but are
necessarily coextensive. But NECESSITY, q.v., is too
hazy a notion to rest with.
We have been able to go on blithely all these years
without making sense of identity between properties,
simply because the utility of the notion of property
does not hinge on identifying or distinguishing them.
That being the case, why not clean up our act by just
declaring coextensive properties identical? Only because
it would be a disturbing breach of usage, as seen in the
case of the heart and kidneys. To ease that shock, we
change the word; we speak no longer of properties, but
of CLASSES.'
By the nineteenth century it could go without saying
that every membership condition determines a class, just
as whatever is said about a thing ascribes a property.
It is at that point that classes obtain the status of
properties minus discrimination of coextensives - a
status which, as I have been complaining, is still
insufficiently appreciated.
And then came Russell's bombshell, shattering the
platitude that every membership condition determines a
class. See PARADOXES; also IMPREDICATIVITY. But this
does nothing to contravene the view of classes as
properties minus discrimination of coextensives. The
reasoning behind Russell's Paradox applies to properties
precisely as to classes, and shatters likewise the
platitude that whatever is said about a thing ascribes a
property. Whatever set-theoretic restraints may be
imposed on the existence of classes, in order to
preserve consistency, would need to be imposed 'pari
passu' on properties if we were so perverse as to
continue to recognise properties in lie of or addition
to classes.
We must acquiesce in ordinary language for ordinary
purposes, and the word 'property' is of a piece with it.
But also the notion of property or its reasonable
facsimile that takes over, since these contexts never
hinge on distinguishing coextensive properties. One
instance among many of the use of classes in mathematics
is seen under DEFINITION, in the definition of number.
For science it is classes SI, properties NO.'
Quine (1987)
Classes versus Properties
QUIDDITIES:
'I have had neither the aptitude nor the temperament for
debate, public or private, when confronted with motives
recognizably other than the pursuit of truth. If in
discussing with a student I sensed that he was animated
rather by some ideological preconception, or by a wish
to have been right for the sake of high marks or self-
esteem, I make short work of the dialogue. A vast gulf,
insufficiently remarked, separates those who are
primarily concerned to have been right from those who
are primarily concerned to be right. The latter, I like
to think, will inherit the earth.'
W.V. Quine
The Time of My Life (1985).
-
'According to the traditional theory, the concept
associated with a term functions like a set of
identifying descriptions supposedly associated with an
ordinary proper name. The new theory of reference holds
that the descriptions, if any, associated with a natural
kind term do not have a decisive role in deciding
whether the term applies to a given case. At best the
descriptions associated with such a term are a handy
guide in picking out things of the kind named, but the
descriptions do not determine what it is to be of the
kind. What determines whether some stuff is gold is its
atomic structure. Likewise, water is H20 - some stuff is
water only if it has the right chemical structure.
Biological kinds are determined by genetic structure,
and other natural kinds are similarly determined.'
Schwartz (ed)
Introduction
Naming, Necessity and Natural Kinds (1977)
The traditional theory (Frege, Russell and Wittgenstein) of
reference has intensions or properties determining extensions
(class membership). The name is a sort of shorthand or
abbreviation for the properties. The new theory of reference,
which began with Donnellson (1966), and was developed by Kripke
(1971) and Putnam (1973) reverses this. The traditional theory
took conjunctions of properties, or a cluster of properties
(family resemblance) as determining reference. This gave some
support to the idea that meanings 'are in the head' since if you
select the properties, you effectively construct the meaning
of terms. But, arguments such as Donnellan's "Smith's
Murderer", and Putnam's "Twin Earth" example argue strongly
against this, as does all of the work of Quine. I have cited the
'Twin Earth' argument against meanings being 'in the head' at
length elsewhere. Here is the Donnellan example:
'Suppose first we come upon poor Smith foully murdered.
From the brutal manner of the killing and the fact that
Smith was the most lovable person in the world, we might
exclaim, "Smith's murderer is insane." I will assume, to
make it a simpler case, that in a quite ordinary sense
we do not know who murdered Smith....This, I shall say,
is an attributive use of the definite description.
On the other hand,
Suppose that Jones has been charged with Smith's murder
and has been placed on trial. Imagine that there is a
discussion of Jones's odd behavior at his trial. We
might sum up our impression of his behavior by saying,
"Smith's murderer is insane." If someone asks to whom we
are referring, by using this description, the answer
here is "Jones."
This, I shall say, is a referential use of the definite
description.'
Donnellan (1966)
Reference and Definite Descriptions pp 46-7
Think of a database system. You could search for an inmate by
looking for a pattern of attributes, such as 'DOB', AND 'SENTYY',
AND 'OFF1' and so on. But we could not be sure that these would
uniquely specify any particular inmate, even if there was nobody
else in the database with those attributes. Specification by
conjunction (ANDing) of attributes is not the way to uniquely,and
lawfully specify a referent as the database exampl clearly shows.
What Kripke proposed was the term 'rigid designator', and this
would be true in all possible worlds. This somewhat shocked the
philosophical community as Kripke claimed that there are
discoverable synthetic yet necessary truths. For example,
'Hersperus is Phosphorus'. The rigid designator of Gold is its
atomic number (79), and for water it's H20. Whilst the name per
se is not important, Gold always did have the characteristics it
has, it always would get the atomic number it now has, and
water always was H20, whether we know this or not, and this was
the case pre Atomic Theory.
The point about meaning not being in the head is precisely this.
It is for science to discover what the distinguishing features of
natural kinds are. We do not create them, we do not construct
them. The world is a certain way and we learn to discriminate
those features and relate them to one another, we do not
construct them. We may of course get things wrong (through
ignorance, guesswork, poor attention to detail etc), but however
you look at it, meanings are not personal, they are not 'in the
head'.
Psychologists are just making a mistake on this point if they
think that there are no facts, but only 'points of view'. It is
just a fact that people do behave in ways which can be
classified, and this is not a matter of personal construction at
all.
Whilst we may classify behaviour according to some rather
arbitrary labels to start with, it is in pattern analysing those
data within the predicate calculus that we will extract lawful
features of behaviour.
Behaviour doesn't just change, it changes as a function of SDs.
These in are not a function of what is inside the head. People
(perhaps implicitly) control these SDs, and the task of the
Behaviour Scientist is to do get better control over this.
The most effective behaviour modifiers in prison are activity
and wing staff. They have no pretences about being
concerned whether their 'clients' want to change or not - they
just get on with their jobs, defining attainment areas and
criteria, assessing inmates relative to those criteria. They
aren't deterred by their clients complaining that they don't
understand either, that's all part of the job. They see such
behaviour as either counter-control or an opportunity for further
training.
To be effective, Applied Criminological Psychology has to get
better control of the SDs, and that means initially getting
staff to define RM-1s.
Donnellan K.S. (1966) Reference and Definite Description
The Philosophical Review LXXV 281-304
Kripke S. (1971) Identity and Necessity
In Naming, Neessity, and Natural Kinds
Ed S.P. Schwartz (1977)
Putnam . H (1973) Meaning and Reference
Philosophical Review LXX pp.699-711
David Longley
May 5, 1992
Peter Ruhrberg
>
>(2) Longley talks about "behaviors", and "traits", such as "drug-taking",
>"'sensation-seeking'", and so on. Note that this is not a language that
>he is entitled to if he is to stick to FOL, since he is here taking
>properties to be included in the domain of discourse. "...is a trait"
>and "...is a behavior" are second-order predicates in that they have
>properties in their extension. That is what "traits" and "behaviors"
>are. This means that he won't be able to quantify over traits and behaviors
>if he sticks to FOL. Let me take an example:
>
> Joey takes drugs
> Joey is an inmate in block 6
> Joey eats lots of chocolate
> George takes drugs
> George is an inmate in block 6
> George eats lots of chocolate
>
>From this data we can infer:
>(*) Drug-taking is a behavior of at least two inmates in block 6
>(**) At least two behaviors of inmates in block 6 involve ingesting
> substances
>
>We need second-order logic for these inferences.
Longley probably doesnt want to draw such inferences. But if he wants
he can draw them in FOL, if he chooses to formalize statements of the
form F(x) along the lines of Pred(f,x), that is to take properties as
objects, which stand in predication relations to other things. This
just goes to show that logic is one thing, ontology another. So I'm
not defending Longeleys first-orderism here. To the contrary.
Peter
David Longley
> >>
> >> Joey takes drugs
> >> Joey is an inmate in block 6
> >> Joey eats lots of chocolate
> >> George takes drugs
> >> George is an inmate in block 6
> >> George eats lots of chocolate
> >>
> >>From this data we can infer:
> >>(*) Drug-taking is a behavior of at least two inmates in block 6
> >>(**) At least two behaviors of inmates in block 6 involve ingesting
> >> substances
> >>
> >>We need second-order logic for these inferences.
> >
> >Longley probably doesnt want to draw such inferences. But if he wants
> >he can draw them in FOL, if he chooses to formalize statements of the
> >form F(x) along the lines of Pred(f,x), that is to take properties as
> >objects, which stand in predication relations to other things. This
> >just goes to show that logic is one thing, ontology another. So I'm
> >not defending Longeleys first-orderism here. To the contrary.
> >
>
> you mean by this, treating the predicate position as subject to
> being bound to quantifiers, then, of course, you are right. But
> I think that is not how Longley is interpreting the phrase "second-order
> logic", moreover, that is not necessarily how logicians have always
> interpreted "second-order logic." If you allow properties to be the
> values of variables, and you also hold that predicates denote properties,
> then, typically, you will also have principles that allow abstraction.
> For example, a rule that says you can infer
>
> Exemp(a,|y| y is red)
>
> from
>
> a is red
>
> This way of treating quantification over properties is, I think, closer to
> ordinary English. For example, consider the following inference:
>
> Berakka can fly
>
> Superman can fly
>
> There is something that both Berakka and Superman can do
>
> Note that "do" here is expressing the exemplification relation, that is, it
> would be symbolized by "Exemp(...,....)", thus:
>
> Fly(B)
> Fly(S)
> (3f) (Exemp(B,f) & Exemp(S,f))
>
> We can validate this argument if we allow the following inference:
>
> Fly(x)
> Hence: Exemp(x, |y| Fly(y))
>
> Thus, in ordinary English, when we quantify over properties, we have to
> introduce a relational predicate like "has", "does", etc. to express
> the logical relation of exemplification between the subject and the
> property. That's because quantifiers can only bind subject positions,
> not attributive positions.
>
> Tom Wetzel
> :::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
> thomas...@eng.sun.com
>
Exactly!!!
The point is that properties are intensional and as such present a problem.
Natural language itself is a problem, largely for this same reason. We use
FOL to get round these problems.
'The present article is almost wholly devoted to a
single problem - THE DEFINITION OF TRUTH. Its task is to
construct - with reference to a given language - A
MATERIALLY ADEQUATE AND FORMALLY CORRECT DEFINITION OF
THE TERM 'TRUE SENTENCE'....In (section 1) 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'
A. Tarski (1931)
The Concept of Truth in Formalized Languages
PREDICATE (The CONCISE OXFORD DICTIONARY)
v. 7 n. - -v.tr /'predi,kett/ 1. Assert or affirm as
true or existent. 2 (foll. by on) found or base (as
statement etc.) on. - n. /'predic(ate)/ 1 GRAM. what is
said about the subject of a sentence etc. (e.g. 'went
home' in 'John went home'. 2. LOGIC a. what is
predicated. b. what is affirmed or denied of the subject
by means of the copula (eg. MORTAL in 'all men are
mortal').
Rather than try to imagine how I may or may not define FOL and higher
logics, refer to the text I have provided in 'Fragments...'. I am not
peddling an ideology, I am simply advocating a policy of parsimony. I
am, at present, persuaded by Quine's arguments that FOL will suffice
as a framework for a science of behaviour.
I am suggesting that quantifying over properties creates an illusion
of 'psychological states' - and I am trying to avoid all that goes
with that illusion. That is why I was criticising the 'Big 5' factor
abstraction of personality (1992). It is important for you to realise
that. As another example, George Kelly's Personal Construct Theory
does the same sort of thing. It too is in my firing, for the same
reasons.
Consider the following in the context of the other arguments developed
in 'Fragments of Behaviour':
'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
'To begin with let us picture formal logic as one phase
of the activity of a hypothetical individual who is
also a physicist, mathematician, et al. Now this
overdrawn individual is interested in ordinary language,
let us suppose, only as a means of getting on with
physics, mathematics, and the rest of science; and he
is happy to depart from ordinary language whenever he
finds a more convenient device of extraordinary
language which is equally adequate to his need of the
moment in formulating and developing his physics,
mathematics, or the like. He drops 'if - then' in
favour of '' without ever entertaining the mistaken
idea that they are synonymous; he makes the change
only because he finds that the purposes for which he
had been needing 'if - then', in connection with his
particular scientific work, happened to be
satisfactorily manageable also by a somewhat different
use of '' and other devices. He makes this and other
shifts with a view to streamlining his scientific
work, maximising his algorithmic facility, and
maximising his understanding of what he is doing. He
does not care how inadequate his logical notation is
as a reflection of the vernacular, as long as it can be
made to serve all the particular needs for which he, in
his scientific program, would have otherwise to depend
on that part of the vernacular. He does not even need to
paraphrase the vernacular into his logical notation,
for he has learned to think directly in his logical
notation, or even (which is the beauty of the thing) to
let it think for him.'
W V O Quine (1962)
(Critique of) Mr Strawson on Logical Theory
The Ways of Paradox & Other Essays p.150
--
David Longley
David Longley
practice of science in fact. Just finding approximate models for
what one thinks one can express with folk-psychology (which
includes folk-physics and folk-logic) is really besides the
point, and precisely what many behaviour scientists such as
Skinner have criticised logicians for. We know that there are
problems with higher order logics, we know there are problems
with folk-psychology. Modelling the latter in the former may turn
out to be little more than an empty exercise in symbol
manipulation, obfuscation and self-delusion which is good for
little more than science fiction - we will see.
--
David Longley
Tom Wetzel
Peter Ruhrberg
>Peter Ruhrberg writes:
>>Longley probably doesnt want to draw such inferences. But if he wants
>>he can draw them in FOL, if he chooses to formalize statements of the
>>form F(x) along the lines of Pred(f,x), that is to take properties as
>>objects, which stand in predication relations to other things. This
>>just goes to show that logic is one thing, ontology another. So I'm
>>not defending Longeleys first-orderism here. To the contrary.
>
>Well, I suppose it depends on how you define "second-order logic." If
>you mean by this, treating the predicate position as subject to
>being bound to quantifiers, then, of course, you are right. But
yes. we have to be more careful than Longley to distinguish predicate
positions in FOL 2ndOL from the positions taken by terms that
translate predicates into FOL/2ndOL according to some chosen
translation. There are various options here. Some allow you to stick
to FOL while subscribing to fullfledged intensional ontologies. That's
really all I meant to say.
>I think that is not how Longley is interpreting the phrase "second-order
>logic", moreover, that is not necessarily how logicians have always
>interpreted "second-order logic." If you allow properties to be the
>values of variables, and you also hold that predicates denote properties,
>then, typically, you will also have principles that allow abstraction.
not all predicates denote properties though, or you get paradox. in
particular Exemp is a case in point: |x| not Exemp(x,x) etc...
(and Bealer (not again..;-) has a rather untypical view of
abstraction, as syntactic sugar. I think it's more that that.)
>For example, a rule that says you can infer
>
>Exemp(a,|y| y is red)
>
>from
>
>a is red
>
>This way of treating quantification over properties is, I think, closer to
>ordinary English. For example, consider the following inference:
>
>Berakka can fly
>
>Superman can fly
>
>There is something that both Berakka and Superman can do
>
>Note that "do" here is expressing the exemplification relation, that is, it
>would be symbolized by "Exemp(...,....)", thus:
>
>Fly(B)
>Fly(S)
>(3f) (Exemp(B,f) & Exemp(S,f))
>
>We can validate this argument if we allow the following inference:
>
>Fly(x)
>Hence: Exemp(x, |y| Fly(y))
>
>Thus, in ordinary English, when we quantify over properties, we have to
>introduce a relational predicate like "has", "does", etc. to express
>the logical relation of exemplification between the subject and the
>property. That's because quantifiers can only bind subject positions,
>not attributive positions.
I think we basically agree.
Peter
Peter Ruhrberg
>In article <3vj3jk$8...@engnews2.Eng.Sun.COM> t...@Eng.Sun.COM "Tom Wetzel" writes:
>> ---
>> Peter Ruhrberg writes:
>> >Longley probably doesnt want to draw such inferences. But if he wants
>> >he can draw them in FOL, if he chooses to formalize statements of the
>> >form F(x) along the lines of Pred(f,x), that is to take properties as
>> >objects, which stand in predication relations to other things. This
>> >just goes to show that logic is one thing, ontology another. So I'm
>> >not defending Longeleys first-orderism here. To the contrary.
>
These problems have nothing to do with the alleged inability of FOL to
deal with properties. There are substantial questions, to be sure, but
that's the fate of all metaphysics.
>Natural language itself is a problem, largely for this same reason. We use
>FOL to get round these problems.
You're kidding yourself if you think talking FOL = talking sense.
(quotes deleted)
>Rather than try to imagine how I may or may not define FOL and higher
>logics, refer to the text I have provided in 'Fragments...'. I am not
>peddling an ideology, I am simply advocating a policy of parsimony. I
>am, at present, persuaded by Quine's arguments that FOL will suffice
>as a framework for a science of behaviour.
And he's quite right. FOL suffices for a science of all kinds of
things, even, one might argue, sets, properties, possible worlds,
qualia, Meinongian objects, beliefs, etc. If we can talk about it we
can talk about it in FOL. So what?
>I am suggesting that quantifying over properties creates an illusion
>of 'psychological states' - and I am trying to avoid all that goes
>with that illusion.
As Tom pointed out: the illusion is all yours, perhaps shared by
conceptualists. The mainstream of philosophers and logicians is does
not confuse these things.
>Consider the following in the context of the other arguments developed
>in 'Fragments of Behaviour':
>
> '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
precisely.
>--
>David Longley
Peter
Tom Wetzel
---
Peter Ruhrberg writes:
>>I think that is not how Longley is interpreting the phrase "second-order
>>logic", moreover, that is not necessarily how logicians have always
>>interpreted "second-order logic." If you allow properties to be the
>>values of variables, and you also hold that predicates denote properties,
>>then, typically, you will also have principles that allow abstraction.
>
>not all predicates denote properties though, or you get paradox. in
>particular Exemp is a case in point: |x| not Exemp(x,x) etc...
>(and Bealer (not again..;-) has a rather untypical view of
>abstraction, as syntactic sugar. I think it's more that that.)
Yeah, I've been thinking about this particular paradox (the paradox of
self-predication, aka the intensional counterpart of Russell's paradox)
for quite some time (since I discussed it in my disseration back in
the '70s). In my current understanding of Abstraction, the following would
be fallacious:
(1) Exemp( |x| x is a property, |x| x is property)
(2) Hence: Exemp( |x| x is a property, |x|Exemp(x,x))
The reason this is a fallacy is that there is no such property as
self-exemplification. I think there are two properties which it is plausible
to say (1) predicates of the property of being a property: (a) the relation
of exemplification, and the property of exemplifying the property of being a
property (a relational property). But I see no reason to suppose that, in
addition to these two properties, there is yet a third property, of
self-exemplification. This is easier to see if you take a case such as:
(3) George = George
Now, what properties does (3) predicate of George? Well, it says the identity
relation obtains between George and George, and it also predicates the
relational property of being George. But I see no reason to suppose there
is yet a third property here, being self-identical. I reflect this intuition
in my understanding of how the rule of abstraction should work for relation
predicates. That is, I would place a restriction on the rule of Abstraction. Thus,
from (1) you could infer:
(2') Exemp2(|x| x is a property, |y| Exemp2(y, |x| x is a property))
Or you could infer:
(*) Exemp3(<|x| x is a property, |x| x is a property> |x||y| Exemp2(y,x))
But I wouldn't allow grabbing onto multiple argument places by a single
bound variable just because the same singular term occurs in both places.
That doesn't suffice to give us a distinct property. You have to careful
in how you build up your abstracts.
Tom Wetzel
:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
thomas...@eng.sun.com
Tom Wetzel
---
>No Tom, anyone can juggle symbols and write rhetoric. If what I was doing
But that comment is just name-calling. What I provided were arguments,
not rhetoric. To respond to arguments you have to actually respond to them,
which you persistently refuse to do. You can assert whatever you want but
your assertions are just that, assertions.
>was just using Quine's work as assertions, there wouldn't be all of the
>empirical work from psychology. If you think you are going to resolve
>any of these issues by 'argument' alone, you are totally misguided.
Here you are being blatantly dishonest. If you were just making an
"empirical psychological" claim why don't you just limit yourself to
that? Why make claims about logic? Why draw out all sorts of
grand philosophical conclusions, as you obviously take yourself to be
doing? Why don't you just post to sci.cognitive or sci.psychology.theory
instead of sci.logic and sci.philosophy.tech?
If you want to make philosophical and logical assertions, then
it is plainly dishonest for you to refuse to discuss them on a logical
and philsophical level, and retreat to this bullshit about how you are
just doing empirical psychology. A little intellectual honesty would be
helpful here.
>From what you have presented so far, you have not even understood what
>I have proposed. Your 'counter-arguments' are not counter arguments at
>all, just non sequitors.
On the contrary, *you* have not shown that *you* know what you are talking
about. The fact that you refuse to answer objections and questions is
indicative of that.
>Show me you understand the thesis before trying to show its deficits. At
>the moment I think you just like arguing for its own sake.
On the contrary, you show me (and the other commenters here) that you know
what you are talking about by answering criticisms and counterarguments.
I and others have given you arguments. If these arguments are "nonsequitors",
then you must *show* that by responding to the arguments. This you have
refused to do.
--
Tom Wetzel
:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
thomas...@eng.sun.com
Tom Wetzel
---
Writes David Longley:
>From what you have presented so far, you have not even understood what
>I have proposed. Your 'counter-arguments' are not counter arguments at
>all, just non sequitors.
Let's see. Among the theses that you have asserted seem to be the following:
(1) That all properties are psychological.
I gave counterexamples to that one, which you ignore. For example,
are malleability and conductivity of copper "psychological states"?
Sounds absurd on its face. This comes about from Longley's
confusion between "intensional" and "intentional."
(2) That statements about properties or about modality or about
intentional states "flout Leibniz' Law."
I pointed out that was an elementary confusion between the metalinguistic
principle of substitutivity and Leibniz' Law, which is an object language
principle that states a necessary condition on identity. You also
confuse "intensional contexts" with statements that report pyschological
states. But modal statements, for example, create intenstional contexts,
and these are not plausibly construed as always being about somebody's
psychological states. For example:
Necessarily Gato is not a dog.
Gato = the only mammal in the backyard.
Necessarily the only mammal in the backyard is not a dog.
(3) You state that purely extensional language is adequate as "the language
of science".
I've pointed out that the best available accounts of nomic or lawlike
relationships are in terms of relations between properties, that they
suppport counterfactual statements that can't be accounted for
without appeals to entities such as states of affairs, possible worlds;
that inductive practices seem to presuppose some notion of essential
links between properties which make them good candidates for projection.
Induction, nomicity, and counterfactual statements are all elements of
reasonable scientific practice that cannot be accounted for within the
confines of Longley's narrowly extensional language.
Those are just a few of the counterarguments that David has refused to
respond to. If I don't "understand" his theses, then he needs to do a better
job of explaining just what it is that his theses are. As it is he has
made a number of tendentious *philsophical* claims (NOT empirical
psychological claims) but he is unwilling to respond to philosophical
counterarguments.
Tom Wetzel
:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
thomas...@eng.sun.com
Tom Wetzel
---
David Longley writes:
[quotes from Quine snipped]
>See also 'On The Individuation of Attributes' in 'Theories and Things'
>Quine (1981). Are you sure you are getting all of my messages?
You mean, your regurgitation of stuff from Quine. The quotes here
simply do not address the points that I have raised. This is the
problem with your practice of just regurgitating quotes. It becomes
extremely frustrating because you are simply refusing to address
the actual arguments and issues that various people have raised.
If you're going to defend your theses, then do so, but I will point
out that you have simply failed to do so and I think I can take
your practice here of just repeating the same Quine quotes endlessly
as a refusal to actually answer the criticisms directed at your claims.
Quine's comments here are mere assertions, and I've already responded
quite sufficiently to Quine's points in previous messages. If you're
going to defend your positions, you'll have step down off
your quote-regurgitation machine and actually engage in discussion.
Tom Wetzel
:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
thomas...@eng.sun.com
David Longley
empirical work from psychology. If you think you are going to resolve
any of these issues by 'argument' alone, you are totally misguided.
From what you have presented so far, you have not even understood what
I have proposed. Your 'counter-arguments' are not counter arguments at
all, just non sequitors.
Show me you understand the thesis before trying to show its deficits. At
the moment I think you just like arguing for its own sake.
--
David Longley
Peter Ruhrberg
>In article <3vbql7$q...@engnews2.Eng.Sun.COM> t...@Eng.Sun.COM "Tom Wetzel" writes:
>
>> Another of David Longley's howlers:
>>
>> >his Twin-Earth thought experiment, which is apparently now widely known.
>>
>> difference in our states. This implies that what there is in the environment
>> is part of what individuates intentional states. Hence, intentional
>> states cannot be purely monadic, "internal" states of the organism. That
>> is what I take Putnam's Twin Earth examples to have shown and I think this
>> is what philosophers generally have taken it to have shown. The problem here
>> is that Longley thinks that semantic externalism is inconsistent with
>> the existence of intentionality -- and this is utterly bizarre. He confuses
>> intentional realism with semantic internalism (ala Searle).
>>
>are intensions. Read some Quine or Putnam and then try and engage me in some
>useful discussion, as it is you are talking nonsense. That it *is* nonsense
>should be clear to you and anyone else who has read the extracts from Quine.
<snip>
>--
>David Longley
What is clear to me is that you consistently confuse Toms (and others)
intensional realism with methodological solipsism (or something even
worse). I grant you this: Properties are
intensional objects, even if that doesn't imply you need anything other
than FOL to talk about them. (As I have said too many times now...)
If we stick to the view that intension fixes extension we conclude
from Putnams argument exactly what Tom concluded. inten*t*ional
relations to inten*s*ional obects are not *narrow* (solipsitically
construed) psychological states. This is the mainstream interpretation
of Putnams argument. Now we can argue whether there nevertheless is a
point for *other* descriptions, a la mentalese, which *are* narrow. We
can also argue whteher all *wide* intensional descriptions can be
exorcised from science (beware, if they go a lot goes with them). I
have found no argument in your postings and quotes that settles these
matters, or at least brings new light to the issue.
As to wo fails to reply to ceratin arguments I obviously am too
partial to be the judge of that ;-)
Peter
Tom Wetzel
---
Snarls David Longley:
<snip>
>> difference in our states. This implies that what there is in the environment
>> is part of what individuates intentional states. Hence, intentional
>> states cannot be purely monadic, "internal" states of the organism. That
>> is what I take Putnam's Twin Earth examples to have shown and I think this
>> is what philosophers generally have taken it to have shown. The problem here
>> is that Longley thinks that semantic externalism is inconsistent with
>> the existence of intentionality -- and this is utterly bizarre. He confuses
>> intentional realism with semantic internalism (ala Searle).
>>
>You are either not reading what I write, or willfully being stupid. properties
>are intensions. Read some Quine or Putnam and then try and engage me in some
>useful discussion, as it is you are talking nonsense. That it *is* nonsense
>should be clear to you and anyone else who has read the extracts from Quine.
Longley shows once again his yawning ignorance of the relevant literature.
Carnap introduced "intension" as a technical term in the context of a traditional
Fregean semantics that makes a distinction between "sense" and "reference".
Longley ignorantly assumes that anyone who wants to talk about properties,
allow properties in the domain of quantification, etc. must buy into
that traditional Fregean distinction. This just shows he is unfamiliar with
other approaches, such as denotational semantics. (For example, read Jerry
Fodor's comments in "A Theory of Content and Other Essays" about why
he has come to the conclusion that denotation is the only kind of
meaning there is, or Ed Zalta's discussion of predicates denoting
properties in "Intensional Logic and the Metaphysics of Intentionality.")
Ignorance is no sin, but it is objectionable when it leads to the sort
of head-in-the-sand dogmatism that Longley demonstrates. As Peter
Ruhrberg points out, my interpretation of Putnum's Twin Earth examples
is the "mainstream" interpretation. Longley simply doesn't
know what he is talking about but stupidly blunders on, insulting those
who try to correct him.
Now, I attributed to Longley the following philosophical theses:
> (1) That all properties are psychological.
>
> (2) That statements about properties or about modality or about
> intentional states "flout Leibniz' Law."
> (3) You state that purely extensional language is adequate as "the language
> of science".
I should add here a fourth thesis of his:
(4) That the introduction of properties into the domain of discourse can
only be accomplished by allowing predicate positions to be bound to
quantifiers, and, thus, the introduction of properties is inconsistent
with sticking to first-order logic.
Both Peter Ruhrberg and I have pointed out that Longley is mistaken
about (4).
Longley denies that he is committed to (1). However, Longley has said this:
>The point is that properties are intensional and as such present a problem.
So, that gives us:
(1a) Properties are intensional.
Moreover, Longley also seems to hold the following:
(1b) Intensional entities are psychological or intentional.
This implied, for example, in his latest reply to me:
>Now the science I am interested in is Behaviour Science. That
>means I want to cleave what can not be reliably quantified into
>from what can. The idea here is that within psychology we have a
>mixed bag. Some of our material is behaviours, some of it
>properties, traits, ie intentions. The case is made in 'Fragments
>of Behaviour: The Extensional Stance', which in turn is taken
>from 'A System Specification for PROfiling BEhaviour' - a
>computer hardware/software spec for how we have gone about doing
>this RATHER than work with intensional idioms (such as the
>propositional attitudes)
Longley continually confuses "intentional entities" (ie. psychological
states) with "intensional entities", i.e. properties, states of affairs,
propositions, etc.
And I will point out that (1) logically follows from (1a) and (1b).
This confusion also is shown by his comment about Putnam's
Twin Earth arguments supposedly having shown that "extension is
not determined by intension." Since Putnam says "meaning is not
in the head", you'd think it would have been obvious even to Longley
that "intension" (meaning) isn't in the head for Putnam. What we
denote (extension) may not be determined by the internal psychological
states, but it would only follow that "extension is not determined
by intension" if one is identifying psychological state with "intension."
That is precisely the confusion that Longley repeatedly falls into.
That there cannot be "reliable" quantification into modal contexts
is a conclusion that Quine may have advocated at one time in the
past, and which Longley takes as gospel, but it is a view that
is not widely shared at the present time. Longley, once again,
appears to be ignorant of the last 20 years worth of literature
on this subject. This doesn't stop him from dogmatizing about it,
tho. Given that talk about properties and states of affairs
("intensional entities") can be formulated within first order
logic (as understood by Longley), he offers no rational basis for
objecting to such entities.
Furthermore, he is inconsistent here since behaviors *are* properties.
Anything that can be predicated of something is a property. If George
stomps the guard, stomping the guard is a behavior, and one that he
shares with Joey if they both stomp the guard. "Stomping the guard" is
a canonical designator for a property, it would by symbolized by the
abstract "|x| x stomps the guard".
Longley's "philosophy" here has everything to do with a certain
positivist, behaviorist metaphysics. That the basis of his views is
philosophical is shown by his repeated reliance on quotes of
*philosophical* arguments from Uncle Willard. "Empirical science" is
just the rubric he dishonestly retreats to when his *philosophical*
arguments are challenged.
Tom Wetzel
:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
thomas...@eng.sun.com
David Longley
writes:
a lot of unsubstantiated rhetoric as usual. As I have said many
times, I am drawing on Quine's philosophy which I take to be
continuous with scientific psychology. I am contrasting that
naturalistic approach with the stance which Fodor (1980)
recommended as a research strategy for Cognitive Psychology, ie
Methodological Solipsism. Since the main body of 'Fragments of
Behaviour: The Extensional Stance' is a review of themes in
psychology such as the difference between learning abstract rules
vs function approximation, actuarial vs. clinical judgment, what
works in inmate programmes, the place of cognitive skills vs
general education, the value of Relational Database Technology
and Descriptive Statistics in the creation of base rates and
automated reports, and the poverty of Fisherian Null Hypothesis
Statistical Testing, much of what Tom is talking about is quite
irrelevant. The title of this thread is supposed to have the word
PSYCHOLOGY after XOR. Tom, may well be an intensional realist,
like Fodor, the problem is that such a stance is useless in the
applied area of work I am concerned with.
However, as to Putnam, I have several extracts which I considered
citing, but the one below will suffice. Anyone wishing more,
shoyuld consult the references in Fragments....'.
However, anyone so doing should note, (as Dennett warned in 'The
Intentional Stance') - - the whole area under discussion is
complicated enough for those immediately working on the issues,
and it can be a mine field. This is why I have made the point so
often that I am trying to stay close to Quine's text. Two things
I want to emphasise below is 1) the fact that intension can be
used in several ways, and 2) the section which is indented
towards the end of the extract should suffice to vindicate what I
have been writing to date to date.
A problem about reference
The set of things which makes up the extension of 'cat'
is different in different possible situations or
'possible worlds'. In a possible world M in which there
are no cats, the extension of 'cat' is the empty set. If
my cat Elsa had had offspring, then the extension of
'cat' would have at least one member it does not have in
the actual world. (We can express this by saying that in
each possible world M in which Elsa had offspring, the
extension of 'cat' includes members it does not include
in the actual world.)
We can indicate the way in which the extension of a term
varies with the possible world M in exactly the way in
which we indicate how the extension of the word 'I'
varies with the speaker: by using a function. We assume
a set of abstract objects called 'possible worlds' to
represent the various states of affairs or possible
world histories, and we associate with the term 'cat' a
function f(M) whose value on each possible world M is
the set of possible objects which are cats in the world
M. This function, following Montague and Carnap, I shall
refer to as the intension (#3) of the word 'cat'.
Similarly, the intension of the two-place predicate
'touches' is the function f(M) whose value on any
possible world M is the set of ordered pairs of possible
objects which touch each other in the world M; the
intension of the three-place predicate 'x is between y
and z' is the function whose value in any possible world
is the set of ordered triples (x, y, z) such that x is
between y and z, and so on. The intension of a word like
'1', whose extension in any world is context-dependent,
will be a more complicated function having as arguments
both the possible world and the indices representing the
context.
What the intension does is to specify how the extension
depends on the possible world. It thus represents what
we are interested In, the extension associated with a
term, in a very complete way, since it says what that
extension would have been in any possible world.
The reason 'intension' (in this sense) cannot be
identified with meaning is that any two terms which are
logically equivalent have the same extension in every
possible world, and hence the same intension, but a
theory which cannot distinguish between terms with the
same meaning and terms which are only equivalent in
logic and mathematics is inadequate as a theory of
meaning. 'Cube' and 'regtllar polyhu(lron with six
square faces' are igically equivalent predicates. So the
intension of these two terms is the same, namely the
function whose value in any possible world is the set of
cubes in that world; but there is a difference in
meaning which would be lost if we simply identified the
meaning with this function.
Let me emphasize that possible worlds, sets, and
functions are to be thought of as abstract extra-mental
entities in this theory, and not to be confused with
representations or descriptions of these entities.
Frege thought that the meaning (Sinn) of an expression
was an extra-mental entity or concept which could
somehow be 'grasped' by the mlnd. Such a theory cannot
help us with intensions in our sense. In the first
place, as just noted, there are differences in meaning
which are not captured by intension; so the
understanding of a term cannot consist only in
associating it with an intension. More important, if we
assume that we have no 'sixth sense' which enables us to
directly perceive extra-mental entities, or to do
something analogous to perceiving them ( intulting'
them, perhaps), then 'grasping' an intension, or any
extra-mental entity, must be mediated by representations
in some way. (This also seems clear introspectively, to
me at least.) But the whole problem we are investigating
is how representabons can enable us to refer to what is
outside the mind. To assurne the notion of 'grasping' an
X which is external to the wxuld be to beg the Whole
question
If I say of someone that he 'believes there is a glass
of water on the table', then I normally attribute to him
the capacity to refer to water. But, as we have seen,
being able to refer to water requires being directly or
indirectly linked to actual water (H20); the statement
'John believes there is a glass of water in front of
him' is not just a statement about what goes on in
John's head, but is in part a statement about John's
environment, and John's relationship to that
environment. If it turns out that John is a Twin Earth
person, then what John believes when he says 'there is a
glass of water on the table' is that there is a glass
containing a liquid which in fact consists of water and
grain alcohol on the table.
Husserl introduced a device which is useful when we wish
to talk of what goes on in someone's head without any
assumptions about the existence or nature of actual
things referred to by the thoughts: the device of
bracketing (#4) If we 'bracket' the belief that we
ascribe to John when we say 'John believes that there is
a glass of water on the table' then what we ascribe to
John is simply the mental state of an actual or possible
person who believes that there is a glass of water on
the table (in the full 'unbracketed' ordinary sense).
Thus, if John on Twin Earth cannot taste the difference
between water and water-cum-grain-alcohol, he may be in
the same mental state as an actual or possible speaker
of Earth English when he says 'there is a glass of water
on the table', notwithstanding the fact that what he
refers to as water would make a reasonable highball. We
will say that he has the bracketed belief that [there is
a glass of water on the table]. In effect, the device of
bracketing subtracts entailments from the ordinary
belief locution (all the entailments that refer to the
external world, or to what is external to the thinker's
mind).
Daniel Dennett has recently used the locution 'notional
world' in a way related to the way Husserl used
bracketing.(#5) The totality of a thinker's bracketed
beliefs constitute the description of the thinker's
notional world, in Dennett's sense. Thus, people on Twin
Earth have roughly the same notional world (and even the
same notional water) that we do; it is just that they
live on a different real planet (and refer to different
actual stuff as 'water'). And the Brains in a Vat of the
previous chapter could have had the same notional world
we do down to the last detail, if you like; it is just
that none of their terms had any external world
reference at all.
The traditional theory of meaning assumed that
a thinker's notional world determines the
intenSions of his terms (and these, together
with the fact that a particular possible world
M is the actual one, determine the extensions
of the terms and the truth-values of all the
sentences). We have seen that the traditional
theory of meaning is wrong; and this is why
the literature today contains many different
concepts (e.g., 'intension' and 'notional
world') and not a single unitary concept of
'meaning'. 'Meaning' has fallen to pieces. But
we are left with the task of picking up the
pieces. If intension and extension are not
directly fixed by notional world, then how are
they fixed.
The received view of interpretation
The most common view of how interpretations of our
language are fixed by us, collectively if not
individually, is associated with the notions of an
operational constraint and a theoretical constraint.
Operational constraints were originally conceived of
rather naively; we simply stipulate (conventionally, as
it were) that a certain sentence (say, 'Electricity is
flowing through this vire') is to be true if and only if
a certain test result is observed (the voltmeter needle
being deflected, or, in a phenomenalistic version, my
having the visual impression of seeing the voltmeter
needle being deflected). This sort of crude
operationalism no longer has any defenders because it
has been appreciated that (1) the links between theory
and experience are probabilistic and cannot be correctly
formalized as perfect correlations (even if there is
current flowing through the wire, there are always low
probability events or background conditions which could
prevent the voltmeter needle from being deflected); and
(2) even these probabilistic links are not simple
semantic correlations, but depend on empirical theory
which is subject to revision. On a naive operationist
account every time a new way of testing whether a
substance is really gold is discovered, the meaning and
reference of 'gold' undergoes a change. (In fact, we
shouldn't speak of a new test for gold being discovered.
)
#3 Montague, R., Forma/ Philosophy, Yale Universit,v,
1974. This use of 'Intension' is not the traditional one
which I discussed in 'The Meaning of "Meaning" '.
#4 Husserl, Ideas; Ceneral Introduction to Pure
Phenomenologv, Allen and Unwin, 1969. (Originally
appeared in 1913).
#5 Dennett, D. 'Beyond Belief', in Thought and Object,
Andrew Woodfield (ed.), Oxford University Press,
forthcoming.
Hilary Putnam (1981)
Reason, Truth and History p 25-29
A brief glance at the body of Fragments (sci.cognitive,
comp.ai.philosophy (29/7/95) or sci.psychology.theory (22/7/95)
or available from me as 9 e-mails (400K), will show, what is
important is the degree to which we pay attention to what inmates
(or clients generally) report as determining what they do, as
opposed to our focusing on what they actually do and make our
deductions from that material. The problem is that traditionally,
psychologists have spent a lot of time on what people think,
whilst the empirical evidence (Nisbett and Wilson 1977; Nisbett
and Ross 1980; Kahneman Slovic and Tversky 1983; Dawes, Faust and
Meehl (1989) and thousands of other studies now reveal, what we
should have seen from the beginning, ie that people learn to
explain their behaviour by observing their own and other peoples
behaviour, and calling upon available heuristics readily a
available in the social library of folk-psychology to "explain"
their actions. As such, the professionals may as well record the
behaviour directly and use the best technology we have to date to
analyse it as Dawes, Faust and Meehl (1989) recommend. The target
is of course contemporary psychological practice - a critique
recently endorsed by Dawes in 'House of Cards: Psychology and
Psychotherapy Built on Myth'.
I suggest those interested in the issues at stake read 'Fragments
of Behaviour: The Extensional Stance' directly, either by
accessing it in the newsgroups cited, or by requesting the 9
ASCII test files from me via e-mail.
--
David Longley
Tom Wetzel
---
A lot of unsubstantiated rhetoric from Longley as usual. In one
breath he says
> much of what Tom is talking about is quite
>irrelevant. The title of this thread is supposed to have the word
>PSYCHOLOGY after XOR. Tom, may well be an intensional realist,
>like Fodor, the problem is that such a stance is useless in the
>applied area of work I am concerned with.
Here he has, once again, committed his usual sophomoric fallacy of
confusing realism about properties, states of affairs, and other
so-called "intensional entities" (with an "s", David) with "intentional
realism" (with a "t", David, get it?) (which latter is obviously what
Fodor is talking about). "Intentional realism" with a "t" refers to
realism about contentful, object-directed, intentional states like
seeing, believing, etc. I'm a realist about both, but it is quite
possible to be a realist about one and not the other, which Longley
can't seem to fathom.
His talk here about his "applied work" is all well and good except
that I wasn't talking specifically about that but about the
specifically philosophical claims that he was making. In the next breath he
says
> I am drawing on Quine's philosophy which I take to be
>continuous with scientific psychology.
You mean you take Uncle Willard's word as gospel, evidently.
And I would simply note that Quine's arguments that Longley quotes
are *philosophical* arguments, arguing a *philosophical* thesis,
and it was Longley's *philosophical* arguments and theses, that
I was critiquing. To talk about his "applied work" is
hardly honest in this context since he was not just making claims
about his applied work but making larger philosophical claims,
and it was precisely the latter that I was critiquing. It is
presumably not due to the peculiar personal attributes of Uncle
Willard that philosophy has the sort of connection with
scientific understanding that Longley here refers to.
Longley's discussion of "intensions" as functions from possible
worlds to sets of objects is simply irrelevant since that is
only one theory of what properties are. The key problem with it
is that it makes necessarily equivalent properties identical,
and this is not a plausible theory of what properties are. In
particular I do not advocate that theory so it is irrelevant
in replying to what I've been saying.
> Frege thought that the meaning (Sinn) of an expression
> was an extra-mental entity or concept which could
> somehow be 'grasped' by the mlnd. Such a theory cannot
> help us with intensions in our sense. In the first
> place, as just noted, there are differences in meaning
> which are not captured by intension; so the
> understanding of a term cannot consist only in
> associating it with an intension.
You're begging the question twice over here:
(1) A Fregean need not assume
that a sense ("intension") is a Carnapian/Montague-esque
function from possible worlds to extensions.
(2) Properties need not be situated in terms of a Fregean
semantics, they can figure, for example, in a denotational semantics
which makes no distinction between "sense" and "reference".
Continuing:
> More important, if we
> assume that we have no 'sixth sense' which enables us to
> directly perceive extra-mental entities, or to do
> something analogous to perceiving them ( intulting'
> them, perhaps), then 'grasping' an intension, or any
> extra-mental entity, must be mediated by representations
> in some way. (This also seems clear introspectively, to
> me at least.) But the whole problem we are investigating
> is how representabons can enable us to refer to what is
> outside the mind. To assurne the notion of 'grasping' an
> X which is external to the wxuld be to beg the Whole
> question.
Here it is clear that Longley thinks the only possible theory of
what properties are is that of Fregean senses, which are conceived of
in Platonistic terms as not in spacetime. But this simply begs the
question. He completely ignores the view, which many philosophers
hold, that properties are objects of perception, that properties
exist in the physical world, that properties enter into causal
relations with organisms, that we perceive things having properties,
etc. Thus, no "sixth-sense" is required since we perceive properties
via the five sensory modalities. Consider my cat Gato's having black fur.
His having that property causally explains part of my visual experience
when I'm looking at him. The fact that extra-mental properties
are constituents of occurrent states of affairs or events that
enter into perceptual situations (constituents of the distal
situation) is part of the explanation of the content of perception
and of also how mind-to-world meaning relations are established
and reinforced.
Continuing:
> If I say of someone that he 'believes there is a glass
> of water on the table', then I normally attribute to him
> the capacity to refer to water. But, as we have seen,
> being able to refer to water requires being directly or
> indirectly linked to actual water (H20); the statement
> 'John believes there is a glass of water in front of
> him' is not just a statement about what goes on in
> John's head, but is in part a statement about John's
> environment, and John's relationship to that
> environment. If it turns out that John is a Twin Earth
> person, then what John believes when he says 'there is a
> glass of water on the table' is that there is a glass
> containing a liquid which in fact consists of water and
> grain alcohol on the table.
The statement (*)
(*) John believes that there is a glass of water in front of him
does indeed not refer to just what is inside his skull. "Meaning
is not in the head", as Putnam says. When Twin Earth John
uses "water" he refers to a different *property* than Earth John.
Earth John refers to H20 whereas Twin Earth John refers to XYZ. This
brings out the fact that propositional attitudes, construed on
a wide content account, are relational, they require relations
to the environment for their indidivuation, as I pointed out previously.
The fact that Earth John and Twin Earth John have the same internal
representations does not suffice to show they mean the same thing
since meaning depends on the brain-world relationship.
Continuing:
> The traditional theory of meaning assumed that
> a thinker's notional world determines the
> intenSions of his terms (and these, together
> with the fact that a particular possible world
> M is the actual one, determine the extensions
> of the terms and the truth-values of all the
> sentences). We have seen that the traditional
> theory of meaning is wrong; and this is why
> the literature today contains many different
> concepts (e.g., 'intension' and 'notional
> world') and not a single unitary concept of
> 'meaning'. 'Meaning' has fallen to pieces. But
> we are left with the task of picking up the
> pieces. If intension and extension are not
> directly fixed by notional world, then how are
> they fixed.
Here it is clear that Longley uses "traditional theory of meaning" to
refer to an *internalist* semantical program, such as that of Searle,
for example. But he simply assumes without argument that externalism
about meaning is inconsistent with the existence of properties,
intensional entities, as objects of reference. And that assumption is
simply false.
One way to answer his last question is to do so the way Fodor suggests
in "A Theory of Content", in terms of a denotational semantics where we
assume that the semantically primitive representations have their
meaning attached via causal relations. Meaning is thus "naturalized"
via the causal theory of reference.
Also, I will here dissent from Longley's interpretation of "bracketing".
Husserl had to assume, even in "bracketed" discourse, the existence of
entities of meaning, such as properties. For example, if I am
describing this tree that I am perceiving as green and leafy, I can
do so without being committed to this being the way the tree really is,
or without being committed to the existence of a tree here, etc. BUT
my discourse is still committed to there being such things as properties,
properties such as being green, being leafy, being a tree.
Continuing:
> what is
>important is the degree to which we pay attention to what inmates
>(or clients generally) report as determining what they do, as
>opposed to our focusing on what they actually do and make our
>deductions from that material. The problem is that traditionally,
>psychologists have spent a lot of time on what people think,
>whilst the empirical evidence (Nisbett and Wilson 1977; Nisbett
>and Ross 1980; Kahneman Slovic and Tversky 1983; Dawes, Faust and
>Meehl (1989) and thousands of other studies now reveal, what we
>should have seen from the beginning, ie that people learn to
>explain their behaviour by observing their own and other peoples
>behaviour, and calling upon available heuristics readily a
>available in the social library of folk-psychology to "explain"
>their actions. As such, the professionals may as well record the
>behaviour directly and use the best technology we have to date to
>analyse it as Dawes, Faust and Meehl (1989) recommend. The target
>is of course contemporary psychological practice - a critique
>recently endorsed by Dawes in 'House of Cards: Psychology and
>Psychotherapy Built on Myth'.
There is much truth in what Longley says here, and if he had confined
himself to such comments, and not tried to make sweeping and
contentious philosophical statements, we might have had less to
argue about.
Tom Wetzel
:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
thomas...@eng.sun.com
David Longley
"Tom Wetzel" writes:
<snip>
>
> (1) That all properties are psychological.
>
> (2) That statements about properties or about modality or about
> intentional states "flout Leibniz' Law."
> (3) You state that purely extensional language is adequate as "the language
> of science".
<snip>
I have not asserted 1, I have cited Quine's that properties are
intensional.
As to 2, I have said (again, along with Quine) that one
substitutivity of identicals 'salva veritate' fails within
intensional contexts.
I'm citing Quine again - see 'Word and Object', 'The Scope and
Language of Science' (1954) (The Ways of Paradox and Other
Essays) and 'Pursuit of Truth; 1990;1992.
Now the science I am interested in is Behaviour Science. That
means I want to cleave what can not be reliably quantified into
from what can. The idea here is that within psychology we have a
mixed bag. Some of our material is behaviours, some of it
properties, traits, ie intentions. The case is made in 'Fragments
of Behaviour: The Extensional Stance', which in turn is taken
from 'A System Specification for PROfiling BEhaviour' - a
computer hardware/software spec for how we have gone about doing
this RATHER than work with intensional idioms (such as the
propositional attitudes) over the past 10 years, and how
automatic report writing within the DBMS can be used to deduce
material which is therefore quite independent of what the
individuals of the FOL based system (ie the inmates) have done,
which need not get us into complications about what the inmates
think or believe (in such areas we can not make reliable
inferences).
Please see the above 9 articles and you will see how we are
talking past each other.
--
David Longley
David Longley
fleh...@orion.oac.uci.edu "Fritz Lehmann" writes:
>
> I don't often resort to personal, ad hominem critiques (I _try_ not to)
> on Usenet, but I did in David Longley's case because of: his continuing
> prolificness in newsgroups I read almost every day, his disingenuousness
> in debate, the ludicrousness of his pet theory and of the far-fetched
> philosophical borrowings used to support the theory, and (as I wrote earlier)
> the possible abusive consequences of Skinnerian Behaviorism being applied to
> hapless British prisoners if UK prison authorities were to be impressed with
> Longley's barrage of irrelevant scholarship.
>
> Longley has explicitly declared that argument and analysis are not the
> way to resolve a problem. (Quoting is so much better!) So, keep up the good
> fight Tom Wetzel if you have the time, but also, "lotsa luck!"
>
There have been several requests for concrete answers from you Lehmann, and
all we get is this sort of thing. Hasn't anyone ever told you that science
does not progress through debate but through the collection and analysis of
data. All I have seen is rhetoric ... which can be fun, but isn't what I am
after. For the record:
'Rhetoric is the literary technology of persuasion, for
good or ill. It is the rallying point for advertisers,
trial lawyers, politicians, and debating teams.
Debating teams are promoted in schools as a spur to
effective language and incisive thought. They serve that
purpose, but only by setting the goal of persuasion
above the goal of truth. The debater's strength lies not
in intellectual curiosity nor in amenability to rational
persuasion by others, but in his skill in defending a
preconception come what may. His is a nefarious knack of
disregarding all the discrepancies while regarding every
crepancy.
The same skill, along with legal lore, is the strength
of the trial lawyer or barrister, and the strength also
of the successful politician, one or the other of which
careers the captain of the the debating team is clearly
destined for. Happily there are lawyers who will only
take on such cases as they deem to be just, and
politicians who will espouse only a case which is
righteous; but these scruples are not adjuncts of the
rhetorical pole, nor are they keys to success in the
legal or political profession.
When an electorate or a jury is the sway of a
demagogue's rhetoric, cold reason and the marshaling of
facts bear little promise in rebuttal. Marshaling more
rhetoric, then, in a contrary vein, we fight fire with
fire. Rhetoric is invaluable homeopathically in
withstanding its own assaults.
In scientific circles there is little demagogy to
combat, but rhetoric is sometimes of service even there;
for in an extremity it may happen that a scientist needs
more than a cold statement of his theory and his
evidence if he is ever to shake the stubborn and
mistaken preconceptions of some of his students, let
alone his dissident colleagues. But rhetoric in the
wrong scientist's hands can do disservice to science. It
can help him put his theory across for his reputation's
sake despite some shakiness in the evidence.
Rhetoric, then, is sometimes nefarious and sometimes
not. In its nefarious use it is the art or practice of
defending a proposition on grounds other than one's own
reasons for defending it. An auxiliary device is
innuendo. A 'referentially translucent' expression, as
Randal Marlin call it, is subtly ambiguous: it can be
taken as objectively stating a result of an action, and
it can be taken as accusing the agent of intending that
result. One of Marlin's examples is the headline 'Pope
Fouls Up Bar Mitzvah'. The Pope's arrival in town caused
a traffic jam that rendered the synagogue inaccessible
for the Bar Mitzvah; but the headline can be taken as
hinting unjustly of hostility on the Pope's part towards
Jews. It is an insidious device, effective in warping
unsuspecting minds while still adhering, in a sense, to
the verifiable.
Nefarious rhetoric is rife not only in tendentious
journalism, television commercials, courts of law,
Congress, political rallies, and the United Nations, but
also in homelier settings. In a New England town meeting
a citizen will describe in glowing terms the public
advantages which accrue from some proposed measure, when
what is at stake deep down has to do with his own
interest as proprietor, abutter, investor or c ontractor.
In such a case we do not cope with abuse by meeting
rhetoric with rhetoric, fire with fire, we just expose
the man's motives. What is important is to be alert to
what is going on, and not accept insincere argument at
face value. This much applies to the august and the
humble ones alike.
What I have been calling nefarious rhetoric recurs in a
rudimentary form also in impromptu discussions. Someone
harbors a prejudice or an article of faith or a vested
interest, and marshals ever more desperate and
threadbare arguments in defence of his position rather
than be swayed by reason or face the facts. Even more
often, perhaps, the deterrent is just stubborn pride:
reluctance to acknowledge error. Unscientific man is
beset by a deplorable desire to have been right. The
scientist is distinguished by a desire to BE right.
Rhetoric
QUINE (1987)
Quiddities
If what I have written does not have a ring of truth about it,
especially the emphasis on the problems of non verbatim quotation
and its relationship to reporting and inference, try reading some
of the references I have cited and then look again. Some of my
own colleagues initially responded as Lehmann does, and came to
see things rather differently after a few years of clinical case
work. If you don't do case work, no matter, translational indeter-
minacy is ubiquitous.
I did not put the material up for debate, I made it available for
appraisal, hoping that some who read it in as presented might be
able to add a few points here and there.
In the recent book 'On Quine' (1995) by Leonardi and Santambrogio,
Lepore and Loewer contribute a chapter entitled 'Quine and the
Attitudes' where they characterise Quine's analysis as monadic and
just about everyone else as promulgating a relational view. This
includes Fodor.
If anyone *does* have anything to constructively offer having read
the 9 extracts, I'd very much like to hear what it is. To a large
extent, what I have seen here on the net is a lot of statements
to the effect that other prople prefer a different approach for
reasons which escape me given that none of those people seem to
be working on the problems I have outlined.
Fritz Lehmann clearly has little understanding of what Radical
Behaviourism is all about - he says as much. He has had ample
oportunity to explain why those of us using Relational Database
Management Systems such as SIR to build logical models of the
behaviour of our domains of concern, should have to venture beyond
FOL. Tversky and Kahneman's work on base-rates, Meehl's work on
clinical vs actuarial judgment, years of research in Attribution
theory and countless studies revealing very low correlation relat-
ions (correlations) between behaviour and attitudes count for just
about nothing to Lehmann.
The fact is that Quine's analyses (like Skinner's in the 1940s)
actually shed some light on the issues. Most of what passes as
cognitivism may be little more than science fiction.
For those interested enough to make up their own minds, just read
the extracts entitled 'Fragments of Behaviour: The Extensional
Stance' sci.cognitive, sci.psychology.theory & comp.ai.philosophy,
and decide for yourself.
Then, *maybe* the title and content of this thread will be a little
more coherent.
--
David Longley
Fritz Lehmann
corrections of David Longley, wrote:
---begin quote---
Longley, once again,
appears to be ignorant of the last 20 years worth of literature
on this subject. This doesn't stop him from dogmatizing about it,
tho.
I don't see evidence that Longley is so notably ignorant of 20
years of literature; rather, he seems to have culled quotes from 50
years of literature using a very strong and selective filter, namely
by marshalling any snippet of philosophy, psychology, mathematical logic (or
taxidermy for that matter) which (he thinks) will add to the prestige
of Skinnerian Behaviorism. Invoking "big-name" authority is part of the plan,
-- see for example the many intellectually obsequious mentions of Quine.
If a quote seems to him to have propaganda value, it enters the Longley corpus,
whether correctly understood or not; otherwise it is omitted. I predict
that Wetzel will not find that Longley is genuinely interested in exploring
the truth of any counter-arguments, judging from Longley's current and past
pattern of Usenet responses in sci.logic.
If you precisely refute and shred a Longley analysis of one of his
(often perfectly cogent) quotes, you "simply don't understand", or "you
haven't read the work".
I don't often resort to personal, ad hominem critiques (I _try_ not to)
on Usenet, but I did in David Longley's case because of: his continuing
prolificness in newsgroups I read almost every day, his disingenuousness
in debate, the ludicrousness of his pet theory and of the far-fetched
philosophical borrowings used to support the theory, and (as I wrote earlier)
the possible abusive consequences of Skinnerian Behaviorism being applied to
hapless British prisoners if UK prison authorities were to be impressed with
Longley's barrage of irrelevant scholarship.
Longley has explicitly declared that argument and analysis are not the
way to resolve a problem. (Quoting is so much better!) So, keep up the good
fight Tom Wetzel if you have the time, but also, "lotsa luck!"
Yours truly, Fritz Lehmann
Fritz Lehmann
mediaeval Schoolmen who would always write "X hath said" in
preference to explicating their own views, where "X" was some prior
Big Name:
... goal of persuasion
above the goal of truth. The debater's strength lies not
in intellectual curiosity nor in amenability to rational
persuasion by others, but in his skill in defending a
preconception come what may. His is a nefarious knack of
disregarding all the discrepancies while regarding every
crepancy.
... Quine, Quiddities
Chutzpah aplenty. This has been Longley's exact pattern, "defending
a preconception come what may". The cogent refutations have come
not from me, but from Aaron Sloman, Tom Wetzel and others, with no trace
of effort by Longley to explore their possible truth, or to refine or revise
his position one whit.
Longley also declared:
---begin quote---
I did not put the material up for debate, I made it available for
appraisal,
---end quote---
It has been appraised.
Yours truly, Fritz Lehmann
David Longley
fleh...@orion.oac.uci.edu "Fritz Lehmann" writes:
> Longley also declared:
> ---begin quote---
> I did not put the material up for debate, I made it available for
> appraisal,
> ---end quote---
>
> It has been appraised.
>
> Yours truly, Fritz Lehmann
>
Yes, and true to form, you base your erroneous conclusions on
inadequate and unrepresentative evidence. All three of you have
made a point of saying that you HAVE NOT READ the original
material!
I have had plenty of private e-mail comments to offset the empty
remarks I have received from you, which just amounts to a form of
heckling.
Tom has at least acknowledged that there is some substance to
what I am presenting (if only restricted to the remarks on
psychology) He subscribes to a different position with respect to
intensional terms. I happen to think intensional realism to be
incoherent, especially in Fodor's hands (see Dennett's 'Granny's
Campaign for Safe Science' in Meaning In Mind: Fodor and His
Critics' eds Loewer and Rey (1991)).
I think Aaron too has gradually come to see the argument I am
presenting (particularly in the form of the failure of
substitutivity in contexts of propositional attitude). He may not
agree, I doubt that he could and still defend his own version of
functionalism. C'est la vie.
There are aspects to what I am presenting which you will not find
elsewhere, but which are consistent with the stance outlined in
Fragments and a large body of empirical work in behaviour
science. If you have not seen that yet, I suspect that you *will*
come to appreciate it IF you read the material I have referred
to. In the absence of you having done so, constructive dialogue
is impossible.
--
David Longley
David Longley
& rhetoric, here are a few comments on the nature of the relational model,
& the reason for using such technology at the foundation for a science of
behaviour in the field of 'corrections'. Such a system can provide us with
valuable base-rates which form the basis of 'offender profiling'.
The rationale for greater investment in such systems to support decision
making in all areas of sentence management should be clear. As to whether
or not the PROBE project amounts to a novel and substantial application in
the field of Artificial Intelligence, I leave for those more qualified to
decide. If anyone would care to review the material, access points are
listed at the end of this article.
'The predicate calculus can be used to form queries about
stored data. Basically we can store the extension of a
predicate as a set of data values in a file on a
computer...The facts in the database can be written down
directly as a series of instances of predicates applied to
constants..
P. Gray (1984)
Logic, Algebra and Databases
'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
'...it is useless to suggest, as some logicians have done,
that the variable x may take as its values intensions of some
sort. For if we admit intensions as possible values of our
variables, we must abandon the principle of the
indiscernibility of identicals, and then, because we have no
clear criterion of identity, we shall be unable to say what
we want to say about extensions.'
Problems of Intensionality
W. Kneale and M Kneale (1962)
The Development of Logic p.617
...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
Cognitive Psychology 21, 515-550 (1989)
My reading of Quine's (1992) 'Pursuit of Truth' leads me to conclude that
systems such as PROBE may serve as more than just a means of practising
a set of helpful extensional strategies. Such systems, in one form or
another may be a sine qua non for the practice of a science & technology
of behaviour. Before deciding whether you agree with this, read the nine
extracts from 'A System Specification for PROfiling BEhaviour' which have
been made available in sci.cognitive, sci.psychology.theory and also in
comp.ai.philosophy, as 'Fragments of Behaviour: The Extensional Stance',
or if you have problems accessing those articles and want to read them,
contact me by e-mail - - I'll forward them to you.
I'd appreciate constructively critical comments.
--
David Longley
Aaron Sloman
misreporting. Search for [DL*] below.
Here's the admission:
David Longley <Da...@longley.demon.co.uk> writes:
[DL]
> > I did not put the material up for debate, I made it available for
> > appraisal,
You have used newsgroups where people are accustomed to debating
almost everything. Are you now saying you were not interested in any
responses other than things like "My that's good stuff David"??
Critical appraisal, which is what you got, is very like good
debating: i.e. people gave reasons for their appraisals.
[Fritz Lehman]
> >
> > It has been appraised.
> >
> > Yours truly, Fritz Lehmann
I agree.
[DL]
> Yes, and true to form, you base your erroneous conclusions on
> inadequate and unrepresentative evidence. All three of you have
> made a point of saying that you HAVE NOT READ the original
> material!
I can't speak for the others, but if you look carefully at what I
actually wrote, you will find that I did not read ALL the original
material you posted. I read ENOUGH to see where you were going
wrong. Sorry.
[DL*]
> I think Aaron too has gradually come to see the argument I am
> presenting
What??????
>..(particularly in the form of the failure of
> substitutivity in contexts of propositional attitude).
What are you thinking of?
I did not find a single argument you were presenting that was not
either
(a) something true by definition (e.g. "intensional contexts are
those where substitutability salve veritate fails"), and therefore
there was nothing gradual about my acceptance: it's like "prime
numbers are numbers divisible only by 1 and themselves", which I
instantly acknowledge, because it's trivially true.
or
(b) a collection of claims I disputed (whether or not Quine, Stich
and Skinner are on your side).
(b1) For example I argued against you that there are some contexts
of propositional attitude that are not intensional, i.e.
substitutivity salva veritate holds in those contexts. (You ignored
this, though Michael Zeleny tried at least to enter into discussion,
though we ended up disagreeing on how we understand sentences of
ordinary English, e.g. "Find out how many people remember seeing the
burglar climb over the wall", which I claim has a non-intensional
interpretation for "the burlar" even though that's a context or
popositional attitude, i.e. intentional.).
(b2) I argued that computer science and software engineering and the
discussion of properties of algorithms used intensional contexts,
and that these made perfectly good sense and should not be abandoned
simply because Quine failed to anticipate their usefulness. (You
mostly ignored the examples, apart from name-calling: "deviant",
"vapourware".)
(b3) I argued that purely neural or behavioural approaches or some
combination thereof would NOT suffice for the undertstanding of
human capabilities (just as they are inadequate for understanding
complex computing systems), for they omit an important level of
description and explanation.
(b4) I argued that science frequently goes far beyond the
information given (e.g. it's one of the most important features of
physics). This is what characterises deep explanations, in physics,
chemistry, biology, .... and psychology.
(b5) I argued (like many mathematicians, at least from Poincare
onwards) that there are successful forms of reasoning used by
mathematicians and others which are NOT embedded in the formalism
and inference mechanisms of predicate logic, and therefore the
attempt to restrict science to what can be done in predicate logic
(first order or higher order) cannot be justified. I gave some
examples. (Reasoning about intersections in a plane, reasoning about
removing underpants without removing trousers: a problem involving
3-D topology and geometry.)
I did, from the beginning, allow that your behavioural/statistical
analysis might produce SOME useful information for practical
purposes, and that it might be better than the intuitions of judges
and prison officers.
There was nothing gradual in any of this.
The only change occurred when you, for some reason, stopped
referring to virtual machines in derogatory terms (vaporware,
unscientific, or whatever) and suddenly allowed that scientists of
whom you approved might actually be interested in them. Your words
were:
| I am not sure we *don't* create what you refer to as 'the high
| level virtual machines' (skills) implemented in the brains of
| school children' nor that we can't (yet) easily insert additional
| [?internal?] monitoring software to detect which data structures
| are being created, when they are changed etc.
I don't know why you changed your position on this - perhaps you
should explain. I did not change mine, gradually or otherwise.
I do sometimes change my views, suddenly or gradually. But not in
this interchange. The Quinean arguments have been far too weak.
(I did modify my position slightly in response to a criticism from
Zeleny, but it still left me disagreeing with you.)
So I hope you will not invoke my name, with or without quotations,
in support of your position on anything except this:
I accept the possibility that your statistical analysis of
factual records MIGHT sometimes be more useful than the
intuitions of judges and prison officers,
as I acknowledged long ago.
[DL]
> He may not
> agree, I doubt that he could and still defend his own version of
> functionalism. C'est la vie.
(b6) I also disagreed with you that my version of functionalism
either presupposed or entailed methodogical solipsism (e.g meanings
are totally internal) a position I've rejected. You have more than
once accused me of methdological solipsism without ever producing an
argument.
[DL]
> There are aspects to what I am presenting which you will not find
> elsewhere, but which are consistent with the stance outlined in
> Fragments and a large body of empirical work in behaviour
> science. If you have not seen that yet, I suspect that you *will*
> come to appreciate it IF you read the material I have referred
> to. In the absence of you having done so, constructive dialogue
> is impossible.
What makes constructive dialogue impossible is a failure to address
the DETAILS of new arguments against old theories in any other way
than by repetition of the old theories.
Let's have some detailed careful analysis without name calling, and
with close attention paid to the counter examples offered. (E.g. you
ignored my examples about times of different computations of the
same number, which were clearly intensional, and switched to
discussing some other examples of times of journeys, which were not,
at least not as you presented them. If you find it too painful to
engage in proper debate and analysis, then maybe we can drop this
whole thread.)
Aaron
--
Aaron Sloman, ( http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~axs )
School of Computer Science, The University of Birmingham, B15 2TT, England
EMAIL A.Sl...@cs.bham.ac.uk
Phone: +44-121-414-4775 Fax: +44-121-414-4281
David Longley
> I've just spotted a very strange admission, and a piece of
> misreporting. Search for [DL*] below.
>
> Here's the admission:
>
> David Longley <Da...@longley.demon.co.uk> writes:
>
> [DL]
> > > I did not put the material up for debate, I made it available for
> > > appraisal,
>
> You have used newsgroups where people are accustomed to debating
> almost everything. Are you now saying you were not interested in any
> responses other than things like "My that's good stuff David"??
No that's not what I am saying. I am saying that the work is not
philosophical but empirical. That philosophy per se is a vacuous
game along with cognitive science and semantics. That what has
been expressed by yourself, Lehmann and a couple of others to
date is totally devoid of any respect for empirical evidence, and
is therefore just sophistry and rhetoric.
I think contemporary *psychology is in a very sorry state and
that those who claim to be making a contribution to science under
the auspices of cognitive science, especially models of semantic
memory and the like are doing no more than building arcane models
akin to computer arcade games.
>
> Critical appraisal, which is what you got, is very like good
> debating: i.e. people gave reasons for their appraisals.
>
> [Fritz Lehman]
> > >
> > > It has been appraised.
> > >
> > > Yours truly, Fritz Lehmann
>
> I agree.
>
> [DL]
> > Yes, and true to form, you base your erroneous conclusions on
> > inadequate and unrepresentative evidence. All three of you have
> > made a point of saying that you HAVE NOT READ the original
> > material!
>
> I can't speak for the others, but if you look carefully at what I
> actually wrote, you will find that I did not read ALL the original
> material you posted. I read ENOUGH to see where you were going
> wrong. Sorry.
Nonsense it is clear from all you have written that you have not
read the material. You keep misrepresenting what it is all about.
All you are interested in doing is defending computer programming
as some kind of psychology. It's the worst kind of metaphysics,
and is exactly what Skinner was criticising in the extract I
cited - as you well know.
>
> [DL*]
> > I think Aaron too has gradually come to see the argument I am
> > presenting
>
> What??????
>
> >..(particularly in the form of the failure of
> > substitutivity in contexts of propositional attitude).
>
> What are you thinking of?
What I am thinking of is exactly what you have said - that you
were coming to understand the stance I was developing. I didn't
say you agreed with it. You couldn't agree with it and continue
with the lines of research which you are pursuing.
You can argue and assert all you like - it doesn't amount to
science. In my book it's just confused rhetoric. What you
promulgate as psychology is an eclectic mixture of
introspectionism, folk-theory and metaphysics somehow wrapped
with computers. What on earth it has to do with human behaviour
in the real, as opposed virtual world, I just do not know.
> I did, from the beginning, allow that your behavioural/statistical
> analysis might produce SOME useful information for practical
> purposes, and that it might be better than the intuitions of judges
> and prison officers.
This is arrogant and ignorant - there is so much evidence in
support of behaviour analysis and technology along with actuarial
analysis that your 'allowance' just sounds silly and pretentious.
If you know the literature *at all* or had read the relevant
parts of Fragments rather than spend your time composing these
petty diatribes, you might have something worth listening to.
>
> There was nothing gradual in any of this.
>
> The only change occurred when you, for some reason, stopped
> referring to virtual machines in derogatory terms (vaporware,
> unscientific, or whatever) and suddenly allowed that scientists of
> whom you approved might actually be interested in them. Your words
> were:
>
> | I am not sure we *don't* create what you refer to as 'the high
> | level virtual machines' (skills) implemented in the brains of
> | school children' nor that we can't (yet) easily insert additional
> | [?internal?] monitoring software to detect which data structures
> | are being created, when they are changed etc.
>
> I don't know why you changed your position on this - perhaps you
> should explain. I did not change mine, gradually or otherwise.
>
I haven't changed my position at all. I have said all along that
what you call 'internal' processes can be handled by looking out
into the world at the contingencies which operate on behaviour.
You claim that you find Gibson's work appealing. Do you recall
the why his coleagues wrote a review of the work in the 70s under
the title 'Ask not what's inside your head but what your head's
inside of'?
As Skinner says, cognitive scientists (such as yourself) can't
see this because you never bother learning what the people
working in learning theory are talking about. To you, it all has
to be 'internal'. This just allows you to build inaccessible
models and peddle anything you like! Show me someting Cognitive
Science has produced which is worthwhile in the last 2 years.
> I do sometimes change my views, suddenly or gradually. But not in
> this interchange. The Quinean arguments have been far too weak.
> (I did modify my position slightly in response to a criticism from
> Zeleny, but it still left me disagreeing with you.)
It's not a matter of name calling to say that your stance is just
a muddle of folk-psychological assumptions.
>
> So I hope you will not invoke my name, with or without quotations,
> in support of your position on anything except this:
>
> I accept the possibility that your statistical analysis of
> factual records MIGHT sometimes be more useful than the
> intuitions of judges and prison officers,
>
> as I acknowledged long ago.
>
I have no inclination to cite you in suport of anything. I am
*totally* opposed to what is being sold in the US and UK as
cognitive science. To me it's pseudoscience par excellence and is
just 19th century Hegelianism expressed in the language of
computers. Ironically, when Turing published his paper in 1937 he
was clearly working from a behaviourist and extenional stance.
WHat you are doing is putting what little has ben achieved back
way beyiond then with all this appeal to 'internal' processes.
> [DL]
> > He may not
> > agree, I doubt that he could and still defend his own version of
> > functionalism. C'est la vie.
>
> (b6) I also disagreed with you that my version of functionalism
> either presupposed or entailed methodogical solipsism (e.g meanings
> are totally internal) a position I've rejected. You have more than
> once accused me of methdological solipsism without ever producing an
> argument.
I am not 'accusing you', read Fodor, he's another intensional
realist which none else thinks is expressing a coherent stance.
>
> [DL]
> > There are aspects to what I am presenting which you will not find
> > elsewhere, but which are consistent with the stance outlined in
> > Fragments and a large body of empirical work in behaviour
> > science. If you have not seen that yet, I suspect that you *will*
> > come to appreciate it IF you read the material I have referred
> > to. In the absence of you having done so, constructive dialogue
> > is impossible.
>
> What makes constructive dialogue impossible is a failure to address
> the DETAILS of new arguments against old theories in any other way
> than by repetition of the old theories.
>
No, what makes constructive dialogue impossible here is a lack of
any evidence from you which addresses the points I have made one
way or another.
> Let's have some detailed careful analysis without name calling, and
> with close attention paid to the counter examples offered. (E.g. you
> ignored my examples about times of different computations of the
> same number, which were clearly intensional, and switched to
> discussing some other examples of times of journeys, which were not,
> at least not as you presented them. If you find it too painful to
> engage in proper debate and analysis, then maybe we can drop this
> whole thread.)
>
Provide some empirical evidence and cust out the apriori
arguments which to me amounts to a stream of counterfactuals. And
reconsider this before you do so:
........... Psychology as a science is, in fact, in a
shambles. Unwittingly, two of the contributors to
that issue of Psychology Today have , I think,
explained why. As Jerome Bruner puts it, there has
been a "continued movement...away from the restrictive
shackles of behaviorism".
Those who so triumphantly announce the death of
behaviourism are announcing their own escape from the
canons of scientific method. Psychology is apparently
abandoning all efforts to stay within the dimensional
system of natural science. It can no longer define
its terms by pointing to referents, much less
referents measurable in centimetres, grams, and seconds.
It has returned to a hypothetical inner world. Bruner
boasts of having rejoined the philosophers in the
study of mind, language , values, and perception.
Rollo May is pleased that "psychology has moved into
matters that used to be left to poetry," and Philip
Zimbardo suggests that cognitive science may now
consider implanting a little soul.
There is no doubt of the freedom thus enjoyed. A
great many things can be talked about when standards
are less rigorous. The field of psychology has
expanded enormously. The very divisions of the American
Psychological Association suggest the current range -
childhood development, personality, social issues,
arts, clinical and other counselling, industry,
education, public service, the military, ageing,
rehabilitation, philosophy, community, humanism, mental
retardation, ecology, family services, health,
psychoanalysis, law, and so on. And a new feature of The
American Psychologist is devoted to public policy.
Unfortunately, as psychology has expanded in this way
it has moved farther and farther from anything that
could be called science.
One can admire the concern and compassion that lead
people to consider these matters, and one can
acknowledge the practical usefulness of much of what
they say. One can admit that at the present time it
is not always easy to say more in a scientific way;
that has been true of all the sciences, especially in
their early stages. There is still a part of human
behaviour with respect to which one must simply do
one's best with the available resources. But if we
are ever to do better, if concern and compassion are
ever to be matched by achievement, it will be with a
science of human behaviour, and psychology once
considered itself that science.'
B.F. Skinner
Can the Experimental Analysis of Behavior Rescue Psychology?
Ch 11, Upon Further Reflection (1987)
'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
'As to my reaction to the BBS treatments as a whole: it
has been my experience that when I write something in
one setting at one time and come back to it in a
different setting at a different time I see other
implications and relations. I had thought that something
of the same sort would happen when other people read
these papers. They would add things which occurred to
them because of their special interests and special
knowledge, and a joint contribution would be possible.
Too often, this has not happened. The misunderstandings
triggered by my papers apparently did not suggest
further implications to many commentators.
Why have I not been more readily understood? Bad
exposition on my part? all I can say is that I worked
very hard on these papers, and I believe they are
consistent with one another. The central position,
however, is not traditional, and that may be the
problem. To move from an inner determination of behavior
to an environmental determination is a difficult step.
Many governmental, religious, ethical, political, and
economic implications might also have been considered,
but most of the contributions do not venture that far
afield.
Why is discussion in the behavioral sciences so often
personal? I do not believe that Einstein, finding it
necessary to challenge some basic assumptions of Newton,
alluded to Newton's senility. I do not think that Mendel
and the other early geneticists, discovering facts that
Darwin so badly needed, then accused him of "totally
ignoring" the genetic basis of evolution. I do not think
that those who propounded the gas laws for so-called
ideal or perfect gases were condemned for their
prejudice against the individual gas molecule.
I have tried to keep the personal tone out of my
replies, but the temptation was great, and at a few
points I have failed. In any case, I have been unable to
avoid spending time and space on the simple correction
of misstatements of fact and of my position, where I
would have welcomed the opportunity for a more
productive exchange. Whatever current usefulness this
volume may have, it should at least be of interest to
the future historian as a sample of the style of
discussion among behavioral scientists near the end of
the 20th century'.
Skinner (1984)
SUMMING UP
BBS 'Canonical Papers' ed. Catatania
I have suggested why the above may be so. It is because of the nature of
the propositional attitudes and the difficulty we have with intensional
conexts in general. The illustration here was indirect discourse. We say
what others have said, or what they think, when really we are ascribing
behaviours to them which were never observed. We do this because we find
it difficult to report our observations, and have to be trained even to
record them accurately. The other 'cognitive' terms follow the same
patterns. Because if this muddle, a science purporting to to make use of
such idioms is doomed to failure.
Whatever its technical weaknesses, the PROBE system takes a first step
towards systematic recording of observations, which can then be analysed
using extensional analysis. If anyone has any constructive contributions
to make, I am keen to hear them. If anyone wants any technical clarific-
ation of the rationale for the system, I'll only be too pleased to do so
but I am not interested in considering radically different approaches as
alternatives - the idea is the see how far this one can be taken on the
basis of collected and analysed data, not ex cathedra, a priori
*arguments*.
This thread contrasts psychology vs behaviour science. The former is what
we think of as naive psychology, ie Attribution Theory. The latter's what
is revealed by the analysis of observations of behaviour using formal
analysis rather than intuitive judgment.
--
David Longley
Neil Rickert
>In article <402nb5$l...@sun4.bham.ac.uk> a...@cs.bham.ac.uk "Aaron Sloman" writes:
I notice something quite interesting in the exchange between Aaron
Sloman and Longley.
[David Longley]
>> > Yes, and true to form, you base your erroneous conclusions on
>> > inadequate and unrepresentative evidence. All three of you have
>> > made a point of saying that you HAVE NOT READ the original
>> > material!
[Aaron Sloman]
>> I can't speak for the others, but if you look carefully at what I
>> actually wrote, you will find that I did not read ALL the original
>> material you posted. I read ENOUGH to see where you were going
>> wrong. Sorry.
[David Longley]
>Nonsense it is clear from all you have written that you have not
>read the material. You keep misrepresenting what it is all about.
Somehow I find that part of the discussion particularly amusing.
There has been much discussion about Longley's arguments. But
Longley never clarifies. Instead he reproduces lengthy quotes from
Quine, Stich, Skinner, Putnam, and many others.
The basis for Longley's 'debating' style is apparently this -- he
assumes that everything he has written (including the quotes) has an
absolutely crystal clear meaning which could not possibly be confused
or misinterpreted. Thus anyone who did not pick up Longley's exact
meaning must not have read the document.
The only theories of language I know that would support such a view
are intensionalist. Evidently Longley is a closet intensionalist and
a secret supporter of methodological solipsism.
Tom Wetzel
---
David Longley writes:
>Tom has at least acknowledged that there is some substance to
>what I am presenting (if only restricted to the remarks on
>psychology) He subscribes to a different position with respect to
>intensional terms. I happen to think intensional realism to be
>incoherent, especially in Fodor's hands (see Dennett's 'Granny's
>Campaign for Safe Science' in Meaning In Mind: Fodor and His
>Critics' eds Loewer and Rey (1991)).
What I acknowledged was the plausibility of one specific comment.
Of course, I don't concede the plausibility of David's behaviorist
*program*.
It's rather odd that Longley thinks Dennett's "Granny's
Campaign for Safe Science" was some sort of telling critique against
intentional realism since, on my reading, that piece is mainly
just rhetorical finger-pointing on Dennett's part, i.e. what Dennett
is complaining about is the mere fact that the defense of intentional
realism *is* a major motivation for Fodor. I don't really see much of
an *argument* on Dennett's part in that piece.
Tom Wetzel
:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
thomas...@eng.sun.com
David Longley
> The basis for Longley's 'debating' style is apparently this -- he
> assumes that everything he has written (including the quotes) has an
> absolutely crystal clear meaning which could not possibly be confused
> or misinterpreted. Thus anyone who did not pick up Longley's exact
> meaning must not have read the document.
>
> The only theories of language I know that would support such a view
> are intensionalist. Evidently Longley is a closet intensionalist and
> a secret supporter of methodological solipsism.
>
Hmmm, that elicited a smile....However, no....I'm refusing to be drawn into
debating issues when the confusion can be so easily explained by the reader
having not read the source material. IFF someone cites an extract and asks
what I mean by it I am quite happy to explicate. I have not seem anything
like that to date.
--
David Longley
David Longley
> >philosophical but empirical. That philosophy per se is a vacuous
> >game along with cognitive science and semantics. That what has
> >been expressed by yourself, Lehmann and a couple of others to
> >date is totally devoid of any respect for empirical evidence, and
> >is therefore just sophistry and rhetoric.
>
> interested in engaging in, at least in purveying quotes and *asserting*
> philosophical theses. In other words, if philosophy is such a useless
> game, why do you go to a lot of trouble regurgitating quotes from
> Quine, Putnam, and Stich.
As I have said many times, I accept Quine's abandonment of the
two dogmas (particularly analyticity) of empiricism, his
statement that epistemology reduces to behavioural psychology,
and that at least what he is doing is continuous with scientific
investigation. I think Fodor's 1980 paper on Methodological
Solipsism was a very important paper, parts of it reduced to
rhetoric - but it aired an important issue. Were it not for my
working in an applied field I may well have never come to hold
such strong anti intensionalist views. As i have said elsewhere,
as an undergraduate I made a spent as much time on Husserl as I
did on mainstream psychology.
I get exasperated when reading Fodor and even find Dennett hard
to take seriously. Perhaps you can give us a readable precis?
I rest my case on the example of 'quotation'. I think Quine has
only scratched the surface with 'Word and Object',
>
> I think that "empirical results" are not always so unambiguous as far
> as their interpretation is concerned. Presuppositions are typically
> made that are not justified solely in terms of "empirical data". These
> issues of interpretation and presupposition are often precisely the
> concerns of philosophy. To take an example, Larry Sklar argues
> plausibly, in "Space, Time, and Spacetime", that there are multiple
> philosophical theses concerning the nature of space and time that are
> consistent with the physical theory here. Appeals to the physics don't
> entirely settle the philosophical questions.
Hmm I've got Sklar's book too - I found myself getting interested
in all of that through Cassier's summary of Husserl's 'Crisis',
and Reichenbach's critique of Kantian a priorism - but that was
when I thought Husserl was the way to go. As a behaviour
scientist I no longer believe that....I'm now keen that
undergraduate psychologists learn something useful..not just
something interesting - 'Fragments of Behaviour: The Extensional
Stance' reflects that 'ideology'..
I guess that's pragmatism for you...
--
David Longley
Tom Wetzel
---
David Longley writes re: the philosophy "game":
>As I have said many times, I accept Quine's abandonment of the
>two dogmas (particularly analyticity) of empiricism, his
>statement that epistemology reduces to behavioural psychology,
>and that at least what he is doing is continuous with scientific
>investigation. I think Fodor's 1980 paper on Methodological
>Solipsism was a very important paper, parts of it reduced to
>rhetoric - but it aired an important issue. Were it not for my
>working in an applied field I may well have never come to hold
>such strong anti intensionalist views. As i have said elsewhere,
>as an undergraduate I made a spent as much time on Husserl as I
>did on mainstream psychology.
Here you are interpreting Quine in a way that he has explicitly
repudiated. It's true that in some of his early statements about
"naturalizing epistemology" he may have given the impression
that "epistemology reduces to behavioural psychology" but this
would imply that there is no such thing as epistemology (since
epistemology is essentially a normative discipline). And Quine
has rejected that interpretation. The point about "naturalizing"
epistemology, I believe, is that epistemology has to be based
on empirical psychology since we need the latter for a well-founded
view of human cognitive capabilities. Epistemology can't be purely
apriori. But the normative and ontological concerns still
distinguish "naturalized" epistemology from behavioral psychology.
There is not the hard-and-fast dividing line between philosophy and
empirical sciences that was advocated during the heyday of postwar
"linguistic analysis", based on the analytic/synthetic distinction.
Even if *that* particular theory about what was characteristic of
philosophy was wrong, it doesn't follow that philosophy does not have
its specific concerns and issues and activities (even if there is now no
consensus about exactly how to define this).
Tom Wetzel
:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
thomas...@eng.sun.com
Tom Wetzel
---
>No that's not what I am saying. I am saying that the work is not
>philosophical but empirical. That philosophy per se is a vacuous
>game along with cognitive science and semantics. That what has
>been expressed by yourself, Lehmann and a couple of others to
>date is totally devoid of any respect for empirical evidence, and
>is therefore just sophistry and rhetoric.
The philosophy "game" is, however, David, a "game" that you seem quite
interested in engaging in, at least in purveying quotes and *asserting*
philosophical theses. In other words, if philosophy is such a useless
game, why do you go to a lot of trouble regurgitating quotes from
Quine, Putnam, and Stich...quotes that are not a matter of reporting
"empirical results" (except insofar as everything, including
philosophy, is grounded in our empirical interaction with our world)
but of philosophical arguments. You're quite interested in what certain
philosohpers say, insofar as they bolster your ideology. But, then,
when it is pointed out that there are other philosophical arguments,
or other interpretations of the philosohpers in question, you reply
with this "oh, well, philosophy is just a game" ploy. Honesty
requires a bit more consistency on your part.
I think that "empirical results" are not always so unambiguous as far
as their interpretation is concerned. Presuppositions are typically
made that are not justified solely in terms of "empirical data". These
issues of interpretation and presupposition are often precisely the
concerns of philosophy. To take an example, Larry Sklar argues
plausibly, in "Space, Time, and Spacetime", that there are multiple
philosophical theses concerning the nature of space and time that are
consistent with the physical theory here. Appeals to the physics don't
entirely settle the philosophical questions.
Tom Wetzel
:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
thomas...@eng.sun.com
Chris Malcolm
(and to similar effect in numerous other postings)
> ....... read the nine
>extracts from 'A System Specification for PROfiling BEhaviour' which have
>been made available in sci.cognitive, sci.psychology.theory and also in
>comp.ai.philosophy, as 'Fragments of Behaviour: The Extensional Stance',
>I'd appreciate constructively critical comments.
Which you would be more likely to get if you paid your readers the
normal courtesies of making pointed summaries of relevant material,
addressing the remarks they make, questions they ask, etc, instead of
retreating behind massive quotations and asking them to do all the
work for you. This is not how we conduct discussions in these groups.
I'm sorry to say I have actually read the nine extracts, but I can't
see any reason to spend time criticising it, constructively or
otherwise, and I can see good reasons not to bother: others have
already well made some of my points, but you have either ignored or
dismissed them.
--
Chris Malcolm c...@aifh.ed.ac.uk +44 (0)131 650 3085
Department of Artificial Intelligence, Edinburgh University
5 Forrest Hill, Edinburgh, EH1 2QL, UK DoD #205
"The mind reigns, but does not govern" -- Paul Valery
David Longley
c...@castle.ed.ac.uk "Chris Malcolm" writes:
> In article <807592...@longley.demon.co.uk> Da...@longley.demon.co.uk writes:
>
> (and to similar effect in numerous other postings)
>
> > ....... read the nine
> >extracts from 'A System Specification for PROfiling BEhaviour' which have
> >been made available in sci.cognitive, sci.psychology.theory and also in
> >comp.ai.philosophy, as 'Fragments of Behaviour: The Extensional Stance',
>
> >I'd appreciate constructively critical comments.
>
> Which you would be more likely to get if you paid your readers the
> normal courtesies of making pointed summaries of relevant material,
> addressing the remarks they make, questions they ask, etc, instead of
> retreating behind massive quotations and asking them to do all the
> work for you. This is not how we conduct discussions in these groups.
> I'm sorry to say I have actually read the nine extracts, but I can't
> see any reason to spend time criticising it, constructively or
> otherwise, and I can see good reasons not to bother: others have
> already well made some of my points, but you have either ignored or
> dismissed them.
>
>
> --
> Chris Malcolm c...@aifh.ed.ac.uk +44 (0)131 650 3085
> Department of Artificial Intelligence, Edinburgh University
> 5 Forrest Hill, Edinburgh, EH1 2QL, UK DoD #205
> "The mind reigns, but does not govern" -- Paul Valery
>
Oh, rubbish....you've just pasted together a bunch of sippets from other
people's posts. Who do you think you are kidding?
The others you refer to have actually said they haven't bothered to read
any of it.
--
David Longley
Neil Rickert
>> In article <DD43x...@festival.ed.ac.uk>
>> c...@castle.ed.ac.uk "Chris Malcolm" writes:
>> > Which you would be more likely to get if you paid your readers the
>> > normal courtesies of making pointed summaries of relevant material,
>> > addressing the remarks they make, questions they ask, etc, instead of
>> > retreating behind massive quotations and asking them to do all the
>> > work for you.
>Read the above again and think about it. I write 400K of material
>and suggest that if anyone wants to discuss it, they have to read
>me for it or read it in sci.psychology.theory.
Even publishers of books know that they cannot just print the
material and expect people to read it. The put some kind of summary
in a blurb on the dust jacket. They have the authors appear in
interview programs where they can describe the work.
In general, when you produce 400K of material, you should expect
most people to decide they don't have the time to read it. If
you want people to read it, it is your responsibility to make
it attractive. You don't do that by just reposting the whole
thing. Chris Malcolm provided good advice.
>You say that *I* should provide 'pointed summaries', & address
>the remarks made by people who have the audacity to say thay have
>not read the material but want to argue about it here on the
>basis of potted summaries instead! As a psychologist this tells
>me a lot about why they use this medium, it's just to *argue*.
If you tried to present your material at speaker's corner in Hyde
Park, most people could and probably would just walk away. Instead
you chose to present it in a forum where people are used to
interesting and stimulating discussions. Contrary to your opinion,
they are not just arguing with you for the sake of argument. They
are trying to get the message through to you that you should either
provide interesting discussion, or you should get out of their
forum. You repeatedly ignore these hints.
>That is what I find so repugnant about cognitive science.
I think you should contemplate a mirror to find the source of
your problems.
>I have already made a considerable point of the Indeterminacy
>Thesis and the problems of the intensional idioms - namely that
>rational inference is rendered effectively impossible in such
>contexts.
Yes. But you don't provide interesting discussion. You quote, the
requote, then quote again just for good measure. You fail to address
the issues raised, but instead you quote yet again. In short, you
are annoying where you should be interesting.
>What you will find in such areas is not good science, but the
>exact opposite, for science as we know it just is not possible in
>such contexts. Once you have seen what the Indeterminacy Thesis
>reveals (and the example of indirect discourse suffices to
>illustrate the problems of the entire class), one should see that
>those who are most prolific in such fields are largely just good
>at science fiction writing.
Personally, I look to the practices of scientists to find out what is
good science. I do not look to philosphers, even when they are as
well known as Quine.
>It is no surprise to me that Cognirtive Scientists (who tend to
>be buried in 'deep' research programmes in the fields of semantic
>networks, higher order logic and 'bizzare' attempts to make
>computers emulate all that is irrational in human psychology (in
>machines designed as purely logical and effective systems !!) try
>to engage me in couter argument. But the very fact that they have
>not read the main test, yet are willing to argue, should raise
>some concern.
You are quick to throw out criticisms. Had you properly engaged in
discussions you might have some evidence as to whether your
criticisms apply to those who debate you. The people who debate on
these newsgroups have quite diverse views, and cannot correctly be
categorized as you have assumed. I'm afraid that your own
ideological committments are seriously limiting your objectivity.
>All we have sen here over the last couple of weeks is some
>political moves to bury a threat.
That is simply your misinterpretation. Frankly, by virtue of the
ineffective way you are arguing your case, you are no threat to
anyone who has participated in these discussions.
David Longley
>
> That is simply your misinterpretation. Frankly, by virtue of the
> ineffective way you are arguing your case, you are no threat to
> anyone who has participated in these discussions.
>
As an illustration of the very thing that I have been
criticising, this is all quite ironic. There are about four
outspoken critics to my knowledge and all four are essentially
intensional realists. I don't expect to persuade such folk out of
their folly. You on the other hand, seem to have elected yourself
as spokesman for your imagined silent majority. I only know about
the latter through the e-mail request I get for the extracts and
from their comments on the material when they have read it. On
the basis of *that* data, I think you ought to read the material
on the way *intensional heuristics* lead one to hold
unrepresentative views Neil.
In science, one does not argue, one looks at the evidence and
either provides evidence which corroborates or falsifies. What I
am looking for is other work which has an interesting bearing on
the research programme. I am confident that anyone with a basic
understanding of what scientific method *is* in practice will be
able to read the extracts and appreciate that the extracts are
there to avoid any problems of access and interpretation. In
fact, since the 9 extracts largely comprise the integrated
presentation of themes from several large and long running
research programmes, I do not see why anyone should be daft
enough to want to *argue* about material which is not amenable to
argumentation.
Some time back, I briefly listed the main subject areas and you
responded by saying that you were unfamiliar with most of the
material so couldn't comment, yet elsewhere that doesn't stop you
making ex cathedra judgements about the project.
Quine figures far more in the 'discussions' than in the main body
of the text as will be clear to anyone who has read it. The
references alone (listed below) should make that quite clear. The
'quotes' are taken from *all* of the references, and the reason
for the quotes is to save readers the bother of getting together
a quite diverse set of readings/books, and to make my reference
to the research specific and unambiguous.
I suspect that what we are seeing here is a disgruntled few who
simply do not have the requisite counter evidence, resorting to
rhetoric and other smoke-screen tactics.
As to answering the criticisms, well if you actually look at the
material I have posted, you will se that I have answered my
critics. The point you fail to appreciate is that 1) they just go
quiet or move on to another matter when I have responded, or 2)
their criticisms are not amenable to constructive discussion.
Lehmann has made absurd and ignorant comments about behaviourism,
Sloman claims that he can quantify into intensional idioms and
the others are either Fodor fans or some other brand of
intensional realist.
The material outlined in the 9 extracts which comprise 'Fragments
of Behaviour: The Extensional Stance' makes a case for the use of
First Order Logic as Relational Database technology to profile
observations of behaviour as a formal reporting and behaviour
management system. Along the way, the more conventional forms of
reporting, based on personal experience (clinical judgement) vs.
actuarial (statistical) analysis of classes of behaviour is
presented, and at the same time the conventionally adopted
Fisherian Null Hypothesis Statistical Testing methodology is
reviewed and criticised. Regression vs. neural network technology
is discussed in the context of intensional heuristics vs. formal
extensional strategies based on distributions of data which
provide base rates. Quine is drawn upon in support of the basic
thesis that reliable quantification is not possible within
intensional contexts, and so psychological terms such as traits
are best eschewed in favour of classes of behaviour.
If you just *look* at the material, and my remarks elsewhere, you
should see that what you class a criticism is not criticism at
all. It's a distraction.
It may well be that individuals in these newsgroups are used to
arguing and debating - but if that's all they can do, what does
that tell you about the nature of the subject being 'debated'? At
least what I have provided makes a positive contribution to
explaining *why* such behaviour is basically a fruitless waste of
everyone's time (and grant money).
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90.Arkes H R & Hammond K R Judgment and Decision Making: An
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91.Dawes R.M The Robust beauty of improper linear models in decision
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Volume 2 eds W Stroebe & M Hewstone 1991, Ch 4 pp. 83-115
98.Goldberg L R Simple models or simple processes? Some research on
clinical judgments American Psychologist,1968,23(7) p.483-496
99.Kahneman D, Slovic P & Tversky A Judgment Under Uncertainty:
Heuristics and Biases Cambridge University Press 1982
100.Kyllonen P C & Christal R E Reasoning Ability Is (Little More
Than) Working-Memory Capacity?! Intelligence 14, 389-433 1990
101.Lundberg G A Case Studies vs. Statistical Methods - An Issue
Based on Misunderstanding. Sociometry v4 pp379-83 1941
102.Meehl P E Clinical vs. Statistical Prediction: A Theoretical
Analysis and a Review of the Evidence University of Minnesota Press,
Minneapolis. 1954
103.Meehl P E When Shall We Use Our Heads Instead of the Formula?
PSYCHODIAGNOSIS: Collected Papers 1971
104.Meehl P E Causes and effects of my disturbing little book J
Person. Assess. 50,370-5,1986
105.Oskamp S Overconfidence in case-study judgments J. Consult.
Psychol. (1965), 29, 261-265
106.Sarbin T R Clinical Psychology - Art or Science? Psychometrica
v6 pp391-400 (1941)
D. On the contrast Between the Extensional and Intensional Analysis
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N & Soames S (eds) Propositions and Attitudes Oxford University Press
1980
108.Churchland P M A Neurocomputational Perspective The Nature of
Mind and The Structure of Science Bradford Books 1989
109.Dahlbom B Dennett and His Critics Blackwell, Oxford 1993
110.Deakin J F W & Longley D Naloxone Enhances Neophobia British
Journal of Pharmacology, April 1981
111.Devitt M. Meanings just ain't in the head In Meaning and Method:
Essays in Honor of Hilary Putnam Ed G. Boolos Cambridge University
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112.Dretske F I The Intentionality of Cognitive States Midwest Studies
in Philosophy 5,281-294 1980
113.Elgin C Z Facts That Don't Matter In Meaning and Method: Essays
in Honor of Hilary Putnam Ed G. Boolos Cambridge University Press 1990
114.Eysenck H J & Eysenck S introduction to: Using Personality to
Individualize Instruction - J A Wakefield JR Edits, San Diego, 1978
115.Fodor J A Methodological Solipsism Considered as a Research
Strategy for Cognitive Psychology Behavioral-and-Brain-Sciences; 1980
Mar Vol 3(1) 63-109
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Translations from the Philosophical Writings of Gottlob Frege 3rd
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120.Kripke S A A Puzzle About Belief in Salmon N & Soames S (eds)
Propositions and Attitudes Oxford University Press 1980
121.Longley D The Interaction of Brain Monoamines and Neuropeptides
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Institute for Medical Research London/Institute of Neurology
University of London 1983
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The Ways of Paradox and Other Essays Harvard University Press 1966,
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--
David Longley
David Longley
> > Which you would be more likely to get if you paid your readers the
> > normal courtesies of making pointed summaries of relevant material,
> > addressing the remarks they make, questions they ask, etc, instead of
> > retreating behind massive quotations and asking them to do all the
> > work for you.
Read the above again and think about it. I write 400K of material
and suggest that if anyone wants to discuss it, they have to read
me for it or read it in sci.psychology.theory.
You say that *I* should provide 'pointed summaries', & address
the remarks made by people who have the audacity to say thay have
not read the material but want to argue about it here on the
basis of potted summaries instead! As a psychologist this tells
me a lot about why they use this medium, it's just to *argue*.
That is what I find so repugnant about cognitive science.
I have already made a considerable point of the Indeterminacy
Thesis and the problems of the intensional idioms - namely that
rational inference is rendered effectively impossible in such
contexts.
What you will find in such areas is not good science, but the
exact opposite, for science as we know it just is not possible in
such contexts. Once you have seen what the Indeterminacy Thesis
reveals (and the example of indirect discourse suffices to
illustrate the problems of the entire class), one should see that
those who are most prolific in such fields are largely just good
at science fiction writing.
It is no surprise to me that Cognirtive Scientists (who tend to
be buried in 'deep' research programmes in the fields of semantic
networks, higher order logic and 'bizzare' attempts to make
computers emulate all that is irrational in human psychology (in
machines designed as purely logical and effective systems !!) try
to engage me in couter argument. But the very fact that they have
not read the main test, yet are willing to argue, should raise
some concern.
All we have sen here over the last couple of weeks is some
political moves to bury a threat. Those who are remotely
interested in the pursuit of truth should make sure they read the
source material and decide for themselves. The argumnets are well
suppoted by direct quoatations from primary sources. The best my
critics can come up with is a critiqe of my use of direct
quatation - - - -This doesn't surprise me in the least.
--
David Longley
Neil Rickert
>In article <40ehbr$i...@mp.cs.niu.edu> ric...@cs.niu.edu "Neil Rickert" writes:
>> That is simply your misinterpretation. Frankly, by virtue of the
>> ineffective way you are arguing your case, you are no threat to
>> anyone who has participated in these discussions.
>As an illustration of the very thing that I have been
>criticising, this is all quite ironic. There are about four
>outspoken critics to my knowledge and all four are essentially
>intensional realists. I don't expect to persuade such folk out of
>their folly.
I suppose I might be one of these "four outspoken critics." If so it
is an illustration of your confusion. I am no intensional realist,
essential or otherwise. However you appear to have a mind set
according to which anyone who disagrees with you must be an
intensional realist. Unfortunately constraints imposed by this mind
set interfere with your ability to understand what others are
saying.
> You on the other hand, seem to have elected yourself
>as spokesman for your imagined silent majority.
A number of people in this discussion have bent over backwards in an
attempt to engage you in discussion. They did so in order to help
you get reach a better understand what are some of the issues you are
raising. You have not only failed to engage these participants, but
you have abused their generosity in your attacks on their
motivations. I haven't elected myself as spokesman for anyone but
myself. But I am really troubled by the way you bite the hand of
those who try to feed you.
> On
>the basis of *that* data, I think you ought to read the material
>on the way *intensional heuristics* lead one to hold
>unrepresentative views Neil.
Perhaps you should read some of that material yourself. You seem to
have wrongly assumed that you are exempt. (Incidently, I don't claim
to hold representative views, if there are any such things.)
>Some time back, I briefly listed the main subject areas and you
>responded by saying that you were unfamiliar with most of the
>material so couldn't comment, yet elsewhere that doesn't stop you
>making ex cathedra judgements about the project.
Most of my comments have not been about your project as a whole, but
about particular questionable assumptions you are making and
particular debating styles that you are using.
>As to answering the criticisms, well if you actually look at the
>material I have posted, you will se that I have answered my
>critics.
You have answered them, but many of your answers have been
non-responsive.
> The point you fail to appreciate is that 1) they just go
>quiet or move on to another matter when I have responded,
They don't "just go quiet". They have added you to their KILL files,
so that they will not in future be troubled by your postings. If I
had been wiser, I would have done likewise several months ago.
> 2)
>their criticisms are not amenable to constructive discussion.
>Lehmann has made absurd and ignorant comments about behaviourism,
>Sloman claims that he can quantify into intensional idioms and
>the others are either Fodor fans or some other brand of
>intensional realist.
I agree that Lehmann's comments were somewhat excessive. I think
he was being deliberately provocative in an unsuccessful attempt
to get you to actually engage in discussion. Sloman, on the other
hand, gave a number of long and thoughtful comments. Had you not
been inflicted with an incapacitating mind set, you might have
found his comments quite valuable.
>If you just *look* at the material, and my remarks elsewhere, you
>should see that what you class a criticism is not criticism at
>all. It's a distraction.
Well of course it's a distraction. Your attitude is "full speed
ahead and damn the torpedos." Thus anyone who suggest otherwise is a
distraction to you. As long as you are convinced that you are right
and the rest of the world is wrong, I don't see why you bothered to
post anything in the first place. You should have anticipated that
this would lead to distractions, since there were bound to be people
who could not fully agree with you.
David Longley
> In <808127...@longley.demon.co.uk> David Longley <Da...@longley.demon.co.uk>
> writes:
> >In article <40ehbr$i...@mp.cs.niu.edu> ric...@cs.niu.edu "Neil Rickert" writes:>
> >> That is simply your misinterpretation. Frankly, by virtue of the
> >> ineffective way you are arguing your case, you are no threat to
> >> anyone who has participated in these discussions.
>
> >As an illustration of the very thing that I have been
> >criticising, this is all quite ironic. There are about four
> >outspoken critics to my knowledge and all four are essentially
> >intensional realists. I don't expect to persuade such folk out of
> >their folly.
>
> I suppose I might be one of these "four outspoken critics." If so it
> is an illustration of your confusion. I am no intensional realist,
> essential or otherwise. However you appear to have a mind set
> according to which anyone who disagrees with you must be an
> intensional realist. Unfortunately constraints imposed by this mind
> set interfere with your ability to understand what others are
> saying.
Neil, when it comes to psychological analysis I bet I can play a
better game than you, so please desist before I return the same
'favour'. I have gone to great lengths to point out the folly of
such ascriptive intentionalism.
It just so happens that the people I count amongst the four are
all quite happy to quantify into intensional contexts. That is
about as real as one can get with intensions. I have yet to read
anything by these so called critics which convinces me they have
a clue about what they are talking about. In fact, each has been
on the receiving end of others remarks which have essentially
amounted to the same criticism. What characterises so many of
these folk is their rabid eclecticism. I have no time for
'debate' with such folk.
Try talking about the work instead of *your* conceptions of *my*
motives. For example, why not contribute to the clarification of
why we need anything more than FOL for a science of behaviour.
--
David Longley
David Longley
>
> >As to answering the criticisms, well if you actually look at the
> >material I have posted, you will se that I have answered my
> >critics.
>
> You have answered them, but many of your answers have been
> non-responsive.
>
No - I have *answered* them. I have given concrete illustrations
of where it is impossible to quantify into intensional contexts
and substitute co-designative terms. The most illustrative one is
indirect discourse and *the* abuse of that, along with the extent
to which it leads to the creations of 'psychological' material
should now be obvious to anyone who has been following the
thread.
> > The point you fail to appreciate is that 1) they just go
> >quiet or move on to another matter when I have responded,
>
> They don't "just go quiet". They have added you to their KILL files,
> so that they will not in future be troubled by your postings. If I
> had been wiser, I would have done likewise several months ago.
>
No - they simply changed the subject - that's what I meant by
'went quiet'.
> > 2)
> >their criticisms are not amenable to constructive discussion.
> >Lehmann has made absurd and ignorant comments about behaviourism,
> >Sloman claims that he can quantify into intensional idioms and
> >the others are either Fodor fans or some other brand of
> >intensional realist.
>
> I agree that Lehmann's comments were somewhat excessive. I think
> he was being deliberately provocative in an unsuccessful attempt
> to get you to actually engage in discussion. Sloman, on the other
> hand, gave a number of long and thoughtful comments. Had you not
> been inflicted with an incapacitating mind set, you might have
> found his comments quite valuable.
>
Sloman is unaware of how eclectic he is in his views. If he
reckons he can take Quine on he should do so. I asked him to put
his first account of the Indeterminacy Thesis by Chris Hookway
and I am still waiting to hear what he had to say. I think it is
pure arrogance for the man to think he can dismiss such a
thoroughly analysed and influential piece of analysis.
I have no such ambitions here on the net, it just doesn't attract
that sort of discussion. What it might be useful for is sharing
some R&D lines of development. That's what 'Fragments of
Behaviour: The Extensional Stance' amounts to, some R&D lines.
From what I have seen to date, many using these news groups have
no idea how to discuss scientific research. Perhaps we can show
them?
> >If you just *look* at the material, and my remarks elsewhere, you
> >should see that what you class a criticism is not criticism at
> >all. It's a distraction.
>
> Well of course it's a distraction. Your attitude is "full speed
> ahead and damn the torpedos." Thus anyone who suggest otherwise is a
> distraction to you. As long as you are convinced that you are right
> and the rest of the world is wrong, I don't see why you bothered to
> post anything in the first place. You should have anticipated that
> this would lead to distractions, since there were bound to be people
> who could not fully agree with you.
>
Yes, part of that's true. But what is extremely annoying is that
it's not *me* that's behind all of this, and it has little to do
with how good or bad my defences might be! Scientific truth just
isn't like that. It's not who presents the best argument. or who
comes off best in a debate! It's whether the theory and evidence
face the tribunal of real life.....and to date, I'm afraid those
ho have been offering me the wisdom of their experience just
don't have the credibility that they think they do.
I say again, try reading the 9 articles and come back and tell me
what you have said again if you can....but after reading the 9
extracts, take a quick look out at life and what people actually
do on a day to day basis before you start telling me about how
much help Lehmann, SLomann and a couple of others may or may not
be.
--
David Longley
Neil Rickert
>Try talking about the work instead of *your* conceptions of *my*
>motives. For example, why not contribute to the clarification of
>why we need anything more than FOL for a science of behaviour.
If I haven't commented on the insufficiency of first order logic, it
is because it seems silly to post messages belaboring the obvious.
Moreover, the problems have already been pointed out by others. If
it were not otherwise sufficiently obvious, the evident failure of
logical positivism should have provided you with a big hint.
Logic by itself can do nothing more than play games manipulating
meaningless formal symbols. It has no way of connecting to the
world.
In order to do anything relating to behavior, you would also need a
suitable set of concepts that relate to the real world, and a set of
rules for manipulating those concepts. If you already have a
suitable set of ready made and rules, then you would already have a
ready made complete science of behavior and there would be no need
for your project.
The logical positivists already went beyond FOL. They allowed a
logic of induction. Induction too is limited. It cannot introduce
new concepts. (See Fodor's argument for nativism in his 1975 book
"The language of Thought"). Most scientific discovery leads to new
concepts. Thus your restriction to FOL will prevent you from making
that kind of scientific discovery. You can at most have a very
primitive behavior science which achieves very little.
The term "logic of induction" may well be an oxymoron. Hume's
reservations about induction were well justified. If you ignore the
Humean concerns, as modern inductionists do, you must instead deal
with the problem that induction, at best, can only provide
approximate knowledge. FOL is an exact system. It cannot deal with
approximations, unless you manage to introduce new concepts to handle
the approximations and probable errors. But FOL by itself has no
mechanism for creating such new concepts. Moreover, such concepts
are not purely extensional.
Tom Wetzel
---
Writes David Longley:
>It just so happens that the people I count amongst the four are
>all quite happy to quantify into intensional contexts. That is
>about as real as one can get with intensions. I have yet to read
>anything by these so called critics which convinces me they have
>a clue about what they are talking about. In fact, each has been
It is noteworthy, tho, that you were never willing to provide any
*arguments* (that actually respond to points raised rather than
more quotes that merely pushes the issue back to interpretation)
to back up assertions like this. That strongly suggests
that *you* don't know what you're talking about.
>on the receiving end of others remarks which have essentially
>amounted to the same criticism. What characterises so many of
>these folk is their rabid eclecticism. I have no time for
>'debate' with such folk.
You say that argument isn't a part of science and it is obvious that
it isn't for you, but presumably name-calling is.
>
>Try talking about the work instead of *your* conceptions of *my*
>motives. For example, why not contribute to the clarification of
>why we need anything more than FOL for a science of behaviour.
Your request is dishonest. I gave you various arguments that you never
responded to. Moreover your request here is inconsistent. If "argument
isn't a part of science" why request arguments?
Tom Wetzel
:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
thomas...@eng.sun.com
Neil Rickert
>In article <40g27q$4...@mp.cs.niu.edu> ric...@cs.niu.edu "Neil Rickert" writes:
>> You have answered them, but many of your answers have been
>> non-responsive.
>No - I have *answered* them. I have given concrete illustrations
>of where it is impossible to quantify into intensional contexts
>and substitute co-designative terms.
So what!
> The most illustrative one is
>indirect discourse and *the* abuse of that, along with the extent
>to which it leads to the creations of 'psychological' material
>should now be obvious to anyone who has been following the
>thread.
I will grant that you are an expert at abusive indirect discourse.
>Sloman is unaware of how eclectic he is in his views. If he
>reckons he can take Quine on he should do so. I asked him to put
>his first account of the Indeterminacy Thesis by Chris Hookway
>and I am still waiting to hear what he had to say. I think it is
>pure arrogance for the man to think he can dismiss such a
>thoroughly analysed and influential piece of analysis.
You only confirm your own failure of comprehension.
>I have no such ambitions here on the net, it just doesn't attract
>that sort of discussion. What it might be useful for is sharing
>some R&D lines of development. That's what 'Fragments of
>Behaviour: The Extensional Stance' amounts to, some R&D lines.
>From what I have seen to date, many using these news groups have
>no idea how to discuss scientific research. Perhaps we can show
>them?
You seem to be implying that "The Extensional Stance" was scientific
research. I read it as a proposal for scientific research, with a
lot of philosophical hand waving purporting to support the proposal.
As far as I can tell the research is not complete. When you have
published conclusive data that supports your case you can talk about
discussing scientific research.
>> >If you just *look* at the material, and my remarks elsewhere, you
>> >should see that what you class a criticism is not criticism at
>> >all. It's a distraction.
>> Well of course it's a distraction. Your attitude is "full speed
>> ahead and damn the torpedos." Thus anyone who suggest otherwise is a
>> distraction to you. As long as you are convinced that you are right
>> and the rest of the world is wrong, I don't see why you bothered to
>> post anything in the first place. You should have anticipated that
>> this would lead to distractions, since there were bound to be people
>> who could not fully agree with you.
>Yes, part of that's true. But what is extremely annoying is that
>it's not *me* that's behind all of this, and it has little to do
>with how good or bad my defences might be!
I don't know who else could be behind it. You brought the material
to this forum to get reactions. You got reactions.
> Scientific truth just
>isn't like that.
As far as I can tell, you haven't presented a whole lot of scientific
truth. It isn't scientific truth until you have published the data,
the data has been subject to adequate peer review by people who can
fully analyze the conditions in which the data was collected, and the
work has been independently reproduced by other experimenters.
> It's not who presents the best argument. or who
>comes off best in a debate! It's whether the theory and evidence
>face the tribunal of real life..
So far it is mostly theory with very little evidence. Facing the
tribunal of real life includes persuading your peers. If you think
people are debating for the sake of debating, you are seriously
mistaken. They are telling you, in very clear terms, that you have
failed to persuade them.
> .....and to date, I'm afraid those
>ho have been offering me the wisdom of their experience just
>don't have the credibility that they think they do.
If you want credible wisdom, ask David Longley. Or ask some
employees who risk their jobs if they don't agree with you. It is
clear by now that you will not consider anyone credible unless they
do agree with you.
Lee Lady
> >SNIP<
>
>As an illustration of the very thing that I have been
>criticising, this is all quite ironic. There are about four
>outspoken critics to my knowledge and all four are essentially
>intensional realists. I don't expect to persuade such folk out of
>their folly. You on the other hand, seem to have elected yourself
Longley, these four are the only people reading the newsgroups who are
capable of even making any sense out of what you're posting. I think
that my background in philosophy is better than most psychologists
(although certainly nothing to write home about) and I find it very
difficult to get even a vague sense of what you're trying to say.
Don't you even notice that nobody whatsoever is making any posts
indicating any kind of agreement with you? It's not that people
necessarily consider you wrong (in fact, there are some good points
buried in your articles, for those capable of deciphering them), but that
they find you totally obscure.
What is the purpose of communication? What is the purpose of your
communication in particular? If your purpose is to convince some
psychologists to give up what they're doing and become converts to your
brand of behavioral science, it ought to be clear to you at this point
that you're having no impact whatsoever.
--
If a kid asks where rain comes from,
I think a cute thing to tell him is, "God is crying."
And if he asks why God is crying, another cute thing to tell him is,
"Probably because of something you did." --- Jack Handey
David Longley
> In <808172...@longley.demon.co.uk> David Longley <Da...@longley.demon.co.uk>
> writes:
>
> You seem to be implying that "The Extensional Stance" was scientific
> research. I read it as a proposal for scientific research, with a
> lot of philosophical hand waving purporting to support the proposal.
> As far as I can tell the research is not complete. When you have
> published conclusive data that supports your case you can talk about
> discussing scientific research.
>
No - the material is retrospective - the project has been running
in part since 1988. The positive 'attainment' orientated
programme is what is new. There is plenty of data, it's not
published because that's the way it is in public service.
> >Yes, part of that's true. But what is extremely annoying is that
> >it's not *me* that's behind all of this, and it has little to do
> >with how good or bad my defences might be!
>
> I don't know who else could be behind it. You brought the material
> to this forum to get reactions. You got reactions.
>
If I collate material and draw themes together from several
diverse programmes that's more like a review surely. I agree that
review may be a bad review, ie it may leave important data out -
but that's what I am asking for here, ie constructive
contributions to improving the scope of that 'review'. I'm sure I
say that the main text is essentially that in the Executive
Summary.
>
> As far as I can tell, you haven't presented a whole lot of scientific
> truth. It isn't scientific truth until you have published the data,
> the data has been subject to adequate peer review by people who can
> fully analyze the conditions in which the data was collected, and the
> work has been independently reproduced by other experimenters.
>
Yes this is fair criticism. What is needed is some presentation
of the data somehow. Can you suggest a way I might do that?
> > It's not who presents the best argument. or who
> >comes off best in a debate! It's whether the theory and evidence
> >face the tribunal of real life..
>
> So far it is mostly theory with very little evidence. Facing the
> tribunal of real life includes persuading your peers. If you think
> people are debating for the sake of debating, you are seriously
> mistaken. They are telling you, in very clear terms, that you have
> failed to persuade them.
>
There is a volume which comprises an OVERVIEW Have a look through
that and let me know if you still wish to ascribe such upleasant
attributes and those below.
> If you want credible wisdom, ask David Longley. Or ask some
> employees who risk their jobs if they don't agree with you. It is
> clear by now that you will not consider anyone credible unless they
> do agree with you.
>
>
OK..that one scrapes the bottom of the barrel <g>. It's second
only to Cattle Prod Behaviourism.
Incidentally, I've just bought Putnam's 'Words & LIfe'. It has
another summary of the argument he develops in 'Representation
and Reality' (1988) against functionalism. One way of thinking
about Functionalism and its failure is that it was introduced to
provide a means whereby we could talk of mental states as playing
an instrumental role in behaviour I/o (S/R). The problem is, that
if the 'museum' theory of meaning is wrong, as Quine claims to
have shown through the Indeterminacy Thesis, and that we can not
reliably quantify into intensional contexts, we have no hope of
turning to mental states to *explain* anything. It is *not* abuse
to say that anyone purporting to do so can't have a clue about
what they are talking about (but it *can* be regarded as a
reference to a pair of papers between Stich and Chomsky in the
early 70s on his charge that grammarians do not know what they
are talking about. The clever bit is that there can be no *what*
if quantification fails, there can be no 'fact of the matter'.
--
David Longley
David Longley
>
> You seem to be implying that "The Extensional Stance" was scientific
> research. I read it as a proposal for scientific research, with a
> lot of philosophical hand waving purporting to support the proposal.
> As far as I can tell the research is not complete. When you have
> published conclusive data that supports your case you can talk about
> discussing scientific research.
>
In response to the two most recent posts, I thought the following
might be of help to clarify matters. I have excluded the
'Introduction' to save space. It is true that to date, I have
tried to restrict what I have had to say to theoretical and
empirical issues. The following provides about the limit of what
I think I can say in such a public forum without running the risk
of misrepresentation through lack of adequate context.
There are several internal (field psychologists) reviews of 'A
System Specification for PROfiling BEhaviour' in the main body of
the following text. I have left the preface material in just in
case it contributes to the context. I have split the text over 2
articles:
PROFILING BEHAVIOUR (PROBE)
A SYSTEM SPECIFICATION
OVERVIEWS AND INTRODUCTION
September 1994
'We consider ourselves distinguished from the ape by the
power of thought. We do not remember that it is like the
power of walking in the one-year old. We think, it is
true, but we think so badly that I often feel it would
be better if we did not.'
B Russell
(in Faith and Mountains
cited in R M Dawes (1988)
Rational Choice in an Uncertain World)
'Regardless of how much we stand to gain from supposing
that human behavior is the proper subject matter of a
science, no one who is a product of Western civilization
can do so without a struggle. We simply do not want such
a science.'
B F Skinner (1953)
Can Science Help? - The Threat to Freedom
(in Science and Human Behavior p.7)
'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)
'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.'
P E Meehl (1986)
What Social Scientists Don't Understand
(in Metatheory in Social Science
Eds D W Fiske & R A Shweder p.325)
PREFACE
The primary purpose of the 10 volumes which comprise 'A System
Specification for Profiling Behaviour (PROBE)' is to outline, for
prison psychologists and their managers, the rationale, and
practical potential of working within a formal, logical,
normative system such as PROBE. This system was developed within
the English Long Term Adult Male Prison System between 1986 and
1994. Since its inception, various other notions such as 'Action
Research', 'Operational Psychology' and other terms have been put
forward in a similar vein, however, given that all of the work of
an Applied Criminological Psychologist is by definition
operational and action based, one might be forgiven for
construing attempts to introduce such terms as being indicative
of something having gone fundamentally wrong. These volumes begin
with a diagnosis and explication. In fact, Volumes 1 through 3
cover some of the key issues in contemporary psychology, drawing
considerably on the work of B.F. Skinner, W.V.O. Quine, and P.E.
Meehl. However, its main intellectual source is Recursive
Function Theory, which has its origins in the work of Turing
(1936) and Church (1936) c.f. Cutland 1980. With these
intellectual debts stated at the beginning, the ensuing PROBE
System Specification outlines a formal infrastructure, i.e. a
System Specification for Profiling Behaviour within the English
Prison System.
Readers should note that it aims to provide no more than a formal
infrastructure. A full practical implementation of PROBE would
require commitment from administrators along with resourcing and
support considerably in excess of that which has been invested to
date. From psychologists it requires a willingness to work as
behaviour scientists, that is, a determination to work within the
scope and language of science, not folk psychology. It also
requires them to abandon the vacuous methodology of Hybrid-
significance Testing (Gigerenzer & Murray 1987) as a basic
technology of evaluation. At the time of writing, and despite
having taught to the contrary for six years, most evaluations of
programmes still rest on doing little more than rejecting the
null hypothesis. Given that the null hypothesis is always false,
rejecting it is more a function of statistical power than
anything else. If less than one in twenty academics appreciate
this point (Meehl 1986), the prevailing state of affairs within
(and outside) Prison Psychology should not be surprising. The
fact is that few understand that significance tests only tell us
how often our pattern of data may occur by chance, and tell us
nothing about the likelihood of the researchers substantive
theory or hypothesis. This is an important theme of this System
Specification, and is discussed in detail in Volume 1. After
having read Volumes 1 and 3, it should be clear why the above is
so. It should also become clear that the error committed by so
many researchers occurs because of a pervasive intensionality
within contemporary psychology. If not already clear, the issues
should become so after the reader has read the extracts from
Meehl (1967, 1978, 1986), and after having considered those
points in the context of the differences in power and precision
between the predicate vs. propositional calculus, (Jeffrey 1988;
Jeffrey & Boolos 1989).
This particular document comprises both an 'Overview' and an
'Introduction' to the material which comprises a 'Specification
for Profiling Behaviour', a formal infrastructure which has been
practically developed over the past 10 years, theoretically for
about 20 years, and which has been operational for 7 years. The
Overview presents a set of critical reviews by a group of staff
who kindly agreed to read and review the first drafts of Volume 1
through Volume 4. The actual volumes reviewed are cited at the
head of each review. Each reviewer was asked to provide a short
review something akin to a book review. They were asked to pitch
it to be suitable for their colleagues and their colleagues'
managers. The reviews were independent and appear as submitted
except for formatting.
The second part, the 'Introduction' largely comprises excerpts on
various logical issues which run throughout the main volumes.
This use of extracts from key sources continues throughout
Volumes 1 to 3, and has been adopted because so much of the
material is drawn from work which is often physically
inaccessible to staff working within prisons. Not only does the
approach save the reader from having to send off for references,
it also saves them a considerable amount of redundant reading.
The reader is encouraged to work through the material, since
PROBE has been designed, first and foremost as an infrastructure
within which Behaviour Scientists can practice and develop their
professional skills in an applied setting. Much of the academic
material is shown to be highly relevant to the practical problems
facing the applied psychologist. At a time when all are being
encouraged to justify their work in terms of Prison Service KPIs
and the Corporate and Business Plan, one might have expected the
system to have been presented with more explicit references to
Strategic Priorities. One of the major themes of the PROBE System
Specification, is however, the failure of Leibniz's Law within
epistemic and other intensional contexts. The relevance of the
system to the KPIs and Strategic priorities are here, and the
motivated reader should have little difficulty identifying where
the links are. One of the main objectives of the System
Specification is to encourage users to use the system themselves,
and it is unlikely that this will come about if all of the work
is done for the reader. Hence the strategy has been to present
examples, encouraging users to work within the infrastructure
rather than outside of it.
That infrastructure is based on the constraints of Relational
Theory. For the purposes of this System Specification, Relational
Theory is presented within a logical rather than set-theoretic
context (see Date 1992 and Volume 3). Practically, and in a
nutshell, the benefits of working within the proposed
infrastructure (or one structurally akin to it) are the benefits
and constraints of the formal 'scope and language of science'
(Quine 1954).
The PROBE system is designed as an infrastructure to support the
measurement and analysis of behaviour by providing a logical
structure within which behaviour predicates (Volume 5) can be
recorded of individuals, which can then be analysed to support
more objective management of those individuals than is possible
using intuitive professional judgement. A predicate is a
declarative term which can be said to be true or false of an
object or individual, hence much of the human decision making
must be made at very early stages of classification. Using the
language of function and argument, an individual can take one or
more of a set of finite valid values as arguments of a relation,
or function. Once decided upon, it is the business of science to
draw upon the laws of logic and mathematics to examine and
extract any further lawful relations which might exist between
such values. One can do this in one's head if one wishes, but the
evidence suggests that the support of extensional, actuarial
technology is far more defensible.
For example, simple frequency distributions are an important and
fundamental start. From these we can examine the distribution of
classes of behaviour, ie the base-rates, relative frequencies or
unconditional probabilities. Next we can examine joint
frequencies, ie associations or correlations between classes
(e.g. report rate and age group). We can go further still and
look at multi-variate influences on a dependent measure (such as
Home Leave Failure, or attendance and performance on a programme
or within an activity), and on the basis of such relations, we
can improve our management of behaviour at the group and
individual levels. With such information, work at the population
and individual inmate management level is put on a professional
footing.
Much of what is said in Volumes 1 and 3 illustrates how very
difficult it is to do this if one relies on intuitive skills
rather than extensional technology. The simple case is made that
it is only by working within a formal logical and actuarial
context that we are able to make objective transformations of the
data within our domain of concern, and that accordingly, all
Applied Criminological Psychologists ought to invest extensively
in such technology, throughout all steps of their career. The
technical skills required are not intellectually demanding, nor
are they de-skilling. They do however require time, logic and its
application.
The reader should not be left with the feeling that what is on
offer is a complex set of mathematical tools. On the contrary,
the basic rules are 'effective', ie algorithmic, and all such
processes are simple computations which are extremely simple
steps of behaviour. What seems to distinguish them from normal,
intelligent, human reasoning, is that effective processes do not
'go beyond the information given', but carefully, and rigorously
(some would say, pedantically) unpack the information which is
already logically entailed (c.f Popper 1959). Their unattractive
quality is that they are *so* simple. They are robotic, which is
to say - they are hard work. Here is how Turing introduced the
notion of effectivity (which Church 1936 equated with recursive
functions):
'The Computer
Computing is normally done by writing certain symbols on
paper. We may suppose this paper is divided into squares
like a child's arithmetic book. In elementary arithmetic
the two-dimensional character of the paper is sometimes
used. But such a use is always avoidable, and I think
that it will be agreed that the two-dimensional
character of paper is no essential of computation. I
assume then that the computation is carried out on one
dimensional paper, ie on a tape divided into squares. I
shall also suppose that the number of symbols which may
be printed is finite. If we were to allow an infinity
of symbols, then there would be symbols differing to an
arbitrarily small extent.
The behaviour of the computer at any moment is
determined by the symbols which he is observing, and his
'state of mind' at that moment. We may suppose that
there is a bound B to the number of symbols or squares
which the computer can observe at one moment. If he
wishes to observe more, he must use successive
observations. We will also suppose that the number of
states of mind which need to be taken into account is
finite. The reasons for this are the same character as
those which restrict the number of symbols. If we
admitted an infinity of states of mind, some of them
will be 'arbitrarily close' and will be confused. Again,
the restriction is not one which seriously affects
computation, since the use of more complicated states of
mind can be avoided by writing more symbols on the tape.
Let us imagine the operations performed by the computer
to be split up into 'simple operations' which are so
elementary that it is not easy to imagine them further
divided. Every such operation consists of some change in
the physical system consisting of the computer and his
tape. We know the state of the system if we know the
sequence of symbols on the tape, which of these are
observed by the computer (possibly with a special
order), and the state of mind of the computer. We may
suppose that in a simple operation not more than one
symbol is altered. Any other changes can be split up
into simple changes of this kind. The situation in
regard to the squares whose symbols may be altered in
this way is the same as in regard to the observed
squares. We may, therefore, without loss of generality,
assume that the squares whose symbols are changed are
always 'observed' squares.'
Alan Turing (1936)
On Computable Numbers, with an application to the
'Entscheidungsproblem' (Hilbert's decision problem)
When Putnam introduced machine functionalism into psychology in
the 1960s and 1970s, he had a precedent, for in 1936 the computer
as we know it today had not been invented. What Turing was
describing above was the operations of a human being, whose job
it was to compute. This was the model upon which his universal
Turing machine was built. Nor should the reader be deterred from
working through the material because of the significant role
which deductive logic plays in the specification. Ordinary
language simply is not up to the task as Tarski (1931) pointed
out:
'[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
'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
One of the major themes of these volumes is to clarify the above
statement in the spirit of Wittgenstein (1922), but drawing on
Quine's skills of exorcization (1956), and thereby highlight
precisely what can, and what can not be said. Part of the impetus
behind this is the very practical constraints one confronts when
using a 4GL to write intelligent reports. The propositional
calculus is only a start, and as will soon become apparent, one
requires the power of the predicate calculus and its deductive
power to say anything intersting based on the data maintained
within PROBE. In this context, Davis (1988), reviewing the
relationship of Mathematical Logic to Computing wrote:
'One of the first things a novice user of a computer
must learn is that computers tend to be totally
unforgiving of "minor" lapses in notation. Who has not
experienced the frustration of being required to re-
enter a long line of text simply because a comma
somewhere should have been a period? We may say that
computer languages (programming languages, operating
systems, etc.) have a totally prescribed formal syntax.
The idea that a specially created language could be
useful for extending the range of what could be
accomplished by computation goes back to Leibniz.
However, the first actual example of a formal language
was presented by Gottlob Frege in his Begriffsschrift
(1879). His Begriffsschrift contained, for the first
time ever, a formulation of what has come to be called
first-order logic. But most important of all for
computer science was Frege's clear demonstration of how
to construct and deal rigorously with a formal
language....Just how remarkable Frege's work was becomes
clear on comparing it with that of his successors.
Important contributions were made by E. Schroder, G
Peano, and by Bertrand Russell. But this work, mostly
done during the early years of the twentieth century,
fell far short of Frege's level of rigor....
Emil Post's dissertation (1921) marked a return to
Frege's standards of rigor... In particular, Post
studied the problem of finding algorithms by which it
could be mechanically determined whether particular
formulas in the language of Principia Mathematica could
be derived using the rules of the language. Post solved
only the first part of the problem; he found algorithms
for the part of Principia Mathematica that we now call
the propositional calculus. Post's efforts to extend
these results led him to consider formal operations on
strings in the most general context, which he called
productions.
Post productions are ubiquitous in computer science.
Their first application was by Noam Chomsky, who found
in them exactly what he needed for his revolutionary
theory of the grammars of natural languages. This led
Chomsky to his now famous classification or hierarchy of
languages based on the specific kind of Post productions
permitted in their defining grammars. The connection
with computer science became apparent when it turned out
that one of Chomsky's classes consisted of just the
languages that could be recognised by a finite
automaton, and that another, the so-called context free
languages, consisted of the languages recognisable by
finite automata equipped with an auxiliary push-down
stack. Apparently independently of Chomsky 's work,
John Backus used Post productions to provide an
appropriate syntax for the developing programming
language ALGOL 58. And then it turned out that the class
of languages that could be described in terms of Backus'
syntax were exactly Chomsky's context-free languages!
The all-important, but basically simple, observation
that every electrical circuit contained switches could
be usefully interpreted as a formula of the
propositional calculus was made by Claude Shannon in his
Master's thesis (Shannon 1938). The idea was just to
interpret "true" and "false" as corresponding to a
switch being open or closed respectively. The Boolean
connectives "and" and "or" then corresponded to switches
being connected in series and parallel, respectively.
The connections between logic and computer science are
two-way. The realisation that the logical complexity of
a Boolean formula is closely related to the number of
elements needed (and hence to the cost) of the
corresponding circuits led the logician and philosopher
W. V. Quine to work on the combinatorial problem of
finding the smallest formula that can represent a given
Boolean function (Quine 1952). Soon this material became
a standard text book topic.'
M Davis (1988)
Influences of Mathematical Logic on Computer Science
in The Universal Turing Machine: A Half Century Survey
Ed: R Herken
With respect to PROBE, it is assumed that all of the relations we
can be concerned with exist (ie can be made the value of a bound
variable) in our universe of discourse. At present, we may not
have all of the requisite elements within our database, but that
can be rectified in time. It is also an assumption, albeit one
supported by considerable evidence, that it is only the
constraints of our Central Nervous Systems which prevent us from
grasping all such relations. A physical study of such constraints
(neophobia - the sine qua non for learning) was the subject of a
four year MRC post-graduate studentship at the National Institute
for Medical Research between 1979 and 1983 (Deakin and Longley
1981; Longley 1983).
Conceptually the major obstacle for PROBE users is the fact that
substitutivity of identicals does not occur in psychological
contexts. In many respects this is related to a natural fear of
the unfamiliar (neophobia), a defense mechanism designed perhaps
to prevent us experiencing everything, and therefore, nothing.
Our expectations are frequently challenged when we come to
appreciate that two things were one all along, and we are
frequently frustrated because if we knew that in the first place
we would have solved many a problem. The PROBE System
Specification is basically a specification of a system which may
help behaviour scientists to identify relations which otherwise
would be harder to identify. To that extent. The reader is
encouraged to consider carefully the extract from Jeffrey (1989)
on identity and inference and consider seriously the potential
merits of Leibniz's dream of our one day being able to turn to
independent formal systems to resolve disputes (although it must
be made clear from the start, that it will be argued that the
solution does not lie in the ritualistic use of Neyman-Pearson or
Fisherian statistical testing and the absurd search for
significant p values. Rather, it lies in sound descriptive
analysis and data transformation, ie deductive inference based on
sound observation and recording of behaviour). Those who prefer
the alternative given the evidence, which will be reviewed in the
following volumes, are probably artists at heart, not scientists.
A System Specification for Profiling Behaviour will not be to
their liking, since it eschews all that is central to art, ie,
intension.
Those who do choose to work through the material may find it
helpful to re-read the introduction and overview at times. Each
volume has its own set of indices on subject, names and files.
Similarly, references are provided at the end of each volume.
--
David Longley
David Longley
la...@uhunix3.its.Hawaii.Edu "Lee Lady" writes:
> Longley, these four are the only people reading the newsgroups who are
> capable of even making any sense out of what you're posting. I think
> that my background in philosophy is better than most psychologists
> (although certainly nothing to write home about) and I find it very
> difficult to get even a vague sense of what you're trying to say.
>
> Don't you even notice that nobody whatsoever is making any posts
> indicating any kind of agreement with you? It's not that people
> necessarily consider you wrong (in fact, there are some good points
> buried in your articles, for those capable of deciphering them), but that
> they find you totally obscure.
>
> What is the purpose of communication? What is the purpose of your
> communication in particular? If your purpose is to convince some
> psychologists to give up what they're doing and become converts to your
> brand of behavioral science, it ought to be clear to you at this point
> that you're having no impact whatsoever.
>
Disclaimer:
The views expressed in these volumes are those of the
author and may not represent the views of the Prison
Service. Any corrections, comments or requests for
further copies should be sent to the author.
'When taught arithmetic in junior school we all learnt
to add and to multiply two numbers. We were not merely
taught that any two numbers have a sum and a product -
we were given methods or rules for finding sums and
products. Such methods or rules are examples of
algorithms or effective procedures. Their implementation
requires no ingenuity or even intelligence beyond that
needed to obey the teacher's instructions.
More generally, an algorithm or effective procedure is a
mechanical rule, or automatic method, or programme for
performing some mathematical operation.'
N.J. Cutland (1980)
Computability: An Introduction to recursive function
theory
Ch 1:Algorithms or effective procedures
Title: PROBE System Specification Overviews and IntroductionOrigin: D Longley, Principal Psychologist, Activity ServicesDate: September 1994
Comments on:-
PROBE - The system specification by David Longley, DIP. Volumes 1 to 3.
Reviewer 1
September 1994
The first three volumes of this work are daunting, challenging
and clearly represent a great deal of thought, study and
consideration on the part of the author. It is also rare that a
prison psychologist faces a document of such weight when asked to
read a colleague's work. This is the first thing that
differentiates David Longley's work from that of the average
prison service psychologist (should such a person exist). The
other differences become apparent as this work is read, and the
reader gains the impression that he is imploring them to
reevaluate their role in the organisation. The tasks handed down
by our many leaders and managers do not appear in the scheme of
work as defined in this document, and there is a problem for the
reader. Does this work fit in to the current ways of working, and
if not, could it, and should it and how can it be made to ? By
reading this document one is forced to ask such questions, and as
Longley makes his own position clear, so one is forced to answer
them.
In Volume 1. Longley sets the scene by raising issues which
practising psychologists commonly avoid facing: 'judgment', 'base
rates' and 'Bayes Theorem', 'intension and extension'. He
introduces the subject of logic, which few undergraduate
psychology courses address and this psychologist feels instantly
anxious. He then goes on to illustrate just how important such
issues are, and then how difficult they are to deal with.
Crucially he uses illustrative examples from the psychological
literature (Wason, Johnson-Laird p.17) and reminds us of those
undergraduate lectures where we were praying that the teacher
would not ask us what the answer was. Funnily none of mine ever
did, but always made some quip about 'I'm sure you all know the
answer, which is of course....'.
What Longley also does is explain some of the basis for practices
which counter his logical, scientific view; 'socially conditioned
(induced) intensional heuristics'. The power of such conditioning
should not be underestimated. When professionally applied
psychology does not equate with academic psychology, as is
superbly illustrated on page 27. the applied psychologist is
faced with a dilemma. Answer the question or change the way we
work. Longley tells us to change the way we work as otherwise we
behave like the subjects in the academics' work. He also offers
to help us change the way we work and holds up the PROBE project
as a (the) 'relational system to provide the requisite
distributional data upon which to use the technology of
algorithmic decision making'.
This introduction leads in to an introduction of the Sentence
Management project which is carefully explained as the focus of
behaviour change in the prison system. This is a great relief for
those of us who wonder about the wisdom of a world where group
work is seen as the agent of behaviour change and other
activities as mere 'work'. It is difficult to imagine how anyone
could argue against the proposal that the contingencies in the
work place are important in shaping prisoners' behaviour and that
they should be used to have a maximum effect on 'offending'
behaviour. Here Longley makes his claim on the focus of work, and
the requirement of continual assessment and evaluation.
Allied to this is his point about 'inhibition' of behaviour as
contrasted with 'learning' (page 36-7). Despite so much evidence,
our society appears to have retained faith in the suppression of
undesirable behaviours by the use of punishment or other means.
By focusing on new behaviour Longley presents the alternative,
the development of new skills using principles of reinforcement
and assessing the effects using distributional data. What every
psychologist must surely argue for in the criminological context
(?). He states: 'At present we don't even keep systematic records
of what we do with inmates in activities. How can governors
effectively manage prisons, .... if nobody systematically knows
what they are doing with inmates ?'. This argument does not aline
against the 'what works' literature, but presents a simple
argument; that to know what effect the prison system is having on
the behaviour of prisoners we must record what environmental
conditions they are living and operating in, and how they are
responding or behaving. The only way to do this is systematically
and then we can demonstrate 'suppression' as well as 'learning'.
In the footnote of Volume 1. Longley quotes an Open University
source which notes that .... 'human judges did not like the
results'. This comment typifies reactions of professionals to
arguments in favour of increased actuarial judgement. The fact
that the 'results' are 'not liked' is not a reason for rejecting
the validity of the work however, and the need for professionals
to understand the issues debated here are likely to become
increasingly important as the Prison Service comes under further
public and political scrutiny through its transition into agency
status. When asked how decisions are made, an actuarial judgement
may provide better results (all the evidence suggests so), and
may be easier to defend (using an argument of probability rather
than 'cause' or 'similarity to another case' etc.).
I will not comment on Volume 2. (An empirical illustration) other
than to say that the reports reproduced here provide large
amounts of information in a format which requires some discipline
to read. This will count against an argument for such as system
in a world of 'executive summaries' and 'sound-bites'. Managers
and other prison staff will require an amount of guidance to use
the rich information provided by this system and that task should
belong to psychologists. Such guidance demands a high degree of
understanding however, and reminded me of the difference between
describing your own research to colleagues, where one has had the
opportunity to explore the details of the data beyond that
presented in the final report, and that of describing someone
else's research, which usually involves incomplete statements and
unsure assertions when memory flounders.
This is a real issue for a system which aims to provide as
automated a process as possible and will demand a great deal of
disciplined work among psychologists to achieve the required
understanding. This is perhaps constrained by the difficulties of
training people to use actuarial methods (e.g., Nisbett and Ross
quoted in Volume 1.).
Volume 3. marries together the academic background and the
practical illustration in what is probably individually the most
useful of the three volumes. Longley states in the early
paragraphs: 'no disrespect is intended to any practising field
psychologists....' and yet this material challenges virtually all
working practices of psychology in the Prison Service. The reader
is left with the impression of a purely bi-polar argument whereas
others working in this area have sought smaller shifts in
practice. Clearly not all current practice is 'folk psychology'
although that which corresponds with 'operational behaviour
science' as defined by Longley is largely confined to research
work. The fact that psychologists may well feel fairly defensive
about their professional standing (in comparisons with 'hard'
sciences and medicine for example) does not help Longley's cause
here. The value of the PROBE/Sentence Management system is that
it provides a 'value free' approach and rejects rhetoric.
Unfortunately the conviction of this document may be
misinterpreted as rhetoric by those who have not read the
literature on actuarial and clinical judgement, the contribution
of logic to the development of science and the debates between
philosophers of science.
It is also doubtful whether many psychologists working in the
field (for whom this document largely appears to have been
written), will have considered other issues Longley presents in
Volume 3. For example, many psychologists will not have been
exposed to arguments against confidentiality in a counselling
relationship. The British Psychological Society Code of Conduct
presents an ethical view which is difficult to equate with
Longley's. It could be argued that the least use of this document
is in stimulating debate among practising psychologists about
issues we commonly choose to ignore or take for granted.
A further issue emerging from Volume 3. is that it is not only
professional psychology that is caught up in the operation of
'folk psychology'. Every professional and inhabitant in the
system is a practising folk psychologist (as those of us who work
in establishments are only too aware), and 'helpful extensional
strategies' (p.26) will challenge all. Operating within the
PROBE/Sentence Management system will always require challenging
the everyday explanations of others in the system, and while such
explanations may well be the legitimate target of academic study,
they may also be the largest constraint of all. Once again this
is not an argument against Longley but another area where
enthusiasm is likely to be limited.
On page 31, Longley goes further, and led me to realise what a
sobering thought is presented by his vision of criminological
psychology. That is, what a scientific approach offers is less
than an artistic, creative, solipsistic psychology, not more
than. Just as 'folk physics' can explain all of the physical
world without resorting to evidence, and the concept of 'faith'
rests purely on the absence of evidence, so 'folk psychology' can
operate with enormous potential. All behaviour can be explained
(albeit retrospectively) and all effects on behaviour can be
isolated. 'Theory' does not need to go through the tortuous
routes exercised in 'hard' science; it can simply be written down
with the aid of a few well drafted diagrams.... The fact that
folk psychology is non-science is unlikely to make it
unattractive and the effects of 'social conditioning' mentioned
earlier are unlikely to be positive. One thing that actuarial
judgment gives you is a sense of how wrong you are likely to be
(probabilities again). Folk psychology can explain away anything
without presenting a need to recognise errors; in folk psychology
all 'effects' have 'causes'.
Throughout Volume 3. Longley presents critiques of others' work.
Well informed criticism is likely to be viewed as altercation in
this context, however carefully source material is quoted and
evidence cited. It might have been beneficial to present the
PROBE project as a positive and integral part of the task facing
prison psychologists rather than a 'competitor within'. For
example the role of a relational database containing information
on the attributes and behaviours of all prisoners within the
Dispersal/Cat B system presents an ideal base for systematically
evaluating group programme work (such as the sex offender, anger
management and thinking skills programmes). A research design
could simply be designed around the data, with control groups
providing little difficulty as the database is designed to
contain data on *all* cases, not a sample. The PROBE system could
also be argued to support the 'Key Performance Indictor'
information used to assess prisons. Governors could use standard
reports about the nature of their populations and changes over
time to point to the performance indicators (actuarially)
underlying KPIs. It is probably frustration that prevents purely
positive argument, and the political will within the prison
service (as is political will anywhere) is no respecter of
science.
In Volume 3. Longley presents some neat turns of phrase that make
his work appealing... On page 240 he says '... behaviour science
and management is the business of the Prison Service, just as
medicine is the business of the Health Service'. While this is
undoubtedly true, it may not be respected by those operating (in)
that service.
After reading these three volumes one is left with a sense of
hope for the PROBE system. It is hard to deny that psychology
faces a difficult future without a firm scientific base, and
despite the resistance to 'science' in the field of psychology,
the need for evidence (such as in efficacy of treatments) and the
need for improvements will demand this work be done. It may well
transpire that it will not be psychologists who are asked to do
the work, but 'IT experts' who are not trained in any
behavioural/psychological theory. The consequences of such will
be major. Psychologists are placed in a privileged position in
his volume. Longley argues that the combination of training in
psychological theory and methods, access to information systems
and the support of the Prison Service will lead to an effective
applied behaviour science. It is to be hoped that they (we) are
to be given the chance.
Comments on:-
PROBE - The system specification by David Longley, DIP. Volumes 1 to 4.
Reviewer 2.
September 1994
________________________________________________________________
In my view the Profiling Behaviour (PROBE) system offers Prison
Service Managers a unique facility which, if utilised
appropriately and to its full potential, through the employment
of specially trained behaviour scientists, may provide the
Service with the means of achieving its goals and in so doing,
ultimately its Vision:
"To provide a Service of which the public can be proud
and will be regarded as a standard of excellence around
the world".
Goal 1:To Keep Prisoners in Custody
It is well known that a major problem for the Prison Service at
this point in time is how to deal with the failure of prisoners
to return to custody following the granting of Home Leave. This
is equally as acute when we consider the difficulties associated
with the granting of Temporary Release.
Poor decision making is extremely costly in such instances and
does little to bring the Service closer to achieving its Vision
where the Public is concerned.
The PROBE Home Leave Actuarial Risk Assessment procedure could,
if fully developed, provide managers with a model to assist and
perhaps even ultimately replace, the judgements of the
individuals that constituent the Home Leave Board.
It is obvious that the convening of Boards is expensive, both in
terms of time and money. Therefore the development of a computer
model which produces results at least as effective and perhaps
even more effective than any Board, must be an attractive option
to any forward thinking manager.
In my view therefore, behaviour scientists should be given the
time and resources to fully develop such a system, so that
managers could be provided with probability estimates of any
prisoner belonging to a Home Leave failure group. Such a system
should ultimately be extended to include the development of a
model for use with prisoners to be considered for Temporary
Release.
Obviously, it is a nonsense for such a system to be restricted
only for the use of those working in Dispersal Prisons. Indeed,
it is establishments at the other end of the security category
(ie. C's and D's) which are likely to benefit most from the
development and employment of such a system.
Goal 2:To Maintain Order, Control, Discipline and a Safe Environment
The maintenance of order, control and discipline within our
prisons and the creation of a safe environment for both prisoners
and staff to live and work in, are fundamental requirements for
the success of the Prison Service of the future. The Public,
particularly in recent years, in the aftermath of the Strangeways
and Wymott riots, has been made all too aware of the consequences
of the breakdown of control and discipline and of staff and
prisoners fearing for their safety within the prison setting.
Inevitably then, they will look to the Service to devise improved
methods of control, which will substantially reduce the
likelihood, or at the very least improve our preparedness for,
order breaking down within our prisons.
In my view the PROBE Behaviour Monitoring Control and Allocation
Profiles provide the Prison Service with one such method. The
PROBE system's capacity for generating individual behaviour
profiles, producing aggregated population data, producing
establishment profiles of adjudications, analysing behaviour
checklists based on staff observations and the producing of
thematic and spatial maps, are facilities which are, at the
present time, unique and which, if utilised to their full
potential, offer managers a level of insight into the nature of
their populations never before available to them.
Whilst the development of such procedures and routines has, to
date, been concentrated in the Dispersal prisons, experience
would suggest that lower category prisons and Local prisons would
benefit equally from the installation of such systems. The
investment of resources into the full development and extension
of such systems would have as its payoff a valuable Management
Information System which might serve as a basis for making better
operational decisions relating to the maintenance of control.
Goal 4:To provide Positive Regimes which help prisoners address
their Offending Behaviour and allow them a full and responsible
life as possible
Goal 5:To help prisoners prepare for their return to the
Community
If the Prison Service is truly to become a Service "regarded as a
standard of excellence around the world", then it is critical
that it develops Regime opportunities for prisoners that impact
on their offending behaviour and prepares them for their return
to the community. Currently the Service has no systematic
information and knowledge concerning the true impact of Regime
opportunities on prisoners behaviour.
The PROBE Behaviour Modification System (Sentence Management &
Plans) in my view seeks to readdress this problem by affording
managers the opportunity of monitoring the impact of Regime
Activities on any individual's behaviour on a monthly basis. Such
measures of behaviour can also be compared against Residential
behavioural measures. The system, by routinely identifying
prisoners who are performing well or poorly for any given
Activity and\or Residential Unit and placing these alongside
individual control measurements (ie. NIC, S-Factor), allows
managers to make decisions regarding the setting of appropriate
short and long term targets, which seek to impact directly on
behaviour and against which the progress of the individual
prisoner can be measured across time.
The operation of such a system, if properly resourced, would in
my view, offer the Service its best opportunity to date to
monitor its progress in achieving Goals 4 and 5.
Comments on:-
PROBE - The system specification by David Longley, DIP. Volumes 1 to 4.
Reviewer 3
September 1994
________________________________________________________________
CRITICAL APPRAISAL OF PROBE SYSTEM SPECIFICATION
The PROBE System Specification provides for the first time a
comprehensive description of the ideas behind and practical
implementation of PROBE. It includes everything from the
'Academic Context' of the work to detailed listings of the
complex retrievals and batch files needed to make the system
function. It is unfortunate that this high quality document was
not available several years ago. In my opinion, the academic
background section could have been presented as a short summary
of the concepts behind PROBE and a representative sample of
references to work done in this area. I would suggest that over
intellectualising has at times detracted from a clear
presentation to psychologists and governors of what, despite its
complexity, is basically a practical database application.
Volume 2 describes in detail how the Sentence Management system
can be used and what results can be derived. Some of the graphs,
particularly the line graphs are difficult to interpret due to
attempting to represent too many establishment data sets on one
graph.
In volume 3, section 1 provides a clear and useful account of
some general system issues, database structure, training,
efficiency, costs etc. Section 2 describes some of the major
current applications of PROBE. It demonstrates the usage of
across establishment analysis of transfers and adjudications. The
information on Spatial Mapping should be particularly useful to
field developers. Section 3 covers the results which are
obtainable from the sentence management system.
Volume 4 is in my opinion the core of the System Specification.
It describes with clarity and detail all the inner workings of
field and headquarters nodes. While the overall structure of the
wide area network is described, it might be easier to visualise
it, if it were presented in a diagrammatic form. Similarly, the
operation of the overnight routines may be more quickly
assimilated by a software maintenance engineer if they were
accompanied by some form of system flowchart.
SUMMARY
The PROBE System Specification provides a comprehensive account
of the work which has lead to the current state of development of
the database and supporting routines. In itself it forms an
important part of the PROBE system and will prove invaluable to
those who will develop and maintain the system in the future.
Comments on:-
PROBE - The system specification by David Longley, DIP. Volumes 1 and 2.
Reviewer 4
September 1994
________________________________________________________________
PROFILING BEHAVIOUR (PROBE) SYSTEM SPECIFICATION VOLUMES 1 & 2
This document describes a framework for facilitating the use of
systematic information as a basis for making decisions which are
central to the operation of any prison establishment. Volumes 1
and 2 will prove challenging and thought-provoking to anyone with
a professional interest in the management of prisons.
The first volume describes the academic context for the
development of the PROBE relational database. It demands the
reader to focus on fundamental aspects of the management of
prisons and invites a re-appraisal of some of the current systems
of operation. Approaches to the assessment of prisoner behaviour,
the organisation of activities for prisoners and the role of
Applied Criminological Psychology in prisons come under scrutiny.
The complex and lengthy development of arguments in this volume
can be daunting and require focused concentration in order to
gain an appreciation and understanding of the content. However if
the reader perseveres the guiding principles behind PROBE are
made explicit thereby setting the context for subsequent volumes.
Volume 2 provides a clear and accessible account of how the PROBE
system can be applied in a prison situation. The detailed
examples successfully illustrate the potential usefulness of the
database. There are convincing demonstrations of the way the
system has been used at different levels of the organisation -
from the day-to-day population management of individual prisons
to the development of a broader perspective across
establishments. The reader is also prompted to think beyond the
specific examples and recognise how use of the system could be
extended to play a key role in a range of central tasks carried
out by establishments. These may include the evaluation of
activity programmes and Key Performance Indicator performance.
Comments on:-
PROBE - The system specification by David Longley, DIP. Volumes 1 to 3.
Reviewer 5
September 1994
________________________________________________________________
PROBE: THE SYSTEM SPECIFICATION
I recently asked a colleague what was the difference between
PROBE and LIDS, she said 'PROBE is like a history book that is
updated every day and LIDS is a daily paper rewritten every day.
In this simple statement she has captured a lot. It is well
known that the best indicator of future behaviour is past
behaviour and therefore the history book will be of more use to
us in monitoring and shaping inmate behaviour than the daily.
I was asked to comment on this System Specification for PROBE as
someone who has worked with PROBE since its arrival in the field,
and therefore in a position to judge if it truly reflects the
PROBE system.
Reading this document is hard work, principally I felt this is
caused by the frequent use of references in the text. The
content itself is both logical and accessible (bearing in mind
the first comment), and the depth of analysis is considerable.
It's not just a description of how a series of PC's are linked
together to collect data. It is an explanation of both how the
PROBE system functions and why it functions in that way.
Since joining the Prison Service I am aware that there is a more
positive/constructive attitude within Prison Psychology. Much of
this has come about with the rejection of the 'nothing works'
philosophy. This has led to the development of regimes and
behaviour modification programmes, and evaluation of this is made
possible by PROBE.
Why should you read this - I would encourage you to read this
document because it will help you to re-evaluate your current
practice. I would particularly recommend volume 1 pages 50-76 on
Clinical vs. Actuarial judgement. In the days of open reporting
both internally and for the Courts, it could save you many
sleepless nights.
Comments on:-
PROBE - The system specification by David Longley, DIP. Volumes 1 and 3.
Reviewer 6
September 1994
________________________________________________________________
The PROBE system has the potential to enhance the management and
reform of prisoners and thereby to assist the Prison Service in
achieving its aim of helping prisoners 'to live law abiding and
useful lives in custody and after release'. As such, far from
being scaled down, it should be maintained in the prisons in
which it is already in place and, when possible, extended
throughout the system.
As I understand it, PROBE can help the Service to meet its aims
through improving predictions. The PROBE system is capable of
making predictions about an individual's future behaviour and
about the effect of particular experiences on future behaviour -
and to do so more accurately than people. PROBE is thus able to
enhance decision making in relation to prisoners by improving
predictions concerning the outcome of such decisions. The
potential implications of this in terms of improvements in the
management and reform of incarcerated offenders are profound and
far-reaching. Armed with an enhanced ability to predict the
outcome of home leaves, governors' decision making in relation to
home leave applications would be improved. Likewise, better
predictions about the effects on recidivism of particular regime
elements would lead to better matching of prisoners to activities
and so, ultimately, to reductions in re-offending.
PROBE makes predictions as follows:
(i) Data are collected and stored in a relational database,
relating prisoners's behaviour at time t with their behaviour and
experiences up to time t.
(ii) These data are analysed, using the technique of logistic
regression, to produce prediction equations in relation to
particular behavioural outcomes.
(iii) Data on an inmate about whom a prediction is to be made is
fed in to the relevant prediction equation, which is then
computed, generating a prediction about the likelihood of a
particular outcome occurring.
Humans can not, Longley suggests, make such accurate predictions
as PROBE. This is because people can not store or process as much
information as a computer and, unlike computers, peoples'
information processing is subject to all manner of biases and
inaccuracies.
In addition to describing, and making the case for, PROBE,
Longley makes a number of other observations.
x Information concerning mentalistic states, events and processes
can not be used in making scientifically supportable predictions,
both for empirical and logical reasons. Empirical considerations
include, most obviously, the fact that prisoners can not be
relied upon to tell us the truth, especially when, as they often
do, they have a vested interest in not telling the truth. The
logical problem with mentalistic statements in science can not be
summarised succinctly, but is clearly explained by Quine and
others (cf Word and Object, Quine, 1960).
x What within the Prison Service lifer management system has been
called "risk assessment" involves human judgement which, as
noted, it is suggested, is of only limited value. In addition,
Longley argues that identifying to prisoners behaviours which are
supposed to be indicative of continued risk will lead to
suppression of those behaviours and thus to the illusion of
change where none has occurred.
x In attempting to generate long term change we should, Longley
argues, take advantage of all that is available within a prison
regime, and not just special programmes. This could only be done
however if backed up by an actuarial decision making tool such as
PROBE to help match experiences to prisoners' needs.
Many have said that they do not agree with what Longley is
suggesting. It is difficult for those who believe that they have
special powers of insight to accept his claims. Unfortunately for
them, Longley provides copious, and I believe incontrovertible,
evidence in support of his claims. The implications for prison
psychology are clear:
x PROBE should be maintained and, when possible, extended
throughout the system;
x "Risk assessment", and indeed any form of clinical judgement,
should be abandoned;
x Whilst special programmes may have their place, the focus of
attempts to modify prisoners' behaviour should be extended to
encompass the entire prison regime - something that PROBE may,
ultimately, allow us to do.
_______
I have recently been involved in evaluating the National Anger
Management Group, using a conventional random allocation
controlled study (Shepherd, 1994). A more appropriate way to have
conducted such research, would have been to use the PROBE system.
Using PROBE would remove the need for data to be collected
specifically for the purposes of evaluating the programme, and
would allow us to answer many of the questions the current study
leaves unanswered, without the need for elaborate and time
consuming experiments. It would even remove the need for a
control group, and all the practical and ethical problems that
entails.
Behaviour profiles before and after treatment could be examined
for those attending the programme. If their profiles were to
evidence a consistent discontinuity between pre and post
treatment, this could reasonably be attributed to an effect of
treatment. The magnitude and longevity of any discontinuity would
provide a meaningful measure of the magnitude and longevity of
any effect.
As well as providing profiles of behaviour, the PROBE system
holds a variety of other information, (such as offence type,
previous convictions and previous custodial experience). Once a
sizeable number of prisoners had been treated, a logistic
regression analysis could be conducted to identify groups of
prisoners with regard to whom the programme might be
differentially effective, and allow any such differences to be
quantified. Identifying which, if any, elements of the programme
are its "active ingredients", would be less straight-forward, but
could be ascertained by comparing, with the effects of the full
version of the programme, the impact on behaviour profiles of
variants of the programme from which particular elements had been
omitted.
The PROBE system could also be used to shed some light on the
issue of how any "active ingredients" of the programme might
work. If the programme has an impact on disruptive behaviour via
improved anger management, behaviour would also be expected to
change in other ways, consistent with reductions in the frequency
and intensity of anger - where such changes would, if they
occurred, be reflected in changes in the behaviour profiles of
the prisoners concerned. Likewise, if, as it is suggested,
reductions in anger are achieved in part by improved conflict
resolution and avoidance skills, this too would be expected to be
reflected in prisoners PROBE profiles.
o o o End Reviews o o o
Finally, before moving on to the introduction, here are some
comments from a) a past Director General, and b) an independent
outside consultancy group on the PROBE system and its management
prior to the writing of this System Specification, and prior to
the rather radical decisions about the system's future which were
made in early 1994.
Mr X
I mentioned to you (and to Mr Y) the excellent presentation
that DPS had given me a fortnight or so ago on their work in
developing PROBE. This is just to put on record the
suggestions that I made to them and passed on to you and Mr
Y.
...
The need to give a similar presentation on PROBE to the
various dispersal prisons groups (including senior members of
the Cat A section) so that everyone at the relevant
management levels is fully seized of the value of the
material that is available - you may think it useful to give
the material to a wider audience.
Mr W
25 June 1990
'Before launching into the recommendations, this report
wishes to stress that fundamentally, PROBE offers an
extremely high level of service to its users within the field
Psychology Units. They have access to significant computer
processing power, to a powerful and flexible database
management system and they can use some sophisticated
software facilities for research and analysis work.
In addition, there are surrounding controlling processes for
transferring data between sites, plus they have access to
their own and other units' data, which have been implemented
so as not to interrupt the basic service provided during
normal working hours. Much of the credit for this must go to
DIP2 in developing such a sophisticated operating environment
over the years and to their commitment in running this
operational system now.'
(p.38, Hoskyns Report September 1993).
Management of PROBE
Finally, because of the current production nature of PROBE,
serious consideration has been given to recommending that the
system should be handed over to be run by PSITG. PSITG would
then become responsible for day to day system management,
help desk support, training, etc, with DIP2 being able to
concentrate on research and offering only specialist advice.
Although the staff within DIP2 would then be able to
concentrate on research, there would still be a staff
requirement within PSITG to run the system. Such a move would
therefore have a cost implication, with perhaps little
benefit from an improved service.
As an entirely pragmatic approach, it is concluded therefore
that the system continues to be run by DIP2, but with a
Project Board to provide direction and ensure that the system
meets the needs of all users within Headquarters and
operational establishments.'
(P.42, Hoskyns Report, September 1993)
'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
'Calculemus.'
G W Leibniz (1679)
'Thus we have arrived at something fundamental: our
conventions regarding the use of the words "not" and "or" is
such that in asserting the two propositions "object A is
either red or blue" and "object A is not red," I have
implicitly already asserted "object A is blue." This is the
essence of so-called *logical deduction*. It is not then, in
any way based on real connections between states of affairs,
which we apprehend in thought. On the contrary, it has
nothing at all to do with the nature of things, but drives
from our manner of speaking about things. A person who
refused to recognize logical deduction would not thereby
manifest a different belief from mine about the behaviour of
things, but he would refuse to speak about things according
to the same rules as I do. I could not convince him, but I
could refuse to speak with him any longer, just as I should
refuse to play chess with a partner who insisted on moving
the bishop orthogonally.
What logical deduction accomplishes, then, is this: it makes
us aware of all that we have implicitly asserted - on the
basis of conventions regarding the use of language - in
asserting a system of propositions, just as, in the above
example, "object A is blue" is implicitly asserted by the
assertion of the two propositions "object A is red or blue"
and "object A is not red."
In saying this we have already suggested the answer to the
question, which naturally must have forced itself on the mind
of every reader who has followed our argument: if it is
really the case that the propositions of logic are
tautologies, that they say nothing about objects, what
purpose does logic serve?
..logical propositions, though being purely tautologous, and
logical deductions, though being nothing but tautological
transformations, have significance for us because we are not
omniscient. Our language is so constituted that in asserting
such and such propositions we implicitly assert such and such
other propositions - but we do not see immediately all that
we have implicitly asserted in this manner. It is only
logical deduction which makes us conscious of it.
If I have succeeded in clarifying somewhat the role of logic,
I may now be brief about the role of mathematics. The
propositions of mathematics are of exactly the same kind as
the propositions of logic: they are tautologous, they say
nothing at all about the objects we want to speak about, but
concern only the manner in which we want to speak of
them....We become aware of meaning the same by "2+3" and by
"5", by going back to the meanings of "2," "3," "5," "+," and
making tautological transformations until we just see that
"2+3" means the same as "5". It is such successive
tautological transformation that is meant by "calculating";
the operations of addition and multiplication which are
learned in school are directives for such tautological
transformation; every mathematical proof is a succession of
such tautological transformations. Their utility, again, is
due to the fact that, for example, we do not by any means see
immediately that we mean by "24 x 31" the same as by "744";
but if we calculate the product "24 x 31", then we transform
it step by step, in such a way that in each individual
transformation we recognize that on the basis of the
conventions regarding the use of the signs involved (in this
case numerals and the signs "+" and "x") what we mean after
the transformation is still the same as what we meant before
it, until finally we became consciously aware of meaning the
same by "744" and by "24 x 31."
..at first glance it is difficult to believe that the whole
of mathematics, with its theorems that it cost such labour to
establish, with its results that so often surprise us, should
admit of being resolved into tautologies. But there is just
one little point which this argument overlooks: it overlooks
the fact that we are not omniscient. An omniscient being,
indeed, would at once know everything that is implicitly
contained in the assertion of a few propositions. IT would
know immediately that on the basis of the conventions
concerning the use of the numerals and the multiplication
sign, "24 x 31" is synonymous with "744". An omniscient being
has no need for logic and mathematics. We ourselves, however,
first have to make ourselves conscious of this by successive
tautological transformations, and hence it may prove quite
surprising to us that in asserting a few propositions we have
implicitly also asserted a proposition which seemingly is
entirely different from them, or that we do mean the same by
two complexes of symbols which are externally altogether
different.'
H Hahn (1933)
Logic, Mathematics and Knowledge of Nature
In Ayer (Ed) Logical Positivism (1959)
--
David Longley
Aaron Sloman
being made, and found this.
David Longley <Da...@longley.demon.co.uk> writes:
> Date: Thu, 10 Aug 95 23:22:34 GMT
In response to Chris Malcolm (c...@castle.ed.ac.uk)
[DL]
> > >I'd appreciate constructively critical comments.
[CAM]
> > Which you would be more likely to get if you paid your readers the
> > normal courtesies of making pointed summaries of relevant material,
> > addressing the remarks they make, questions they ask, etc, instead of
> > retreating behind massive quotations and asking them to do all the
> > work for you. This is not how we conduct discussions in these groups.
> > I'm sorry to say I have actually read the nine extracts, but I can't
> > see any reason to spend time criticising it, constructively or
> > otherwise, and I can see good reasons not to bother: others have
> > already well made some of my points, but you have either ignored or
> > dismissed them.
I am sure Chris is quite right, but [DL] responds
> Oh, rubbish....you've just pasted together a bunch of sippets from other
> people's posts. Who do you think you are kidding?
In other contexts, Chris has shown himself to be a perceptive and
knowledgeable contributor to discussions about AI and philosophy. He
doesn't need to express himself by stringing together quotes from
other people's posts (or published articles). He can formulate and
express his own arguments.
Also since Chris says explicitly that he has read all nine extracts
and David claims that others say they have not (see below), he is
just flatly contradicting himself in claiming that Chris has just
pasted together a bunch of snippets:
[DL]
> The others you refer to have actually said they haven't bothered to read
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> any of it.
^^^^^^^^^^
"any of it"??
This is just a straightforward lie, as I have repeatedly stated that
I've read enough to form an opinion about its value (by induction),
and other critics have also said that they have read portions.
(David does seem to have trouble with the logical relations between
"any", "some", "most", "often" and "all").
David also conveniently ignores the point that Chris has based *his*
critical remarks on a *complete* reading of all the nine extracts.
I think it is clear that Davd is waiting till someone turns up to
*support* his Probe system, or his behaviourist psychology, or the
philosophy on which it is based, and in the meantime will either
ignore all counter arguments or meet them with a combination of
bluster (like the above) and repetition of what he has said before
(including repeated injunctions to read what he has said before).
Maybe it is time for all his critics to sit back and wait for
someone sympathetic to David's philosophy (he has a philosophy,
though he purports to rubbish philosophy -- when it doesn't agree
with him), to defend him. Criticising him is not going to get
anywhere.
Let's suppose David is right and all his critics have either failed
to read his texts or failed to understand them (a concept a
behaviourist can't use, I guess), or are too prejudiced to accept
his arguments. If there's something good in his theories, then
someone, somewhere, should be prepared to explain why, in a more
convincing way than David can, using a form of argument that will be
more acceptable to readers of these groups.
Let's wait and see, and meanwhile give him a rest from all this
criticism, which now seems to be counter-productive.
Aaron
---
Aaron Sloman
I wrote, in response to David's reply to Chris Malcolm.
> Let's wait and see, and meanwhile give him a rest from all this
> criticism, which now seems to be counter-productive.
Just a short post-script to that.
Looking at the material with which David responded to Neil Rickert
in the message <808238...@longley.demon.co.uk> posted on Sat, 12
Aug 95 14:42:23 I found the following, immediately after his quote
from M Davis(1988)
[DL]
> With respect to PROBE, it is assumed that all of the relations we
> can be concerned with exist (ie can be made the value of a bound
> variable) in our universe of discourse.
I.e. David wants not only objects but also relations to be the
values of his variables.
Or, in other words, he is using a Higher Order Logic, not First
Order Logic (which does not allow variables to range over
relations).
From this I conclude that he must use terminology in a different way
from the rest of us (including the authors he quotes) when he says
that he uses only FOL, and that all science should use only FOL.
Thus some of the criticisms of what he actually says may be
misplaced, since it may not be what he really means (assuming he did
not intend flatly to contradict himself, which is hardly likely).
Perhaps further detailed study of his text (for which I don't have
time) will show other ways in which some of what he says shows that
we have been misinterpreting other things he says because he uses
familiar technical terms with an unusual meaning.
I had been previously been assuming that David meant his technical
terminology to be interpreted in the same way as Quine and others
whom he quotes interpret them, but that may have been uncharitable
on my part, since his background is psychology not philosophy.
David Longley
A.Sl...@cs.bham.ac.uk "Aaron Sloman" writes:
<snip>
>
> I think it is clear that Davd is waiting till someone turns up to
> *support* his Probe system, or his behaviourist psychology, or the
> philosophy on which it is based, and in the meantime will either
> ignore all counter arguments or meet them with a combination of
> bluster (like the above) and repetition of what he has said before
> (including repeated injunctions to read what he has said before).
>
> Maybe it is time for all his critics to sit back and wait for
> someone sympathetic to David's philosophy (he has a philosophy,
> though he purports to rubbish philosophy -- when it doesn't agree
> with him), to defend him. Criticising him is not going to get
> anywhere.
>
> Let's suppose David is right and all his critics have either failed
> to read his texts or failed to understand them (a concept a
> behaviourist can't use, I guess), or are too prejudiced to accept
> his arguments. If there's something good in his theories, then
> someone, somewhere, should be prepared to explain why, in a more
> convincing way than David can, using a form of argument that will be
> more acceptable to readers of these groups.
>
> criticism, which now seems to be counter-productive.
>
and critically evaluated. Probably 95% of what comprises the 9
extracts is literature *review*. The material doesn't comprise a
*theory* of any sort, just a practical methodology for the
recording, reporting and managing behaviour.
All these remarks about critical evaluation are just fantasy.
Where I have re-quoted bits from the extracts, what I *have*
received is comments to the effect that 'if interpreted
differently...', never refutations, and especially not additional
research evidence to make me reconsider the general conclusions
which emerge from the overall review.
My irritation comes from ascriptions to the contrary. My
challenges to the coherence and utility of cognitive science and
any approach which takes propositional attitudes as potential
independent variables when one's objective is to change behaviour
can be traced directly to Quine and Putnam.
I have learned not to take people's reports of their behaviour
all that seriously without substantiating evidence. Protestations
that I should will just not work. I doubt whether many reading
these threads will have put together the literature quite as I
have, it is vast. I do however, claim that it is a
representative sample of influential work over the past 40 years.
As to n-ary predicates (ie relations/tables) committing me to
higher order logic, please explain. Relational Database
technology is well grounded in FOL I have been led to believe.
My recommendation is: 'Don't Kill the Messenger' - just read the
text (available from me as 9 files amounting to 400K if you can't
access it from sci.cognitive or comp.ai.philsophy).
--
David Longley
Chris Menzel
:[...]
: I.e. David wants not only objects but also relations to be the
: values of his variables.
: Or, in other words, he is using a Higher Order Logic, not First
: Order Logic (which does not allow variables to range over
: relations).
This is inaccurate for two related reasons. First, one can use a
higher-order *language* that contains predicate variables that range
over relations but which is still essentially first-order. The trick
is that the semantics for the language is weakened somewhat so as not
to require, e.g., all one-place second-order predicate variables to
range over *all* sets of individuals. To loosen this requirement is
to use what are known as *generalized* models for higher-order
languages. Henkin defined this model theory for higher-order
languages and proved a completeness theorem for the corresponding
logic. The logic can be translated straightaway into a many-sorted
first-order theory (and thence, if you please, into a single-sorted
first-order theory).
Second, you can quantify over all the relations you want in
first-order set theory, where, of course, relation = set of n-tuples,
the only kind of relation you need for relational database theory.
===================================================================
Christopher Menzel | http://philebus.tamu.edu (WWW)
Philosophy, Texas A&M University | cme...@tamu.edu (email)
College Station, TX 77843-4237 | (409) 845-8764 (voice)
===================================================================
David Longley
A.Sl...@cs.bham.ac.uk "Aaron Sloman" writes:
> PS
>
> I wrote, in response to David's reply to Chris Malcolm.
>
> > Let's wait and see, and meanwhile give him a rest from all this
> > criticism, which now seems to be counter-productive.
>
> Just a short post-script to that.
>
> Looking at the material with which David responded to Neil Rickert
> in the message <808238...@longley.demon.co.uk> posted on Sat, 12
> Aug 95 14:42:23 I found the following, immediately after his quote
> from M Davis(1988)
>
> [DL]
> > With respect to PROBE, it is assumed that all of the relations we
> > can be concerned with exist (ie can be made the value of a bound
> > variable) in our universe of discourse.
>
What we record are class memberships, ie offence type, dates of reports,
place of infractions, type of infraction, date of infraction, date of
birth, prior convictions, date of expected release and so on.
One of the major problems one faces with rDBMSs is that of missing data.
When retrieving data using either SQL or a procedural 4GL one does tend
to assume that each case has the data which one is using in the query.
In reality, this is not always the case. Rather than add 'complications'
to what is being outlined (after all, what's being outlined here are the
basics of using a relational database system and query language).
If the use of relational database technology does take one into higher
order logic (or even modeal logic) I'd appreciate being enlightened as
to how this is so and why it is so.
'It is convenient to assume that the predicates "=", ">", ">="
etc, are builtin (i.e they are part of the formal system we
are defining) and that the expressions using them can be
written in the conventional manner, but of course users
should be able to define their own additional predicates as
well. Indeed, that is the whole point, as we will quickly
see: The fact is, in database terms, a user-defined predicate
is nothing more nor less than a user-defined relation.'
...
'The suppliers relation S, for example, can be regarded as a
predicate with four arguments (S#, SNAME, STATUS, and CITY).
Furthermore the expressions S(S1, Smith,20,London) and
S(S6,Green,45,Rome) represent "instances" or invocations of
that predicate that evaluate to true and false respectively.'
C. J. Date (1992)
Logic Based Database Systems: A Tutorial Part II p.378
Relational Database Writings 1989-1991
The import of this statement marks an important step on the route to
widescale practise of logical and actuarial behaviour management
rather than ad hoc clinicalism which as we have seen in Volume 1, can
only be less precise instances of the former, acceptance of this may
be limited solely by the fact that it is all so relatively new:
'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.
--
David Longley
David Longley
A.Sl...@cs.bham.ac.uk "Aaron Sloman" writes:
<snip>
>
> I think it is clear that Davd is waiting till someone turns up to
> *support* his Probe system, or his behaviourist psychology, or the
> philosophy on which it is based, and in the meantime will either
> ignore all counter arguments or meet them with a combination of
> bluster (like the above) and repetition of what he has said before
> (including repeated injunctions to read what he has said before).
>
> Maybe it is time for all his critics to sit back and wait for
> someone sympathetic to David's philosophy (he has a philosophy,
> though he purports to rubbish philosophy -- when it doesn't agree
> with him), to defend him. Criticising him is not going to get
> anywhere.
>
> Let's suppose David is right and all his critics have either failed
> to read his texts or failed to understand them (a concept a
> behaviourist can't use, I guess), or are too prejudiced to accept
> his arguments. If there's something good in his theories, then
> someone, somewhere, should be prepared to explain why, in a more
> convincing way than David can, using a form of argument that will be
> more acceptable to readers of these groups.
>
> criticism, which now seems to be counter-productive.
>
I find Sloman to be exactly the sort of academic which Skinner had in
mind when he wrote the following.
'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
Let me reiterate a few points which Sloman is incapable of holding on
to (even though at one stage he put up a note to the effect that he
had finally caught on...
First of all, PROBE is based around a commercial DBMS (Scientific
Information Retrieval) along with some add on major statistics packages
and WAN control software. We need distributional data & standard report
generating routines so we can make better sense of what are often fast
moving populations and individuals. We need base rates, and we need to
be able to monitor and evaluate what we do. We need to target high risk
groups and individuals, and to do all that, we need something far more
concrete than the idioms of propositional attitude.
Getting people to give up homely philosophies, ie pet folk notions of
'personality' and how inmates may fit such stereotypes - and replacing
such speculative inferences with observations which truth functionally
tied to specific demands which the envirnment puts on all individuals
is what the system is all about - ie PROfiling BEhaviour.
We have seen (in these threads) what bizzare ascriptions can be cast
in an effort to translate/understand essentially novel/unfamiliar data
into one's repertoire. Charges that the material is 'unclear', 'vague'
or 'obscure' may just mean that it is not readily translatable into
the framework of the recipient. In the case of those who object to the
basic tenets of behaviourism, Quine's philosophy, Skinner etc, this is
not at all surprising.
--
David Longley
Chris Malcolm
>In article <DD43x...@festival.ed.ac.uk>
> c...@castle.ed.ac.uk "Chris Malcolm" writes:
>> In article <807592...@longley.demon.co.uk> Da...@longley.demon.co.uk writes:
>> (and to similar effect in numerous other postings)
>> > ....... read the nine
>> >extracts from 'A System Specification for PROfiling BEhaviour' which have
>> >been made available in sci.cognitive, sci.psychology.theory and also in
>> >comp.ai.philosophy, as 'Fragments of Behaviour: The Extensional Stance',
>> >I'd appreciate constructively critical comments.
>> Which you would be more likely to get if you paid your readers the
>> normal courtesies of making pointed summaries of relevant material,
>> addressing the remarks they make, questions they ask, etc, instead of
>> retreating behind massive quotations and asking them to do all the
>> work for you. This is not how we conduct discussions in these groups.
>> I'm sorry to say I have actually read the nine extracts, but I can't
>> see any reason to spend time criticising it, constructively or
>> otherwise, and I can see good reasons not to bother: others have
>> already well made some of my points, but you have either ignored or
>> dismissed them.
>Oh, rubbish....you've just pasted together a bunch of sippets from other
>people's posts. Who do you think you are kidding?
Hoist with your own petard, David! You have quoted above almost all of
*my* contribution to my posting, and it is (as usual) my own words.
*ALL* of the considerable rest of it was in fact direct quotations from
*your* posting!
>The others you refer to have actually said they haven't bothered to read
>any of it.
You clearly haven't been reading their replies to you. Despite your
insistence that all of your correspondents read carefully of your own
voluminous postings, you seem very careless indeed in reading their
much shorter and more direct replies. And in this reply to me it
seems that you don't even read your *own* postings carefully, since
you failed to recognise what I cited in my posting, and revealingly
characterised your "own" work as:-
>Oh, rubbish....you've just pasted together a bunch of sippets from other
>people's posts. Who do you think you are kidding?
[In order to appreciate fully the wit of Shakespeare's remark, it is
necessary to know that a petard was both a small Heath Robinson kind
of bomb, and a fart.]
There seems no point in continuing to a correspondence with someone
who "writes" so much and reads so little.
David Longley
c...@castle.ed.ac.uk "Chris Malcolm" writes:
>
> >Oh, rubbish....you've just pasted together a bunch of sippets from other
> >people's posts. Who do you think you are kidding?
>
> [In order to appreciate fully the wit of Shakespeare's remark, it is
> necessary to know that a petard was both a small Heath Robinson kind
> of bomb, and a fart.]
>
> There seems no point in continuing to a correspondence with someone
> who "writes" so much and reads so little.
> --
> Chris Malcolm c...@aifh.ed.ac.uk +44 (0)131 650 3085
> Department of Artificial Intelligence, Edinburgh University
> 5 Forrest Hill, Edinburgh, EH1 2QL, UK DoD #205
> "The mind reigns, but does not govern" -- Paul Valery
Can you really blame me for not wanting to read material such as this?
David Longley
Aaron Sloman
[DL]
> >Sloman is unaware of how eclectic he is in his views. If he
> >reckons he can take Quine on he should do so. I asked him to put
> >his first account of the Indeterminacy Thesis by Chris Hookway
> >and I am still waiting to hear what he had to say.
Me too. I guess Chris was too busy to respond to my query.
[DL]
> > I think it is
> >pure arrogance for the man to think he can dismiss such a
> >thoroughly analysed and influential piece of analysis.
I have never respected authority, never will, and I tell all my
students not to either. They have to learn to think for themselves,
and respect only good arguments or clear, checkable evidence. I hope
you will too.
Bye.
Neil Rickert
>In article <40ojqb$e...@percy.cs.bham.ac.uk>
> A.Sl...@cs.bham.ac.uk "Aaron Sloman" writes:
>> I have never respected authority, never will, and I tell all my
>> students not to either. They have to learn to think for themselves,
>> and respect only good arguments or clear, checkable evidence. I hope
>> you will too.
I feel exactly the same way.
>If it *was* just authority I was referring to I wouldn't have been so
>critical.
I think you miss the point, David. It is your incessant quoting
which paints a picture of you relying on authority. If you had been
able to present your own arguments more clearly (with citations where
appropriate), instead of expecting quotes of authority figures to do
it for you, you would have been far more effective.
David Longley
I don't consider the results of empirical analysis or
mathematical logic to be arguments from authority. The fallacy of
argument from authority is nothing to do with what I have done.
All I have done is expanded on the conventional method of the
scientist where s/he cites earlier work as the context for some
further work with a word or too so brief that *only* the
specialist can usually follow. Try reading it that way and all
may become clear.
Argument from authority is when one gives undue weight to the
views of an individual simply because s/he is accomplished in
another field/area. Anyone can see that is *not* my method. If
facts are facts, I see no point in putting other people's work
into my words and risking someone else not understanding on the
basis of alternate exposition on my part.
Either the material is sound or it is not. The fact that I
directly quote rather than indirectly quote should be taken as a
positive stylistic feature not a negative one.
--
David Longley
David Longley
> ric...@cs.niu.edu (Neil Rickert) quotes David Longley
>
> [DL]
> > >Sloman is unaware of how eclectic he is in his views. If he
> > >reckons he can take Quine on he should do so. I asked him to put
> > >his first account of the Indeterminacy Thesis by Chris Hookway
> > >and I am still waiting to hear what he had to say.
>
> Me too. I guess Chris was too busy to respond to my query.
>
> [DL]
> > > I think it is
> > >pure arrogance for the man to think he can dismiss such a
> > >thoroughly analysed and influential piece of analysis.
>
> I have never respected authority, never will, and I tell all my
> students not to either. They have to learn to think for themselves,
> and respect only good arguments or clear, checkable evidence. I hope
> you will too.
>
If it *was* just authority I was referring to I wouldn't have been so
critical. As to my respecting authority, well, there's a sad irony there
Aaron. If you think hard on the context of the subject matter at issue,
the full force of that irony may dawn on you.....
--
David Longley
David Longley
of human cognition is thatit 'goes beyond the information given'.
Taking both the well documented empirical evidence which
substantiates this observation, in conjunction with Quine's
(1956;1960) logical analysis of the propositional attitudes, I have
suggested that Bruner's epithet be turned back on 'Cognitive Science'
as a critique. Whatever the study of cognition is, it is not a
science, and as such, I think Skinner's strongly worded critique of
this recent trend is entirely warranted.
As a simple but powerful illustration of the problem, I have used the
example of 'what is said'. A speaker's words are rarely reported
verbatim, ie directly quoted, when someone 'reports' what someone
has said. Instead, their words are paraphrased, or translated. This
would not be such a problem were it not for the fact that the
statement that 'x said y' purports to be a behavioural
description. The other propositional attitudes are but more complex
versions of the same. Quantification into such contexts can make
little sense.
Such intensional contexts *do* indeed 'go beyond the information
given'. But from the perspective of any science, to do so is anathema,
since one either records ones observations *as* obseervations, or one
acknowledges that one is not reporting one's observations at all.
None of the arguments levelled at this simple, but representative
critique of cognitivism have addressed this essentially Quinean point.
As such I suggest that sceptics give serious time and consideration
to the following in conjunction with the theme which emerges from the
review of research which largely comprises 'Fragments of Behaviour..'
'If we are limning the true and ultimate structure of
reality, the canonical scheme for us is the austere
scheme that knows no quotation but direct quotation and
no propositional attitudes but only the physical
constitution and behavior of organisms.'
W.V.O Quine
Word and Object 1960 p 221
For:
'Once it is shown that a region of discourse is not
extensional, then according to Quine, we have reason to
doubt its claim to describe the structure of reality.'
C. Hookway
Logic: Canonical Notation and Extensionality
Quine (1988)
To me, the language of 'Cognitive Science' *is* as Skinner charged,
tye language of metaphor and rhetoric more fitted to science fiction.
I'm going to take a break from all of this for a while (probably to
several people's relief <g>). However, I would like the above comment
to be given some thought. 'Fragments of Behaviour: The Extensional
Stance' has grown out of an attempt to bring the discipline of
psychology to an area which urgently requires professional services. I
can find no better way of describing the dire situation which applied
psychcologists find rthemseleves in today than the account given by
Robyn Dawes in his recent book 'HOUSE OF CARDS: Psychology and
Psychotherapy Built on Myth', FREE PRESS, 1994.
o o o
From the Introduction:
A BRIEF HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGICAL PRACTICE
Sigmund Freud, who founded psychoanalysis, which led to the expansion
of psychotherapy as a professions saw no reason why his techniques
should be used only by medical doctors. Nevertheless, particularly in
the United States, psychological evaluation and psychotherapy were
considered to be medical specialties, so that prior to World War II
only a few psychologists here and there engaged in what is now termed
practice." After the war many American soldiers returned home with
psychological problems that were considered severe enough to require
hospitalization, but there were not enough psychiatrists to staff the
many Veterans Administration (VA) hospitals. This shortage was
especially acute given government pay rates. The late E. Lowell Kelly
of the University of Michigan proposed a solution: Allow psychologists
to treat hospitalized veterans on a (near)-equal status with
psychiatrists, who retained the ultimate medical responsibility. His
rationale was that psychologists had a qualification that
psychiatrists didn't: extensive research training. Thus, the
psychologists would bring to the settings a competence different from
that of standard medicine, and their unique contribution would be
based on this competence. Practice would follow-not precede-research
findings, even at a time when nonpsychiatric medical practice was less
wedded to such findings than it is today. Kelly was successful in his
lobbying arguments, and the field of clinical psychology was born.
Kelly was elected president of the American Psychological
Association in 1956. As time passed, however, he became increasingly
concerned that his vision had been abandoned, even as, after a period
of ten or so years of steady growth, the profession exploded in
numbers. Graduate programs proliferated, all appealing to a board of
the APA for "accreditation." In 1971 the APA made a momentous
decision. As evidence indicated that training in theory and research
were unrelated to effectiveness as a psychotherapist, the association
recognized a new degree, the doctorate of psychology without research
training. It was abbreviated as a Psy.D., to differentiate it from the
Ph.D., which is technically a "doctorate of philosophy" and which for
years has implied not only relevant research training but the
production of a dissertation that contributes new knowledge to the
field of study. The recognition of the Psy.D. was provisional, pending
an evaluation of the programs and the people graduating from them.
What happened, however, was rapid expansion. The original
program at the University of Illinois no longer exists, but Psy.D.
programs sprang up all over the country, and some of them-such as the
Los Angeles branch of the California School of Professional
Psychology even obtained state and American Psychological Association
accreditation to switch from granting a Psy.D. to granting a Ph.D. The
finding that research training and competence were unrelated to
effectiveness as a therapist received stronger and stronger research
support, so that derogating research based practice-as opposed to the
"art" of psychotherapy-appeared appropriate to the profession. The
fact that the research indicated that one's effectiveness as a
therapist was unrelated to any professional training was ignored,
especially when the question of whether to allow greater autonomy and
status for the allied profession of psychiatric social work arose.
People with Psy.D.'s became equal to those with Ph.D<'s within the
profession through a phrase in most state licensing laws that required
a Ph.D. from a program accredited by the APA "or equivalent training."
The "fights with the American Medical Association and the American
Psychiatric Association to allow psychologists to be primary providers
of mental health services was largely successful, perhaps in part by
dint of sheer numbers. The original view that recipients of Psy.D.'s
and now Ph.D.'s from professional schools were to function primarily
as therapists was lost. These recipients now have equal impact with
research-trained Ph.D.'s in influencing professional and public
policy.
Evolution continued along the same lines. The number of
doctoral programs in clinical, counselling, and school psychology
increased from about 250 in 1975 to almost 350 in 1989; by 1979,
about 25 percent of all doctorates awarded in clinical psychology were
Psy.D.'s or Ph.D. s from professional schools, and that percentage
increased to 39 percent in 1987. Starting in 1972, more degrees were
awarded in the health services provider" area than in the area of
academic research, and by 1985 the ratio was almost three to one.'
During the expansion, the proportion of degrees in clinical,
counselling, and school psychology granted by the institutions that a
National Research Institute committee rated in the top 25 percent of
graduate programs shrank from 37.5 percent in 1973 to 23.2 percent m
1983; since this shrinkage was a consistent 1.4 percent per year
unrelated to time, we can make a reasonable extrapolation to 13.2
percent in I99n. No exact figures are available, although Georgine M.
Plon of Vanderbilt University-who has worked on many of the committees
whose reports are cited here-gives a more optimistic estimate of about
18-19% in 1987. During that expansion, the rigor of the scientific
training of practicing psychologists diminished. A person obtaining an
advanced degree from an institution of lesser status does not
necessarily receive poorer scientific training than one graduating
from a place of higher status, or understand the scientific
basis of psychology less well; there is a great deal of overlap
in actual training and understanding. Nevertheless, proportions of
psychology graduates from institutions of different status can be
used as an indicator of quality and rigor of training. The
figures, therefore, support the conclusions of Lee Sechrest of the
University of Arizona, former head of its department, and a former
president of the APA's division of clinical psychology:
Question: You have concerns about where psychology is headed.
And yet every year thousands more psychologists are produced
With [graduate degrees], most in applied areas.
Answer: One of the fundamental problems is that I don't think
we are graduating thousands of psychologists. We are
graduating thousands and thousands of practitioners who are
peripherally acquainted with the discipline of psychology.
As we will see in Chapter 2, such peripheral acquaintance need
not make for poor therapists. When, however, mental health
practitioners in psychology present themselves as experts in legal
proceedings, or in deciding whether child abuse actually occurred, or
as in advising people about how to live, such peripheral acquaintance
is a severe problem. The public trusts such experts on the assumption
that they are applying valid psychological principles. But when the
experts aren't even aware of these principles, their pronouncements
are unsupported.
I know of no comparable changes in the quality of training for
psychiatrists. Requirements of passing calculus, physics, biology, and
organic chemistry for entrance to medical school have remained
constant, however, and the first two years at most medical schools
retain a highly academic ("scientific") curriculum. As one
psychiatrist friend argues, biochemistry may not be nearly as
important to psychiatric work as statistics would be, and much of the
course work psychiatrists are required to take appears to be little
more than drudgery. Such drudgery does, however, assure that the
psychiatrists will have the intelligence and perseverance to succeed
at these tough tasks. The topics they master may not be directly
relevant to practice, but the qualities a person needs to master them
may well be. Most of the major higher status graduate schools in
psychology also require evidence of these qualities for admission, and
their programs are intellectually demanding for students who intend to
become professionals as well as for those who intend to enter
research. Moreover, these programs emphasize an approach to practice
based on what is known scientifically.
Unfortunately, the lower status schools - as a group - do not
emphasize research, and many of these professional schools select and
train mainly on the basis of impressions of students' personal
qualities. Graduates can emerge with little scientific training beyond
a year's perfunctory course in statistics, centered mainly on how to
enter data into a "canned" computer program. The APA has checklist
requirements for a program's accreditation, but satisfying such a list
is a far cry from providing rigorous training. It is possible to argue
that the individual is so complex, and human problems are so
ineffable, and so on, that what therapists do is not amenable to
scientific understanding - so that scientific understanding and
training are irrelevant. But then there would be no justification for
recognizing some people rather than others as having scientific
expertise in the mental health professions, according them social
status and pay on the basis of their purported application of
scientific principles, or - most important paying more attention to
what they say than to what anyone else says. There had been warnings
of this situation. As far back as 1947, when the VA programs were just
beginning to function, an APA committee on recommended training
programs in clinical psychology wrote:
It is important that this interest in research on the part of
psychology continue, for as one surveys the scene the
likelihood that the major burden of research will fall on the
psychologist becomes clearer. If he [sic] permits himself to
be drawn off into private therapeutlc practice as has the
psychiatrist, or into institutional therapeutic work as has
the social worker, the outlook for research is dim In a field
where the need is enormous. As had already been indicated, if
a social need for therapy exists, then the need for research
is even greater. The fact that there is not equal pressure
for the latter 15 mainly due to the excusable but still
short-sighted outlook of the public. The universities, with
their more far-sighted orientation have a serious
responsibility to develop research interests and abilities in
the clinical psychologists they train. The interest should be
on research on the laws of human behavior primarily and on
technical devices and therapy secondarily. (italics added)
WHY RESEARCH AND RESEARCH TRAINING ARE SO IMPORTANT
One reason research training is so essential is that we do not know a
great deal about the development and alleviation of emotional
distress. Even in fields where we do know a great deal, research is
essential to improving service. In gene therapy, for example, the
noted researcher W. French Anderson urges caution in medical
treatment: Medicine is an inexact science; we still understand very
little about how the human body works. Well-intentioned efforts at
treatment with standard therapeutics can produce unexpected problems
months or years later. Anderson works, as do others in his field,
with extreme caution and careful analysis of what is happening to
patients undergoing gene therapy. But in the domain of psychological
treatment we understand even less, and there are few "standard
treatments," apart from drug therapy and social learning-oriented
behavior modification.
It is possible to argue that since not much is known,
evaluating psychological treatment should be equally vague and
uncritical (a type of "characteristic matching," by which for years
the yellowness of a root of a plant was interpreted as indicating that
it might be beneficial in alleviating jaundiced). A more justifiable
argument is that the less we know, the more scrupulous and careful we
should be in applying and monitoring what we think we do know. That
requires a knowledge of scientific methodology and a demand that
conclusions rise to the challenge "show me"-a minimal requirement of
science. One standard reply to this argument is to emphasize the need
for mental health treatment, which leads to an implied ethic that "we
(the intuitive "experts") must do something." But the very real need
does not justify the pretence that the "something" we might wish to
do often, really "anything"-is necessarily valid or helpful, in the
absence of evidence that it is in fact valid and helpful.
A second reason that research training is essential is that it
is easy for people-everyone, not just therapists-to fool themselves
into believing that they have great insight into the causes and
alleviation of emotional distress. We believe that if we talk to
people and get to know them "as individuals," we can understand them
better than by using broad general principles and seeing how they
should be applied. (Note that the latter is exactly the course pursued
in general medicine, and there is empirical evidence that experts in
physics and engineering pursue it as well.28) But the evidence
indicates that this individualized understanding is often illusory.
There is an apparent contradiction because in fact therapists who
claim to have such individualized knowledge actually do help their
clients. The contradiction is resolved by noting that the very same
evidence that indicates that "insight" psychotherapy is effective does
not reveal why it is effective; thus, somewhat paradoxically, the
success of verbal therapy may not rely on the therapist's
understanding of the client.
A third reason is that a commitment to rationality and
scientific knowledge constrains the poorly trained and hence
unskeptical professional from making extreme claims. Some of these
claims are sheer nonsense-for example, a claim to be able to know what
someone was thinking when she committed suicide, or to be able to tell
within ten minutes whether someone has been sexually abused as a child
on the basis of that person's general demeanor. Such claims are often
believed. The Harvard professor who stated that he knew in his mind
what Teresa Jackson's daughter was thinking in her mind when she
committed suicide was allowed to testify as an expert in the Teresa
Jackson child abuse trial, and Teresa Jackson was convicted. Many
other mental health professionals claiming expertise are able-free of
the constraints that an understanding of the evidence should provide-
to testify whether a person was or was not "insane" during the
commitment of a crime, not "insane" in the ordinary social sense of
the term, which courts are as capable of judging as is anyone else,
but in some supposedly scientific sense of the term. Moreover, the
claims are often believed by the general public-often to the detriment
of all involved. For example, the belief that schizophrenia and autism
are due to a "schizophrenogenic" ("or iceberg") mother, who was
unwilling to or incapable of providing the afflicted child with the
affection required for normal development, has caused untold misery
among the families of such disturbed children. How did that belief
come about? From comical Judgment,'' which was accepted because it is
consistent with our Everyday intuitions." (Chapter 2 will detail the
even more disturbing example of lobotomy as a "cure" for
schizophrenia.)
One particularly pernicious result of the deemphasis on
research has been a series of fads in the area of mental health. The
most prevalent one as this book is written is an epidemic of
diagnosing people as suffering from multiple personality disorder.
This condition supposedly results from repressed child sexual abuse,
or even from being raised by parents who practiced satanism-although
belief in the existence or satanic cults (as opposed to belief in the
KKK or the mafia) is based purely on "aided memories" of people in
therapy or "support groups." (A well-publicized story of a satanic
cult practice in Texas that led to ten murders was later retracted. It
was a drug ring. )
To be sure, professional psychologists still claim that their
practice is research based, whether or not it is in fact. In 1988,
when the then president of the APA was facing a revolt of research-
oriented psychologists who threatened to form their own, research-
based organization, he said "Our scientific base is what sets us
apart from the social workers, the counselors, and the Gypsies." And
later: "The scientists are the jewels in our crown, and they will
continue to be. So we're not going to give them up."
CURRENT BUT UNJUSTIFIED SUCCESS
Having separated itself so far from its research base, how did
professional psychology survive? One answer is through lobbying state
and national governments for money and privilege. A great deal of
money has been put into lobbying with positive results, which can be
assessed by reading even randomly chosen issues of the APA Executive
News bulletin or the State Issues Forum. Also, positive feedback
arises from growth itself-just as the initial growth of VHS
recordings led people to buy more VHS sets than Beta sets, which
stimulated the growth of VHS recordings, and so on-even though the
Beta technology may have been superior. Moreover, salaries of
professional psychologists are high, at least relative to salaries of
research and academic psychologists. Finally, there is an intrinsic
appeal to college seniors in doing "real clinical work" with "real
people" after years of academic "preparation for life."
All these factors alone, however, cannot account for the
successful growth of professional psychology. For example, lobbying
pure and simple may have an effect when the numbers of people a lobby
group represents is large relative to the individual legislator's
entire constituency, or are "single-issue" oriented. But a hundred
thousand professional psychologists and allied practitioners do not
constitute such a group; they are geographically diffuse and hardly
single-issue people.
Other lobbyists succeed by framing their issue in ways
compatible with legislators' views of the world.33 That is exactly
what may account for the APA's lobbying success. Acceptance of what
"authorities" claim about their own expertise is not a pathological
syndrome, except at its extremes. Belief in authorities who really
understand human life is therefore natural to us all. Haven't I myself
cited Kelly and Sechrest as authorities? Moreover, as we will see in
Chapter 7, authorities claim to be able to "explain" the individual
life course, an ability that we all believe we have; yet research
findings show that neither the authorities nor the rest of us can do
this well, which may surprise the readers of the New York Review of
Books as much as readers of People magazine. An observer cannot
explain "why" people do what they do, and people themselves are often
aware only of their after-the-fact rationalizations; few take careful
notes based on "think aloud ruminations at the time they make major
decisions in their lives, and even if they did, many important factors
influencing their behavior would not be included.
More specifically, professional psychologists and other mental
health professionals employing the same procedures make the same
attribution errors" in their explanations that we all tend to
make overemphasizing the role of personality as opposed to
situational factors in influencing the behavior of others, while
simultaneously overemphasizing situational factors as opposed to
personality in influencing our own behavior. We readily believe
that when other people behave in ways we don't like, it's because
they are "sick," but that when we behave in ways we don't like, it's
due to the lousy home environment in which we were raised. That leads
to the final impact of the claims of professional psychologists. They
end up agreeing with the rest of us! Such agreement, of course,
implies that they agree with each other as well, and then they
can cite each other as additional authority figures.
FORENSIC PSYCHOLOGY WITH "PORTRAITS"
Let me illustrate these problems by an analysis of the presidential
speech to the American Psychological Association at its 1990
convention. The president who made it is a leading forensic
psychologist. Although his presidential address was not delivered
until 1990, he was the president who preceded the one who referred to
the "jewel in the crown. His speech is a defense of psychological
assessment in court settings. He makes many good points at the
beginning when he discusses the presentation of results from well-
standardized and validated tests. For example, the highest subtest
score on an overall IQ test of someone subsequently brain-damaged
cannot be used as an index of how well that person functioned prior to
the damage. (Perfectly normal people as well will have some subtest
scores higher than others, so that their highest score cannot be taken
as a measure of their overall IQ. which is assessed by their average
score.) He also stresses the importance of the reliabilities and
validities (predictive accuracies) of the measures used.
Toward the end of the speech, however, the president pushes
his own use of what he terms psychological portraits in court
settings, by which he means detailed descriptions of a person's
psychological functioning. First, he points out that the research
evidence evaluating categorical judgments of professional clinicians
yields negative results: "Research published much earlier showed that
the type of one- or two word differential diagnosis,
characterizations, and predictions then extant were judged to be
lacking in validity (Meehl, 1954, 1956, 1957). Reviews of more current
studies (Dawes, Faust and Meehl, 1989), including an excellent recent
update of the use of one's head instead of formulas (Kleinmuntz,
1990), reaffirm that conclusion. He then dismisses such judgments in
favor of what he terms "valid psychological assessment (portrait)
findings."
His evidence for their validity is two extreme cases. One is
of a twenty-one year-old woman who scored at the ninety-eighth
percentile in aptitude tests and was Phi Beta Kappa in college. She
subsequently suffered a serious head injury in an automobile accident
and thereafter tested in the mentally defective range (third
percentile) on intelligence tests. The other case he cites is of a man
whose intellectual abilities were totally unchanged after exposure to
neurotoxins in a workplace. (Not surprisingly, everyone involved
agreed with the president's expert professional testimony that the
first person had suffered extensive impairment as the result of brain
damage while the second hadn't.) Using these extreme instances, he
goes on to conclude that: "when such assessment is done well, it is
patently obvious to all involved (i.e., juries, judges, and attorneys
for both plaintiff and defense) that what such a psychologist-expert-
witness concluded was valid (true) within the reasonable degree of
certainty required in such litigation" (italics in the original).
Actually, however, he has made the reverse argument. Because it is
patently obvious, it must be true. In other words, his claim that his
judgment is valid is supported by the fact that everyone agrees with
it, that is, by the lack of a need for his judgment-because the same
judgment can be made without him. He misses the point that valid
expert testimony in a court should be about matters that untrained
judges and juries cannot evaluate without assistance.
He further supports his assertions by invoking social approval
of such expert testimony: "in this regard, psychology is little
different from medicine, engineering, or other professions. That is,
professions in which practitioners (artisans) are judged by society to
be valid (usable) for many services, despite the absence of the
necessary research, primarily on the basis that common experience (of
legislators, professional peers, patients, clients, and others)
suggests some utility from their services."
He has it backward. We trust engineers because we trust
engineering and believe that engineers are trained to apply valid
principles of engineering; moreover, we have evidence every day that
these principles are valid when we observe airplanes flying. We trust
doctors because we trust modern medicine, and we have evidence that it
works when antibiotics and operations cure people. We do not, or at
least should not, believe in the validity of a field as the result of
first trusting a practitioner of it-and then concluding that "if she
believes in it, it must be valid." There is enough history of wrongly
trusting "professions" (like astrology, and the racial analyses of
Nazi "scientists") that mere trust is not evidence of validity. An
enlightened view demands a basis for trust. This president supplies
none.
Most distressing of all, however, the president dismisses
findings from research that has actually been conducted, and instead
cites mere hypothetical findings from research that has yet to be
conducted. As he himself points out, the research doesn't support his
assertions: They [Faust and Ziskin] correctly quote my belief that
currently there is no body of research that indicates that assessment
across the whole domain is valid or other than clinical art." But he
continues: It is my hope that empirical research on such state-of-the-
art psychological assessment will soon be undertaken. When it is, I
firmly believe that research will reveal that acceptable levels of
validity do now exist for these modern comprehensive psychological
assessments and that it will serve as the requisite empirical basis
for consensual agreement regarding the validity of such expert
opinions currently being reached by attorneys for both the plaintiff
and defendant for that subset of cases that I know first hand are
being settled without going to court."
But suppose his hope is not realized, and future research
either is not done or does not reveal acceptable levels of validity?
Moreover,there is little reason to believe that an overall judgment
will have much validity when the components on which it is based have
none, which in this context even the speaker himself admits. Then
what? Are he and his colleagues to return to all the courts in which
they have testified, apologize, and request new hearings for those
involved? This approach to practice embraces a principle that I find
unacceptable: Earn now, learn later-if at all. Compare this philosophy
with the philosophy of extreme caution expressed by W. French
Anderson, in the context of gene therapy about which a lot more is
known already.
But the president presents the "portraits" anyway.
Professional psychologists and other mental health experts are often
willing to testify, and they have a profound impact on others' lives
in the absence of any evidence that what they do is valid. Their
supportive evidence is simply hypothesized, while negative evidence
that has actually been collected is ignored. This form of reasoning
can be termed arguing from a vacuum, because what is purported to be
true is supported not by direct evidence but by attacking an
alternative possibility. As we will see throughout this book, mental
health professionals repeatedly argue from a vacuum to justify their
practices.
The American people certainly deserve to have professional
mental health experts in the court system only after evidence of their
accuracy has been supplied, not before. We should demand more
convincing arguments than this APA president presents. Lacking such
evidence, he and his colleagues should be thrown out of court. But
their licensing has allowed them in court, and the justification for
their presence is based on exactly the type of arguments he presents.
Unfortunately, these arguments are persuasive to many people, even
though careful examination shows them to imply evidence that simply
doesn't exist-the vacuum. They appeal to our uncritical intuitions.
They sell. It is my hope that this book will convince the reader not
to buy them.
BUT THE SCIENCE EXISTS, ELSEWHERE
The fact that the president cannot point to studies supporting his
position does not imply that research psychologists have not conducted
literally thousands of studies that have led to a "science of
psychology." First, much progress in psychological knowledge has been
in the areas or physiology, perception, thinking, judgment, behavioral
control, and social beliefs, attitudes, and interactions.4l
Achievements are not limited to theoretical understanding but have
applied uses as well. Many of these uses are so common that we do not
even think of them as involving "social science": aptitude tests and
public opinion polling are examples. These advancements may not have
uniformly good consequences, but neither do those in other sciences,
like nuclear bombs and medical devices that promote overpopulation and
prolong fife In a vegetative state or one of unrelenting and extreme
pain. Aptitude tests that predict success in a racist environment may
be used for racist selection to that environment; public opinion polls
that accurately reflect voter sentiment may lead politicians to become
subservient to that sentiment rather than do what they believe is
right or strive to change that sentiment in a desirable direction.
Nevertheless, aptitude tests do predict, opinion polls do reflect
public sentiment, of course, on a statistical rather than a certain
basis.
In psychology, however, knowledge that does cumulate,
cumulates slowly. We do know some things about some conditions. We
know that phobias and specific anxieties are not simply symptoms of a
' deeper" disturbance, and hence that they can be addressed directly
through behavioral means without the emergence of new symptoms. We
know there is a strong genetic component in schizophrenia and
alcoholism. The general wisdom based on actual scientific studies is
that mild or moderate depression is best treated by a combination of
behavioral, cognitive and drug approaches, although evidence is
accumulating that cognitive styles of blaming oneself for failure and
crediting "luck" for success play a vital role in depression. (We
cannot be yet certain, however, that helping people to get over
depressive symptoms as quickly as possible will be beneficial in the
long term, in part because judgments of what is valuable or beneficial
in life cannot be made on the basis of the standard categories for
mental health or Illness.)
Psychology has also developed a number of effective
measurement devices and ways to predict future behavior. These devices
are of the type that can be administered without much training,
however, and do not require doctoral-level skill to interpret.
Moreover, the best predictors are made on the basis of past overt
behavior. It's not that people don't change-they do, sometimes
profoundly. Rather, no personal skill has yet been developed-or
assessment instrument devised-that allows us to predict who will
change, when, and how.
Ironically, the reasons for this invalidity may be found in
another area of psychological research-in human judgment and decision
making. That area investigates people's systematic biases in making
judgments and reaching decisions. (These biases are covered in
Chapters 3 and 4 of this book.) Such biases are particularly strong
either when judgments are made in the absence of a well-validated
scientific theory or when they are evaluated without systematic
feedback about how good they are. Unfortunately both those conditions
characterize the art of clinical prediction in professional
psychology. These biases lead not only to invalid judgments of the
type the APA president claims to be invalid but to an inference
that the type of "portrait" judgments he espouses will be
invalid as well. One particular problem stems from reliance on
retrospective memory in the self-evaluation of judgmental accuracy
when no careful records are kept or no scientific comparisons made.
Retrospective memory is not only kind but also "makes sense;; out
Of both the past itself, for example, that if one is depressed,
one's parents have been aloof, uncaring, and demanding, and our
thoughts about past events and predictions made from them, for
example, that "I knew it would happen all along"-even when past
evidence indicates a contrary prediction was made.48 Consequently, it
systematically distorts the past and our past judgments in a way that
makes the course of events appear to have been predictable and our
judgments appear to have been good. The research supporting this
generalization is so strong that editors of the National
Academy of Sciences reports summarizing advances in psychology
(see note 41) specifically exclude studies and "evidence" based on
retrospective memory as providing nothing of scientific value.
It is precisely the biased judgments associated with lack of a
well validated theory, lack of systematic feedback, and reliance on
retrospective memory that leads to what David Faust, himself a
clinical psychologist, terms "the delusions of clinical psychology.'
STATISTICAL GENERALIZATION IN PSYCHOLOGICAL STUDIES
Some 'scientific" studies in the mental health area involve
experimental comparisons (see Chapter 2). Others are "correlational"
studies inn which Enactors vary and investigators examine the
relationships between them. The critical difference between
experimental and correlatlonal studies is that in the former the
investigator manipulates conditions, In as systematic a manner as
possible, and observes what happens as a result-while in the latter
the investigator allows conditions and results to vary naturally. Both
types have passed the scrutiny of Journal reviewers, whose rate of
rejecting articles for publication generally ranges from 60 percent to
over 90 percent.
All these studies have another characteristic in common: They
report statistically stable trends and influences. None report results
whose level of certitude approaches that of results in what people
generally regard as established science. In the established science of
medicine, for example, we have a fairly certain idea of what will
happen if a cancer goes untreated, if an appendix bursts, or if an HIV
infection establishes itself in the bloodstream. Such knowledge is
probabilistic only in the sense that there will be a few exceptions-an
occasional spontaneous remission of a well-diagnosed cancer, a rare
benign response to peritonitis when a sac forms immediately around the
infection, or an extremely slow progression from HIV infection to
AIDS. The treatment of such conditions is less certain than the
diagnosls-although its efficacy can be monitored in a way that
provides fairly certain knowledge of what is happening, if not of the
ultimate longevity of the patient. Other less certain knowledge lies
"on the frontiers" of medicine. Similarly, we know enough about
physics, astronomy and engineering to have experienced only two
disasters in our manned space programs, although we do not know enough
to be at all certain of the origins of the universe, a subject of
much debate.
In psychology, however, we do not have this base of fairly
certain knowledge. Even when we are fairly certain of a principle, its
application remains probabilistic. Moreover, psychological principles
themselves are established on a probabilistic basis. A cursory
scanning of a successful empirical investigation indicates that it
establishes at best only a reliable or "significant' statistical
trend. A more careful reading indicates that this trend is established
in a context of a great deal of variability. Reliability," in
psychology, means simply that we have good statistical reasons to
believe this trend would be replicated if a similar experimental study
or observational investigation were conducted m a context not too
different from the study that originally established the trend.
"Significant" means simply that we have reason to believe that the
trend did not arise on a chance basis. (Ironically, the way we
establish "significance" is to assume that only chance variation is
operating, then prove that under those circumstances it iS unlikely
that we would have obtained a result as strong as the one we actually
obtained. A phrase like "significant at the 1 in 1000 level means
simply that if the results were due to random processes, we would
obtain a result as strong as the one we actually obtained only one
time in a thousand.)
A further analysis of scientific studies of mental health
practice indicates that there is always more unexplained variation in
the results than there is variation that can be explained by the trend
we believe the study has supported. Thus, when we assert that there IS
genetic influence in certain mental disorders, the basis of our
assertion is that we can predict these disorders on the basis of
genetic factors more reliably than we could on the basis of chance
fluctuation.. For example, studies find that the incidence of
alcoholism IS related to the alcoholism of the biological parents of
children who have been adopted and is unrelated to the alcoholism of
the children s adoptive parents. That does not mean that a child with
an alcoholic biological parent, or even two, is more likely than not
to become an alcoholic. Far from it-most children of alcoholic
biological parents do not become alcoholics themselves. The study's
conclusions mean simply that there's a trend, involving genetic
constitution. Even in the face of well-established statistical trends,
a child of alcoholic biological parents is most likely to turn out
normal. The same result is found for children of schizophrenic
parents, even though they are more likely to become schizophrenic than
are people whose parents are not schizophrenic. In this context of
variability (technically termed unexplained variance"), about the
closest we can come to making a predlction that a particular person
will have a particular disorder is that identical twins of a
schizophrenic individual have about a 50 percent chance of suffering
from schizophrenia themselves.
The same principle of finding more unexplained variability than
variability explained by an established trend also characterizes
studies of the alleviation of emotional distress. We just don't know
all that much about the causes of emotional distress, which is not to
say that if we stick with what we do know, we cannot help people.
When, for example, we find a trend that behavioral approaches are
better at helping people overcome phobias than psychoanalytic ones,
someone who is phobic would be well advised to try behavioral rather
than psychoanalytic therapy-even though the differences in success
rate are not great, and a particular individual might actually be
better off with psychoanalysis. (Knowing which people would be better
off with psychoanalysis would require further research-which might or
might not yield positive results.) This unexplained variability is
preponderant, and it IS Important to understand its existence. It is,
in fact, the basis for a common argument from a vacuum that some
psychologists make: Because the research results indicate a great deal
of uncertainty about what to do, my expert judgment can do better in
prescribing treatment than these results." This judgment is then
claimed to have "arisen from experience, without any evidence that the
judgment yields more certainty than careful studies indicate is there.
(In fact, such judgments that are opposed to research findings do
worse; see Chapter 3).
The statistical nature of generalizations in psychology and
other social sciences can be masked by study conclusions indicating
high reliability and significance. Both these factors are, however, a
joint function of the effect size and the sample size in a given
study.50 Consider a hypothetical medical finding, based on a study of
two samples of 10,000 people, that those who eat bacon at least once
every two weeks have twice the rate of some dire consequence than do
those who don't eat bacon-and that this finding is "highly
significant. First, we don't know whether the two rates themselves are
quite high or quite low in proportion to the general population, a
result that is absolutely crucial to our decision about whether to
enjoy eating bacon. Even if the rates are presented, however, they
might be quite inconsequential for our decision making. For example, 8
dire consequences in the bacon-eating group (for a rate of 8/10,000
=.0008) versus 2 in the other group (for a rate of 2/10,000 = .0002)
would yield 2 ratio of 4 to l, a result or boardline significance. But
we might not care much about a rate of .0008. (We have a 1-in-50,000
chance of being seriously injured or killed every time we go on an
automobile trip.) On the other hand, if the number of dire
consequences were 10,000 (for a rate of 1.0) in the bacon-eating group
and 2,r00 (for a rate of .25) in the other, we might care a great deal
about.
It is important to keep in mind that even effects that are
proudly reclaimed to be "highly significant" may be slight. It is
especially Important to keep that in mind when psychologists and their
publicists tout results that have serious implications about life and
desirable ways of living. One researcher group states that "it is
generally accepted that a positive view of the self and positive mood
state are necessary or adaptation and for persistence toward goals."52
This statement iS based on results of multiple studies that indicate a
positive statistical relationship. But those findings do not imply
that no one adapts, persists, or succeeds without being positive; some
people may actually succeed because they believe that whatever they
are trying to achieve IS extremely valuable, or because they believe
that putting forth the effort is the "right thing to do" or the only
thing to do. (The term necessary in the foregoing quote is
unfortunate, in my view.) In fact, the authors of this study
themselves, in another section of the same paper, discuss the effects
of unanticipated success, which would be almost impossible if the
former statement were interpreted to mean that feeling positive about
an endeavor is absolutely necessary for its success.
Given all the variability in "the science of mental health and
illness," responsible assertions must be of a ceteris paribus nature.
Despite claims that pervade the popular media, for example, there IS
absolutely no scientific evidence that feeling good about oneself iS a
necessary condition for engaging in desirable behavior. Nor is there
any evidence that feeling bad about oneself is necessary for engaging
in undesirable behavior. There is a statistical correlation-that s
all. But we are not even sure how to interpret that correlation. The
behavior might lead to the feelings, or vice versa; or the influence
behavior has on feelings might explain the whole correlation.
Moreover, the correlation could change as people's beliefs and
attitudes change, or even as their beliefs about how to interpret the
same correlation change.
More important, the uncertainty of knowledge and its
application in the mental health area means that responsible
professionals should practice with a cautious, open, and questioning
attitude. "Knowing" with in ten minutes from the way a client walks
that she was an incest victim as a child can easily lead a
psychologist to ask questions that Suggest to her that she must have
been a victim. This suggestion in turn can lead the client to
reinterpret inaccurately recalled instances of benign behavior toward
her as indicative of abuse, which can lead her to conclude that abuse
occurred when it didn't-perhaps based on a fully reconstructed memory
of such abuse. That belief can lead the client to be alienated from
her family and to adopt a stance of incompetence in the face of her
own "recalled" childhood traumas. The resulting distress reinforces
the therapist's conclusion that the client as suffered greatly from
her childhood trauma, which she must now five through-occasionally
with more improbable and bizarre details added-before she can function
as an adult. "Authoritative" beliefs and statements about particular
individuals are inappropriate and-because they are so often wrong-can
be harmful. Those who seek the services of psychologists should be
wary of any professionals who do not proceed cautiously.
Experts in court in particular should point out the
statistical nature of psychological generalizations rather than paint
a "portrait" of an individual or make causal statements about what led
to what in an individuals life. Such causal statements are particularly
common in civil suits, because the courts often demand proof of
psychological harm. Psychological harm may be every bit as devastating
as physical harm, but the question is how to establish it. To assess
physical harm, we have well-validated theories about how the
individual human body works and techniques for establishing
malfunction-such as Xrays and blood tests-that transcend the self-
report and behavior of victims. In contrast, to assess psychological
harm, the evidence consists of the behavior and self-report of the
victim, and the intuitive art of the examining psychologist or
psychiatrist.
Does that mean we cannot assess psychological harm, even if it
is considerable? No. In civil suits concerning exposure to harmful
substances, we use statistical analyses to establish that the
substances caused harm. We make an inference from the aggregate, such
as an increase in the cancer rate of those exposed, to the individual,
that is, to his or her cancer. In litigation about such exposure no
responsible expert witness would claim to be able to tell exactly what
led the particular victims cancer to develop, or why it developed in
one area of the body rather than another. Rather, he or she would
testify based on these inferences from the aggregate. Similarly, a
responsible psychologist or psychiatrist could cite statistical
knowledge-saying "in general . . .- and let the court apply the same
rules for determining harm that it does in medical areas where the
evidence is statistical rather than concrete.
Unfortunately, as indicated by the forensic psychologist's
presidential address, that type of testimony is not what courts accept
from professional psychologists, and it is not what professional
psychologists present. Instead, a psychologist will most likely
present a mythic statement about what caused what for the individual
being evaluated, which will often be disputed by a professional
psychologist on the other side. If the expert is not very persuasive
in court, or if the opposition's expert is more persuasive, then what?
Since the judgment is at best dubious in the first place, style of
presentation may become of utmost importance.
ADVICE ABOUT HOW TO LIVE
Professional psychologists not only claim to have expertise they don't
have, they claim to have insight into now people should think, feel,
and behave. For example, the APA president who referred to the "jewel
in the crown" stated in the fall of 1988, "We are all teachers. I
think my clients see me as primarily a teacher. We have taught the
whole culture. We didn't invent the woman's movement, but we have been
among its most ardent supporters. I would like to get away from the
medical model entirely. Our job is to bring knowledge to the world."54
We can well ask what it is that professional psychologists have to
teach. Without the "medical model," with its presumed expertise, what
is left in mental health? The answer might be scientific knowledge.
But the practice of professional psychologists is often not based on
scientific knowledge, in fact flies in the face of such knowledge.
What then do psychologists have to teach?
The answer is a belief system. Under the guise of advancing
"positive" mental health-which certainly sounds fine and is
consequently hard to oppose-the profession of psychology has
propounded a simplistic philosophy of life. This philosophy maintains
that the purpose of life is to maximize one's mental health, which is
dependent wholly on self-esteem. Some psychologists, like Shelley
Taylor, have "discovered" that self-esteem is more important even than
realism. "Every theory of mental health" she asserts, "considers a
positive self-concept to be the cornerstone of a healthy ego." If the
point of life is to maximize self-esteem, it follows that a positive
self-concept is everything.
Thus, love, lust, friendship, doing the "right thing," accomplishment
leaving the world a little better or worse place than one found it,
even behavior itself are all of importance only insofar as they impact
mental health, which equals self-esteem. A wonderful person who does
not happen to think particularly well of herself or himself (for
whatever reason, such as a religiously based modesty or an absence of
pride) is a failure. A conceited ass, in contrast, has good mental
health. (The claim is made that such a person must be lacking in
self esteem somewhere-or there would be no need to be a conceited ass.
Where that lack lies, however, is not specified. Once again, the
argument from a vacuum.)
Part II of this book, which discusses the implications of this
unidimenslonal view of life, is a bit speculative. The question of how
much professional psychologists have to teach the rest of the
population, outside the medical model" domain, is basically one of
value. While I personally do not accept the positivistic dichotomy of
"fact" versus value as absolute, it is nevertheless clear (to me,
anyway) that a clinical view of life-even one that addresses the
causes of psychological distress-cannot lead to conclusions about what
constitutes a good life, any more than the fact that someone lived to
age ninety five without a single physical problem prior to a thirty-
second heart attack implies that this person led a fulfilling or good
life. Did Abraham Lincoln or Winston Churchill always think well of
themselves. Not all psychological suffering is necessarily bad. People
used to believe that "spiritual crises" could lead to greater
understanding and maturity. A value-laden view, however, is simply
defined out of existence by the teacher who advises us to do whatever
is possible to maximize our mental health.
Unfortunately, this "maximize mental health" view also has
some very negative impacts, both direct and indirect. The
psychological analysis of the individual life-at least as it is
currently practiced often misses what is important in that life. Other
qualities may be more important than freedom from conflict, distress,
or self-doubt-or even from a well-recognized symptom of mental
illness. Yet today "ill" people are treated with a paternalistic
contempt, to the point that when such a person leads a remarkable
life-as did Bertha Pappenheim who was Joseph Breuer's and Sigmund
Freud's patient Anna O.'-all they did that is admirable is explained,
or rather explained away, in terms of their illness or their
adaptation to the illness. "Mental illness is just like any other
illness," like an ulcer, perhaps, but someone labeled as mentally ill
is best advised not to tell others because such "illness" carries a
stigma. In fact, a plethora of mental health "experts" have to a large
extent convinced the public that whether or not one is emotionally
distressed can actually define whether or not one is a good person or
is leading a desirable life.
Psychologists' contempt for the individual autonomy of their
own clients can also be seen in their explanations of the lives of
everyone else. They explain social problems in psychological terms,
often to the detriment of solving or ameliorating them; it is the poor
self-image of the impoverished American child that leads to a lack of
academic skills, we are told, not the fact that these skills are
taught for roughly half the number of hours per year in American
schools than they are taught in a country such as Japan. Mental
illness is used to explain the problem of impoverished and homeless
Americans, even though the broadest possible definition of mental
illness would classify at most only one-third of them as "mentally
ill.
One result of the prevalence of these unwarranted assertions and
theorizing has been to weaken people's trust in their own
autonomy, in their own abilities to deal with the problems they
confront In life. Once such belief is weakened, it is necessary to
provide people with compensation in some way. One form of compensation
is to encourage them to have positive illusions to enhance their self-
esteem (see Chapter 9). Without such illusions, people are supposedly
so childlike that they could not function in the face of the
uncertainties of the world (again, the derogation of autonomy). l will
propose at the end of this book (Chapter 10) that we are actually a
lot freer than the pronouncements of professional psychologists would
have us believe we are, that we can decide what to do in our own
lives, and that autonomy grows by exercising it. We do have choice. It
is perfectly possible to function without illusions-and it must be
kept in mind that the "teachers"' claims involve statistical
generalizations about things as they are, not as they could be.
R W Dawes (1994)
House of Cards: Psychology and Psychotherapy Built on Myth
'Fragments of Behaviour: The Extensional Stance' may well have
it's technical faults. However, it's general theme is that of a
review of mainstream research which bears on the work of
professional psychologists working in an important area of
behaviour management. One can accept or reject the conclusions I
draw from that research, what one cannot reject, I claim, is that
there are strong reasons for thinking that what purports to be
the 'new look' in psychology which began with Bruner in the late
1950s, contends with 'Null Hypothesis Statistical Testing as
being, as Meehl said, the worse thing that ever happened in the
history of psychology.
--
David Longley
Aaron Sloman
he is opposed to cognitive science. This is one of his arguments.
> Date: Wed, 16 Aug 95 14:32:37 GMT
>
> Such intensional contexts *do* indeed 'go beyond the information
> given'. But from the perspective of any science, to do so is anathema,
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> since one either records ones observations *as* obseervations, or one
> acknowledges that one is not reporting one's observations at all.
I presume this is a sincere attempt to explain what is worrying you.
Now several of us have previously pointed out in response to similar
comments that what physicists do all the time is go beyond the
information given.
For example they talk about photons, neutrinos, positrons,
gravitational fields, and all sorts of other things that are all
introduced by THEORIES which go_beyond_the_information_given. If you
don't believe this go and buy a modern textbook on physics.
You could argue that physics is not a science. But nobody would
take you seriously.
Of course, you may wish to say that SOME of what scientists do is
record observed data. That's certainly true. But it is equally true
of cognitive scientists: they use videos, tape recordings, detailed
transcripts, etc.
But simply recording what happens is not science: we also need
explanations based on theories about why those things happen. In ALL
science those explanations go_beyond_the_information_given.
I have given concrete examples above from physics.
> None of the arguments levelled at this simple, but representative
> critique of cognitivism have addressed this essentially Quinean point.
Please, try to understand this. Whatever Quine says: NOBODY is going
to take him seriously if it follows from his views that physics is
not a respectable science.
In fact, I don't think there is anything in Quine that supports the
view that you just have to stick with observations. In fact, in his
book From A Logical Point of View you will find a view of knowledge
as a large network of propositions some closely tied to what we can
observe and others only loosely so. The latter are not easily
rejected on the basis of any kind of observation: that's because
they go way beyond the information given.
So please answer the questions:
Is physics a respectable science?
Is it allowed to provide explanatory theories that go beyond the
information given, e.g. theories about inferred entities?
If your answer is NO in either case, please justify it, preferably
without a splurge of quotations.
Aaron
Gary Merrill
|> In fact, I don't think there is anything in Quine that supports the
|> view that you just have to stick with observations. In fact, in his
|> book From A Logical Point of View you will find a view of knowledge
|> as a large network of propositions some closely tied to what we can
|> observe and others only loosely so. The latter are not easily
|> rejected on the basis of any kind of observation: that's because
|> they go way beyond the information given.
This view is even clearer in Quine's and Ullian's book _The Web of
Belief_ (rather a suggestive title, isn't it?), which is an excellent
introduction to epistemology and philosophy of science.
|> So please answer the questions:
|>
|> Is physics a respectable science?
|>
|> Is it allowed to provide explanatory theories that go beyond the
|> information given, e.g. theories about inferred entities?
|>
|> If your answer is NO in either case, please justify it, preferably
|> without a splurge of quotations.
And exactly what would a "science" be like, and what would be the
point of a "science" that did not "go beyond the information
given"? This restriction seems to rather severely restrict the
predictive power of one's "science" and hence, among other things,
its usefulness in developing technology.
--
Gary H. Merrill [Principal Systems Developer, Compiler and Tools Division]
SAS Institute Inc. / SAS Campus Dr. / Cary, NC 27513 / (919) 677-8000
sas...@theseus.unx.sas.com ... !mcnc!sas!sasghm
David Longley
A.Sl...@cs.bham.ac.uk "Aaron Sloman" writes:
> David Longley <Da...@longley.demon.co.uk> has tried to explain why
> he is opposed to cognitive science. This is one of his arguments.
>
> > Date: Wed, 16 Aug 95 14:32:37 GMT
> >
> > Such intensional contexts *do* indeed 'go beyond the information
> > given'. But from the perspective of any science, to do so is anathema,
> ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> > since one either records ones observations *as* obseervations, or one
> > acknowledges that one is not reporting one's observations at all.
>
> I presume this is a sincere attempt to explain what is worrying you.
>
> Now several of us have previously pointed out in response to similar
> comments that what physicists do all the time is go beyond the
> information given.
>
Forget about physics for examples, I'm not a physicist, neither
are you. Stay with the example which is directly to do with what
*immediately* concerns me and my colleagues in our applied work,
and which apparently concerns those in academia working in
various forms of psychology.
One thing I will say is that there is a basic difference between
variables which can be measured which one or two steps back
assumes they can be quantified into) and intensional idioms which
are a problem with respect to quantification. My example of 'said
that' is a good one I believe, but things, believes, hopes,
perceives would all so.
It will be clear to anyone who knows the recent history of
psychology that to 'go beyond the information given' refers to
Bruner's work in the late 1950s (& which Kuhn used in The
Structure of Scientific Revolutions' to bolster his 'Psychology
of Science' ideas). Physicists are already working within an
enormously powerful theoretical framework which is *so* well
quantified that the precision (such as in QED) allows all sorts
of wild talk. That is not the case in your or my field, and we
should not pretend otherwise.
> For example they talk about photons, neutrinos, positrons,
> gravitational fields, and all sorts of other things that are all
> introduced by THEORIES which go_beyond_the_information_given. If you
> don't believe this go and buy a modern textbook on physics.
They don't go beyond the information given, they can be measured.
>
> You could argue that physics is not a science. But nobody would
> take you seriously.
>
I have said no such thing, and would not, the analogy does not
hold at all for the sorts of things you are speculating the
existence of!!!
> Of course, you may wish to say that SOME of what scientists do is
> record observed data. That's certainly true. But it is equally true
> of cognitive scientists: they use videos, tape recordings, detailed
> transcripts, etc.
>
Of what? 'thoughts', 'minds', 'attitudes'.....or could it be
BEHAVIOURS Aaron!!!
^^^^^^^^^^
> But simply recording what happens is not science: we also need
> explanations based on theories about why those things happen. In ALL
> science those explanations go_beyond_the_information_given.
>
No they don't. They ideally deduce further functional relations
which are implicitly already there, which account for observed
data, and which allow us to talk about our observations in a more
organised way. Surely that's what deductive logic is all about.
Surely that's what the 'Logic of Scientific Discovery' was all
about? In 'Fragments..' I suggest that it is the natural failure
of quantification within contexts of propositional attitude, ie
epistemic contexts, that gives deduction its value as a formal
procedure. Hans Hahn made the point quite eloquently I thought.
> I have given concrete examples above from physics.
>
> > None of the arguments levelled at this simple, but representative
> > critique of cognitivism have addressed this essentially Quinean point.
>
> Please, try to understand this. Whatever Quine says: NOBODY is going
> to take him seriously if it follows from his views that physics is
> not a respectable science.
>
You have said this, I have not, nor has anyone else (to my
knowledge). My example was 'said that', as an example of all of
the propositional attitudes. Right from the beginning, when you
first interjected, I said that I thought a lot could be achieved
by explicating the other propositional attitudes like 'think
that', perceives that, and so on in he same way that Quine did
for 'said that'.
> In fact, I don't think there is anything in Quine that supports the
> view that you just have to stick with observations. In fact, in his
> book From A Logical Point of View you will find a view of knowledge
> as a large network of propositions some closely tied to what we can
> observe and others only loosely so. The latter are not easily
> rejected on the basis of any kind of observation: that's because
> they go way beyond the information given.
>
Quine is an empiricist. We will see more clearly what he has to
say when 'From Stimulus to Science' is published this autumn. I
would conjecture that as this century's most austere positivist
and evidential behaviourist, his position must be reasonably
close to how I have presented it (but I am more than happy to be
corrected this point).
> So please answer the questions:
>
> Is physics a respectable science?
>
Of course physics is a respectable science (there are some silly
ideas in it, like in all sciences but that's another story).
However the history of physics and chemistry has had its daft
notions like 'ether' and 'phlogiston'.
But what you are talking about has NOTHING to do with anything I
have said. It is this sort of sleight of hand which in my view
makes you look like a pedlar of rhetoric Aaron. Get back to
talking about the subject under discussion and stop pretending it
has ANYTHING to do with contemporary physics.
> Is it allowed to provide explanatory theories that go beyond the
> information given, e.g. theories about inferred entities?
>
> If your answer is NO in either case, please justify it, preferably
> without a splurge of quotations.
>
Solve the SIMPLE problems first before asking such questions. You
seem to want to speculate altogether without having anything
tangible to start with. THAT's what I object to. There are more
'inferred entities' than there are measured entities, and once
you are in that game it's hard to tell science from science
fiction.
Look at what Dawes has to say in the extract from 'House of
Cards: Psychology and Psychotherapy Built on Myth' 1994. We are
seeing pseudo scientists coming out of the universities with BSc
degrees, MSc and PhDs - supposedly scientists. *We* end up having
to retrain them, when really we should be able to rely on them
having some useful technical skills.
Yes - I am concerned, and yes, I am sincere - and yes - I am
angry. I have had to end up doing a lot of the technical training
which should have been done in the universities. Why should I,
and others like me, have to do this? Large numbers of people that
I see should never have earned a batchelor of SCIENCE degree.
--
David Longley
Aaron Sloman
and found that David has responded to one of my criticisms by
explaining more clearly what he's getting at. I am still not sure I
understand his position, but here are some comments anyway.
David Longley <Da...@longley.demon.co.uk> writes:
> Date: Wed, 16 Aug 95 21:59:14 GMT
>
> In article <40tik8$s...@percy.cs.bham.ac.uk>
> A.Sl...@cs.bham.ac.uk "Aaron Sloman" writes:
[AS]
> > David Longley <Da...@longley.demon.co.uk> has tried to explain why
> > he is opposed to cognitive science. This is one of his arguments.
[DL]
> > > Date: Wed, 16 Aug 95 14:32:37 GMT
> > >
> > > Such intensional contexts *do* indeed 'go beyond the information
> > > given'. But from the perspective of any science, to do so is anathema,
> > ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> > > since one either records ones observations *as* obseervations, or one
> > > acknowledges that one is not reporting one's observations at all.
> > ...
[AS]
> > Now several of us have previously pointed out in response to similar
> > comments that what physicists do all the time is go beyond the
> > information given.
> >
[DL]
> Forget about physics for examples,
If you insist on ignoring (i.e. "forget about") counter-arguments
that contradict your generalisations, you cannot expect to be taken
seriously.
Note that counter-examples can be ignored without intellectual
dishonesty IF the claim made is only about *some* science. But you
made an assertion about *any* science, in the underlined quote
above.
> I'm not a physicist, neither
> are you.
Speak for yourself. I happen to have a degree in mathematics and
physics, though it's old and worn out, I admit. I have also taught
philosophy of science over many years (including philosophy of
physics), and you are here making statements that fall within
philosophy of science.
(I think it would be a good idea if all psychology students were
taught some physics so that they gained some insight into the
requirements for deep explanatory science, instead of the
narrow-minded positivism so many of them are taught.)
Anyhow, that's just an aside. The main point is that if you make a
statement about "any science" then, by ordinary logic, your
statement must include physics since that is a science. So if
physics contradicts your statement, then your statement is false.
QED.
Expressed in first order predicate calculus (wordy English version):
Longley:
For all x, if x is a science then going beyond the
information given is anathema to x.
[This is of the form: All-x( S(x) -> A(x) )]
(I have compressed a rather complex concept in the predicate A(x) to
bring out the overall logical structure of your assertion, which you
appear not to have seen.)
Fact:
Physics is a science and going beyond the information given
is not anathema to physics.
[This is of the form:
S(p) & ~A(p)), which entails
~(S(p) -> A(p)), and therefore entails
~(All-x( S(x) -> A(x) )]
If the statement labelled Fact: is true then the statement labelled
Longley: is false. If you can't see that connection then you don't
understand predicate calculus and we can abandon our discussions.
Now, physics goes beyond the information given in two quite
different ways:
(a) it uses concepts that are not definable in terms of
observables (e.g. "electron", "quark")
(b) it formulates propositions that go beyond the evidence
on which they are based, i.e. propositions with predictive
content, i.e. propositions which are capable of being
falsified by future experiments.
(a) Is the deeper sense of going beyond the information given. It is
what makes physics an explanatory science rather than a collection
of well supported rules of thumb, such as we find in crafts and folk
beliefs.
Until psychology has similar deep explanatory concepts it will be
nothing but a bunch of observed regularities and a lot of
hand-waving, hardly worthy of the name of "science".
[DL]
> ..Stay with the example which is directly to do with what
> *immediately* concerns me and my colleagues in our applied work,
> and which apparently concerns those in academia working in
> various forms of psychology.
It was YOU who made the sweeping statements about ANY science as
part of your attempt to justify restricting psychology to a
particular methodology.
If you wish to abandon your general claim about `any science' and
restrict it only to psychology, then we can discuss that by showing
that explanatory theories in psychology will have to go beyond the
information given in the senses of both (a) and (b) if psychology is
to go beyond regularity-collection and provide an explanatory
framework that increases our understanding (which is what science is
all about).
[DL]
> One thing I will say is that there is a basic difference between
> variables which can be measured which one or two steps back
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> assumes they can be quantified into) and intensional idioms which
> are a problem with respect to quantification.
I don't understand this notion of variables "which can be measured
which one or two steps back". Are you saying that it is OK to go
beyond the information given so long as you use only one or two
steps beyond what's given?
How do you count steps? And why should there be any restriction to
"one or two steps"? Why not three or four, or seventy steps, if the
best explanatory theory available is far removed from observables?
[DL]
> ..My example of 'said
> that' is a good one I believe, but things, believes, hopes,
> perceives would all so.
Note that *examples* do NOT prove a generalisation.
I can provide lots and lots of examples of numbers that are
divisible by 79. It does not follow that all, or most, numbers are
divisible by 79. You need to be more precise about what you are
claiming and how your examples support it.
Your examples show ONLY that there are SOME forms of expression that
are intensional, which nobody has disputed (though I've tried to
show that intensionality is not restricted to psychological
contexts.)
Apart from quoting Quine's unconvincing claims, you have provided no
argument that that shows that science in general must reject
concepts or propositions that go beyond "given" information, or that
psychology in particular should reject intensional language.
Confronted with examples of statements about people that don't fit
first order logic there are (at least) two possible options we
can accept:
Intensional contexts cannot be included in science.
First order extensional logic is inadequate for science
It's time for you to consider the second option.
Anyhow, it now seems from your recent comments that when you talked
about going beyond the information given this was a red herring,
since you are not really objecting to the GENERAL notion of going
beyond the information given but only the specific case of
intensional contexts.
I previously read you as using the rejection of the general notion
to defend rejection of the particular case.
If that was not your intention, then I apologise, but your words
referred to `any science', and you do keep telling us to look at
what was actually said.
Anyhow, it is true that intensional contexts raise problems of
interpretation that are different from those of the unobservables of
physics. But these problems are not directly concerned with going
beyond what's given. Lots of theories go beyond the information
given without using intensional contexts.
Here's an example (not totally fanciful) of how a psychologist might
go beyond the information given without using any intensional
contexts. Consider a theory which says that one of the internal
states (control states) of a rat is a hunger-drive D, with the
following properties:
1. As the rat uses energy, D goes up.
2. As the rat consumes food, D goes down.
3. Whenever D is above some threshold T the rat will attempt to
find and consume food.
(4. Various other states and processes may affect the threshold
T. E.g. detection of a rat-predator may raise T, and
detection of food may lower T.)
Such a theory (which I am NOT putting forward as a serious bit of
psychology) refers to various unobservables, including D, T, and the
other things that influence T. All these would need to be specified,
and the precise relations between changes in D and other things
represented in equations. It would also be desirable to include
further unobservables linking D to the movements that constitute
food-seeking and food-consuming behaviour (i.e. internal mechanisms
relating perceptual states to control signals to muscles, etc.)
It would also be desirable to come up with definitions of what
constitutes "food" or a "rat-predator", if the theory is to have
predictive power.
If rats are, as I suspect, information processing systems, it may be
impossible to specify what constitutes food or a rat-predator in any
"objective" way, e.g. in terms of physical and chemical properties.
That's because we know (as any control engineer can tell you) that
it is possible for an information-based control system to select
actions on the basis of how sensory signals are *interpreted*, which
can depend on internal states that are changed over time (e.g. by
learning processes).
(Some such interpretation processes may depend on quirks of
inherited mechanisms that vary from one individual to another rather
than simply depending on the agent's prior interactions with the
environment.)
Such a system will not have behaviour that is predictable simply on
the basis of physical properties of the environment. Thus the need
to refer to the rat's internal interpretation of sensory signals
will again introduce a need for unobservable theoretical constructs
in the theory.
Now such a theory would be in no way unscientific because of the use
of concepts (e.g. D, T, and internal interpretations) referring to
things that are not "given" in our observations, any more than the
use of concepts like "neutrino" and "valency" in physics and
chemistry is unscientific.
Of course, the theory might turn out to be no good for other
reasons, e.g. because all attempts to refine it so as to yield
reliable predictions fail, or because some other theory turns out to
have far more explanatory power, etc.
If I have understood you correctly you have no objection to that
kind of theory going beyond the information given as long as it uses
no concepts requiring intensional contexts.
[DL]
> It will be clear to anyone who knows the recent history of
> psychology that to 'go beyond the information given' refers to
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> Bruner's work in the late 1950s
I don't know what Bruner wrote about this, and from what I recall of
his theories they were generally inadequate because, like most
psychologists, he lacked the conceptual tools to build theories with
explanatory power. (That's not his fault: the tools were, and are,
still being constructed. Similarly, Newton could not be blamed for
lacking the tools of quantum physics even though he forged good new
tools for expressing his own kind of mechanics.)
[DL]
> ..(& which Kuhn used in The
> Structure of Scientific Revolutions' to bolster his 'Psychology
> of Science' ideas).
Kuhn understood physics a lot better than he understood psychology.
[DL]
> ...Physicists are already working within an
> enormously powerful theoretical framework which is *so* well
> quantified that the precision (such as in QED) allows all sorts
> of wild talk.
Are you saying that when a theoretical framework is well quantified
then "wild talk" is permissible in science? Why?
Note that it is perfectly possible to write quantified stuff that is
completely false. That's not necessarily good science.
I am not sure what do you mean by "so well quantified"? Do you mean
expressed using quantifiers (i.e. in formal logic) or do you mean
that the theories are numerical (i.e. refer to quantities)?
And in either case why should that sort of quantification justify
*wild* talk? Please, if you want to be understood, explain yourself.
At present I am mystified.
[DL]
> ..That is not the case in your or my field, and we
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> should not pretend otherwise.
I have no idea what you think "my field" is, or how you can tell
whether it has or lacks precision.
I use logic when necessary, programming languages when necessary
(and these have sufficient precision to generate definite behaviour
in computers), various subsets of English with more or less
precision (e.g. specifications of designs that are sufficiently
precise to enable other people to produce code matching the
specification). For example, I have specified and implemented a
simulation toolkit that is being used both here at Birmingham and at
DRA Malvern, and I have previously worked on compilers, editors,
graphical software, and other things where great precision is
required (far exceeding the precision to be found in most
psychology). I've also done a little mathematics and logic in my
time.
In my work as a philosopher and cognitive scientist I TRY to use
exactly the same precision wherever possible, though in the early
stages of formulation of theories it is sometimes difficult. So an
iterative process of refinement is required.
For example, I am trying to specify a type of information processing
architecture that is capable of supporting the distinction between
an agent being in control of its internal processes and not being in
control of them.
(This distinction is relevant to the analysis of some emotional
states -- e.g. people who are grieving often find that they cannot
concentrate on tasks that previously had high priority for them,
because thoughts relating to the beloved deceased constantly intrude
and distract them.)
What is required here is the specification of a certain kind of
control architecture which normally enables various tasks to be
performed, but which can react to disturbing information in such a
way as to be rendered unable to perform those tasks. (The key ideas
here go back at least about 30 years to a seminal paper by
H.A.Simon, a Nobel-prize winning scientist, but I presume you will
claim it's all unscientific vapourware.)
At present I regard my ideas on these information processing control
architectures as half-baked and imprecise. But that's because I know
what precise specifications are, and can tell when I don't yet have
them! (And where necessary my research students and colleagues will
point out such imprecision if I miss it.)
But I also know that imprecise and woolly thoughts can sometimes be
precursors to precise and powerful ideas, as the history of physics
shows.
None of the flaws in the current theory has anything to do with the
fact that I use intensional contexts, or the fact that I go beyond
the information given. They are all due to the fact that the
architecture is still under-specified and the requirements for the
architecture are also still unclear.
[AS - on physicists]
> > For example they talk about photons, neutrinos, positrons,
> > gravitational fields, and all sorts of other things that are all
> > introduced by THEORIES which go_beyond_the_information_given. If you
> > don't believe this go and buy a modern textbook on physics.
[DL]
> They don't go beyond the information given, they can be measured.
Do you have any idea how these things are measured in physics? It's
not like visually comparing two lengths or the colour of objects.
The reasoning that links the information given to the measurements,
e.g. the charge on an electron or the energy of a neutrino, or the
speed of rotation of a distant star, includes all sorts of
inferences based both on theories and huge assumptions about the
working of very complex apparatus.
It is certainly far more indirect than observing whether a rat
presses a lever or jumps over a barrier, or whether a human presses
a certain sequence of keys on a keyboard.
What justifies the use of such measurements is a rich body of
*theory* linking unobservables (via inference chains of different
lengths) to observables, along with the success of the theory.
What's wrong with psychological theories is NOT that they too invoke
unobservables going beyond the information given, but that so far
the theories are just wrong.
They are too shallow and too simple to cope with the enormously
complex mechanisms that underly human and animal behaviour.
(Though some of the theories do give reliable predictions in
carefully restricted contexts, PROVIDED that the "subjects" come
from the right culture and wish to cooperate with the experimenter,
and understand the instructions as the experimenter wants them to,
and haven't learnt the skills that would change their behaviour from
the norm, etc. etc.. -- I once ruined some psychological experiments
on memory because I had read a book on how to improve my memory:
as a result of which my behaviour confounded all the predictions.)
[AS]
> >.......
> > Of course, you may wish to say that SOME of what scientists do is
> > record observed data. That's certainly true. But it is equally true
> > of cognitive scientists: they use videos, tape recordings, detailed
> > transcripts, etc.
> >
[DL]
> Of what? 'thoughts', 'minds', 'attitudes'.....or could it be
> BEHAVIOURS Aaron!!!
> ^^^^^^^^^^
They use videos and recordings of behaviour. And then they use their
theories to interpret the observations. Similarly, physicists use
recordings of behaviour of their apparatus, and then they use
theories to interpret the recordings.
So far, there's no difference that allows you to say physicists are
doing science and the cognitive scientists are not.
Of course the current theories in cognitive science are pretty
primitive. But that's no reason to say that nothing but behaviour is
relevant. Similarly once upon a time the theories of physics were
pretty primitive. But now we can use our physical measurements to go
way beyond the information given. There's nothing inherently
unscientific about this.
Whether thoughts, minds or attitudes should figure in the
interpretations of the psychological data will depend on how good
the theories involving them are at explaining and predicting.
THAT's how to assess the theories, not by using some misguided
philosopher's attempt to rule out certain forms of theories in
advance. (Compare people who once tried to rule out physical
theories that allowed actions without any matter linking causes and
effects. They probably thought they had good philosophical arguments
for doing that - e.g. cause and effect must be contiguous.)
[AS]
> > But simply recording what happens is not science: we also need
> > explanations based on theories about why those things happen. In ALL
> > science those explanations go_beyond_the_information_given.
> >
[DL]
> No they don't. They ideally deduce further functional relations
> which are implicitly already there, which account for observed
> data, and which allow us to talk about our observations in a more
> organised way. Surely that's what deductive logic is all about.
I am afraid that this is either just wildly wrong (in what sense is
quantum physics `implicitly there' in all the phenomena that we
observe, which modern physics explains?) or else so vague that it
allows all explanatory theories including those of cognitive science
to be referring to what's `implicitly already there'.
[DL]
> Surely that's what the 'Logic of Scientific Discovery' was all
> about?
Go and read it again. You seem to have completely missed Popper's
point. His work mounted a sustained attack on positivist and crude
empiricist theories of science which tried to build everything up
from observations. The whole point of his hypothetico-deductive
method was that theories could never be derived from or inferred
from observations, though they could to some extent be tested, by
inferring observations from the theories (plus other observations).
But he appreciated that the whole process of testing (and what he
called `corroboration') was full of loopholes (e.g. unfulfilled
predictions could be explained away by auxiliary hypotheses,
postulated faults in instruments, etc. etc.)
[DL]
> ..In 'Fragments..' I suggest that it is the natural failure
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> of quantification within contexts of propositional attitude, ie
> epistemic contexts, that gives deduction its value as a formal
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> procedure. Hans Hahn made the point quite eloquently I thought.
I don't see how failure can give anything value. I am afraid that my
current best interpretation of what you have written is that you
have half understood Quine and other authors and use them to provide
bogus justifications for your own brand of psychology against other
brands.
Probably both brands are deeply flawed at present --- but the
behavioural psychology is permanently flawed because the links
between input and output in humans and other animals go via such
complicated control mechanisms that almost any proposed regularity
is liable to be refuted by a variation in the *internal* states of
some of those mechanisms.
That raises the question -- what sorts of theories are needed to
describe the internal mechanisms?
Well, we don't know what kinds of formalisms will be available in
500 years time, but right now the most sophisticated forms of
control that we know about involve various kinds of information and
computation (and I include not only manipulation and storage of
rules, plans, goals, factual information, but also the computations
performed by different sorts of neural nets, e.g. data storage and
retrieval in content-addressable memories, storage of associations
between patterns, triggering of previously stored associations,
various kinds of interpolation and generalisation, etc.)
We know that for many kinds of human behaviour the information
content rather than the physical form of a stimulus is what is
important.
For example, in the UK over the last year, information about the
national lottery, presented in a variety of distinct physical forms
(television ads and announcements, newspaper ads, radio
announcements, word of mouth, posters at supermarkets etc. including
the use of other languages than English) induced millions of people
to believe that they had a real chance of winning large sums of
money and possibly even becoming millionaires (that was the content
of the messages they received in these various different physical
formats).
As a result a significant proportion of the population changed their
behaviour in at least two ways, i.e. spending money on lottery
tickets (which required different kinds of physical behaviour in
different environments) and either watching television programs on
saturday nights or checking one of the other sources of information
about winning numbers.
Of course, we don't yet have good theories about the detailed
processing of the many kinds of sensory information which gave
people their new beliefs. Nor do we have detailed computational
theories about the desires people have for wealth and other things,
the processes by which they manipulate estimates of probability or
likelihood, the planning mechanisms that generate the actions
required to obtain lottery tickets, the processes of selecting
numbers, etc. etc.
But if you think there's any way we are going to have a complete
theory of what's going on in this large scale manipulation of
behaviour WITHOUT taking account of transfer of *information* about
prices of tickets and sizes of prizes, then I would like to see how
such a theory can account for the roles of the diverse physical
stimuli (including the stimuli presented to immigrant folk who had
to have the information translated into some other language than
English) and the diverse forms of behaviour involved (e.g. using
different writing implements, handing over coins, handing over
notes, writing checks, asking for change, instructing friends to
make purchases, etc. etc.)
My conjecture is that in the long run the ONLY form of theory that
will prove capable of expressing the appropriate generalisations
that cover all the cases without ad-hocery will prove to be one that
postulates that human brains manipulate semantic content (e.g. the
information about available prizes and how to enter the lottery),
and do so by relating information about the environment to semantic
states involving desires, preferences, and the like (e.g. the desire
to own a lot of money).
Such a theory will have to be very complicated - but that's because
the facts to be explained are very complicated.
There are two possible moves you seem to find attractive - though
they are very different.
(a) The first is to eschew all talk of internal semantic states and
try to account for the phenomena entirely in terms of patterns
linking physical stimuli with physical behaviour (possibly using
intervening postulated physical states).
(b) The second is to allow that information states are important,
while following Quine in trying to analyse away reference to
information states in terms of reference to quoted sentences and
other symbols. I.e. (b) attempts to reduce semantic states to
syntactic states.
If you try to do (a) consistently you will end up doing physics and
chemistry and tracing all the low level physical links through
brains, and the result will not allow expression of any interesting
generalisations other than those of physics and chemistry. That's
because at that level there's too much diversity of implementation
between different brains. (That's an empirical claim that needs
spelling out in more detail, along with supporting evidence.)
If you try to do (b) consistently, the diversity of languages
available (both external languages and internal languages used by
brains) will make it impossible to complete the programme by using
`laws' at the desired level of generality. That's because the ONLY
thing COMMON to all the different ways human brains can encode the
belief that there's a lottery every saturday offering very large
prizes is via the semantic contents shared by all the syntactic
forms.
(E.g. try spelling out what's common to the chinese, arabic, hebrew,
dutch, german, french, english, finnish, etc. encodings without
mentioning semantic content).
If that means that we have to allow intensional language in our
scientific theories, then so be it: Quine made a good try, but it
wasn't good enough. (It was his misguided commitment to behaviourism
that led him to his indeterminacy thesis: both can be consistently
rejected by scientists who have better conceptual tools.)
> ...
[AS]
> > In fact, I don't think there is anything in Quine that supports the
> > view that you just have to stick with observations. In fact, in his
> > book From A Logical Point of View you will find a view of knowledge
> > as a large network of propositions some closely tied to what we can
> > observe and others only loosely so. The latter are not easily
> > rejected on the basis of any kind of observation: that's because
> > they go way beyond the information given.
> >
[DL]
> Quine is an empiricist. We will see more clearly what he has to
> say when 'From Stimulus to Science' is published this autumn. I
> would conjecture that as this century's most austere positivist
> and evidential behaviourist, his position must be reasonably
> close to how I have presented it (but I am more than happy to be
> corrected this point).
Let's hope that Quine turns out to be more flexible and intelligent
than you have made him out to be.
[DL]
> .....You
> seem to want to speculate altogether without having anything
> tangible to start with. THAT's what I object to. There are more
> 'inferred entities' than there are measured entities, and once
> you are in that game it's hard to tell science from science
> fiction.
That's because you have not been exposed to enough real science
involving deep explanations of what's observable.
[DL]
> Look at what Dawes has to say in the extract from 'House of
> Cards: Psychology and Psychotherapy Built on Myth' 1994. We are
> seeing pseudo scientists coming out of the universities with BSc
> degrees, MSc and PhDs - supposedly scientists. *We* end up having
> to retrain them, when really we should be able to rely on them
> having some useful technical skills.
From what I know of the current training of psychologists I have no
desire to defend it. Many of them are taught to do measurements and
use statistics, and not much else.
When they attempt to theorise they can't tell the difference between
describing a mechanism that might actually work and using woolly
metaphors -- because they have not been trained in the design,
implementation, and testing of explanatory theories. (E.g. they may
try to set up an experiment to decide whether people perform a task
`using images' or `using propositions' without realising that the
two alternatives are so incompletely specified that each admits all
sorts of totally different implementations, with quite different
behavioural consequences.)
[DL]
> Yes - I am concerned, and yes, I am sincere - and yes - I am
> angry. I have had to end up doing a lot of the technical training
> which should have been done in the universities. Why should I,
> and others like me, have to do this? Large numbers of people that
> I see should never have earned a batchelor of SCIENCE degree.
Maybe they should all have been taught some physics and AI or
computer science, instead of just the woolly kind of cognitive
science that we are both objecting to and the shallow kind of
behavioural science that I am objecting to.
I suspect I should not have been tempted to respond, for I don't
think continuing this kind of debate is going to be fruitful, since
nothing I can say will convince you and nothing in the arguments you
have presented convinces me.
We shall have to wait for some years, and see what kinds of theories
the different approaches produce in the long run and compare them
for explanatory power and predictive power.
You can continue to try developing your kind of psychology, but if
you make attempts to rule out other kinds as unscientific, don't
expect that everyone will drop what they are doing and follow your
approach. At least not unless you find far better arguments than any
produced so far by Quine or anyone else.
Good night.
Aaron
David Longley
> > ..In 'Fragments..' I suggest that it is the natural failure
> ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> > of quantification within contexts of propositional attitude, ie
> > epistemic contexts, that gives deduction its value as a formal
> ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> > procedure. Hans Hahn made the point quite eloquently I thought.
>
> I don't see how failure can give anything value. I am afraid that my
> current best interpretation of what you have written is that you
> have half understood Quine and other authors and use them to provide
> bogus justifications for your own brand of psychology against other
> brands.
>
Well, this failure has a key place in all that I have outlined in
'Fragments of Behaviour: The Extensional Stance'.
> Probably both brands are deeply flawed at present --- but the
> behavioural psychology is permanently flawed because the links
> between input and output in humans and other animals go via such
> complicated control mechanisms that almost any proposed regularity
> is liable to be refuted by a variation in the *internal* states of
> some of those mechanisms.
Hmmm, but where I take it to indicate non man's land on grounds of
indeterminacy, you seem to take it as an opportunity to create all
sorts of fictions.
<snip>
>
> There are two possible moves you seem to find attractive - though
> they are very different.
>
> (a) The first is to eschew all talk of internal semantic states and
> try to account for the phenomena entirely in terms of patterns
> linking physical stimuli with physical behaviour (possibly using
> intervening postulated physical states).
>
In the particular field of application I have been working in, there
seems to be no alternative, ie map what the environment demands, and
differentially measuring how individuals perform relative to those
demands.
Well, let's see what 'From Stimulus to Science' produces.
--
David Longley