Re: The Dance of the Copy Theorist
Larry Kaye
In the post below, Glen Sizemore claims that the copy theorist cannot escape the committment to some sort of dubious homunculus view of awareness of percpetual representations (or other unhelpful metaphors).
Here's a "direct" reply (pun intended): we are aware of our perceptual representations ("sense data") in virtue of having furhter representations that represent the former--call the latter "second order" reps. This is, roughly, what many HOT theorists would say about consicouness (and self-awareness) in general (although I don't know any of them offhand who explicitly hold this sort of representationalist view of perception too.)
So the model is:
input ---> first order reps. ---> second order reps.
\ /
\--<--represent-<-/
Note that this does not mean that we are aware of these second-order reps. I presume that we'd need third-order reps for that (and perhaps humans are simply not constructed that way.)
Also note that this ultimate requires an explanation of what it is for a mental state to be representational. But everyone's got that problem--anyone who acknowledges any sort of representations has got to explain representation in general.
And finally, note that HOT theorists hope to explain qualia (away) in terms of these higher-order reps. But I'm not actually advocating that plank of the HOT view (because I don't believe it) and because I don't have to--even if qualia are, say, inherent properties of first order reps (and our second order reps allow us to think about those properties), still this is a workable model of representationalism that avoids the homunculus view/empty metaphors.
Larry
-----Original Message-----
From: Glen Sizemore [mailto:gmsiz...@YAHOO.COM]
Sent: Friday, April 22, 2005 5:13 PM
To: PSYC...@LISTSERV.UH.EDU
Subject: The Dance of the Copy Theorist
The Dance of the Copy Theorist
Despite his attack on the representationalism of
Aristotle, the admonitions of Theophrastus went
unheeded for thousands of years. Copy theory was just
so compelling. It was so simple - the seeing of a tree
is really an inner seeing, and what was seen was, by
whatever name, a representation. Curiously, the Greeks
were struggling, as Skinner liked to point out, with
the problem of how the world "covered the distance" to
the person, and indeed, according to the Greeks,
something reached out and seized the world and copied
it. The questions the Greeks asked would soon be
answered by the physics of light but, no matter, the
damage had been done. We do not see the world but,
rather, a copy - a sometimes imperfect copy (lest how
would we "explain" illusions?) - but a copy
nonetheless.
Finally, Theophrastus' suggestion - that seeing a copy
leaves the original problem unanswered - was taken
seriously by a few and represntationalism saw its
first challenge. Who sees this representation? And if
seeing requires a representation, so must the seeing
of a representation. This has led to a couple of
different verbal gyrations designed to save the notion
of representation:
The first possible gyration is to claim that the
representation is not seen. This is a short-lived
strategy because any term that is used is something
that requires a representation. We cannot, after all,
say that the representation is "felt" since "feeling"
certainly must require a representation. More popular
around here, is to say something akin to the
following: the "representation IS seeing" or "the
representation IS the experience of seeing," or even
something like "the 'point eye,' and the
representation are the same thing." I am not asserting
that these are direct quotes but they may as well be.
But let's see how other representations - real,
non-metaphorical representations - fare when these
rules of language are applied. That is, could a
photograph BE the seeing? Could it be the experience
of itself? Could the "point eye" ever "be the same as
the photograph"? That, of course, makes no sense, yet
it is what is claimed around here of "representations
in our brains." These must be special representations
indeed - specially constructed that is. Such
representations are nothing short of magical.
Another possible gyration is Dennett's (and no doubt
others') fractionation of the homunculus. Perhaps the
homunculus is not a whole little person at all -
perhaps he or she is a fractionated collection of
stupid little homunculitos, each charged with seeing
only a little bit of the representation. Somehow this
is supposed to make it less silly.
The sad fact is that representationalists cannot
escape certain metaphors, and at the heart of this
metaphor is the existence of real, literal
representations, like photographs and paintings. Oh,
and we wouldn't want to forget the hologram fad of the
'70s and '80s.
Glen M. Sizemore
he key-peck itself as not being the “seeing,” and there is some usefulness to that distinction. But that does not mean that “seeing” is some pre-behavioral thing that happens before the animal behaves. Viewing perception as an action is, I think, explicit or implicit in all of what we have been calling here “direct perception.” It is certainly explicit in radical behaviorism.
The final twist is this: Humans are trained to respond, not only to the public world, but also their own behavior. This is why we even talk about the “phenomenal aspects” of perception. With respect to “seeing,” I have suggested, and will now do more than that now, that the ontogeny of eye movements holds much of the key to what “seeing” is. Eye movements have consequences (even during a saccade) and those consequences maintain the responses that produce them.
Skinner was also very fond of the so-called “observing procedure.” In this procedure key-pecks on one key (the “food key”) are reinforced (by delivery of food, of course) on some intermittent schedule when the light is, say, red, but this schedule of reinforcement alternates unpredictably with a period of time, during which the key is green, when key-pecks are never reinforced. After the pigeon develops discriminated responding, the conditions are changed such that the key color is neither red nor green but is, say, white. A second key (the observing key), however, is also illuminated white, and pecking that key changes the key color on the other key to the color that corresponds to the schedule that is in effect. Such behavior, of course, is maintained by the key-color change. Presumably, so is behavior that we can’t see that we may label “seeing,” and which occurs when the observing response is not explicitly required. The representationalist will not, of course, be happy !
with this view and argue that the “seeing” is something else. No doubt there is more to seeing than eye movements, but the subtlety of the response does not make it something other than behavior.
In conclusion, “seeing” and “hearing” etc. are responses maintained by their sensory changes and, ultimately, by the other consequences that characterize the contingencies in which such stimulation is embedded. The “phenomenal aspects” of seeing are LIKE something (as the overused quote goes) – and what they are like is seeing a literal copy in the sense that our eye movements will be similarly controlled by a photo and the world of which it is a representation. But that does not mean that we see a representation when we are looking at the world - it means exactly the opposite! The fact that seeing the world is LIKE something, and that particular something is “seeing a representation” gives rise to the persistent mistake of arguing that we see representations, and this mistake is the worse thing that ever happened to psychology, philosophy and “behavioral” neuroscience. Yes, what I am saying is that “qualia” is nothing more than the part behavior controlled by what we call v!
isual stimuli that we observe when we say “I see a tree.” It is a red herring exactly because the only thing that it is LIKE is “seeing a representation” but it IS NOT seeing a representation. It is only LIKE it. And it is like it because the behavior controlled is similar (but not the same).
This view will, no doubt, be vigorously contested, but I must, nonetheless, thank members of the group (and our Dear Moderator that makes the group possible), for being part of the environment that shaped the above artifact of my behavior. I believe that it is about as concisely as I have ever put it.
Cordially,
Glen
Larry Kaye
Many of the qualities we perceive are not physical qualities or kinds. for instance, I can see a crumpled shirt. But there's no hope of providing a reduction of that property to purely physcial properties. (Even though, no doubt, these properties "supervene" on physical properties--every crumpled shirt is made up of some complex set of physical attributes or other.) It's also, by the way, likely that the so-called secondary qualities are not physical/external--e.g., if color is not a property of the external environment, then it can't be that I see color in virtue of being reinforced to respond selectively to the colors. To get some idea of the problem: if you claim that I have been reinforced to respond selectively to 520nm light waves and label them "green" then you will have no explanation of why I also classify the shadows of red and white light as green (since the reflected wavelengths are not 520nms. But all the same, color shadows look vividly colored.) So the first p!
roblem is that many of the qualities we see are not physical qualities of the world, so an explanation in terms of reinforcement of selected reponses to physically characterized inputs won't work.
It's useful to consider the next two points together: Second, it seems obvious that we respond to only a small amount of the vast number of things and qualities that we actually see. Third, it is flattly false that in order to see something novel a person must be reinforced in some way. I might, for instance, pass a person on the street, take a good look at them and not respond in any way. And if I meet them again, I may well recognize that it's the same person. But there's been no reinforcement of any sort, nor have I responded in any way.
It is equally possible to, say, spot a new kind of animal--a kind of bird I've never seen before--and not respond in any way nor be reinforced in any way yet see and recognize it again a while later.
Think of a nice vacation in scenic vistas--how much of the scenery do we actually respond to? Andwhat's the reinforcement--seeing the beauty of the scene? (=disguised mentalism--see below)
Fourth, it's just not true that children learn to see in vitue of "reinforcement", at least as far as, say, selectively being given food pellets (or M&Ms, etc.) for appropriate responses. (What a horrible upbringing that would be!) Parents typically begin rewarding and punishing children (for good and bad behvior--which often has little to do with the kind of learning you're thinking about) long after they can see/perceive, and for that matter communicate a bit.
Fifth and finally, the underlying problem with the Skinnerian approach is that there's no non-circular way of specifying what counts as a reinforcer. As we all know, virtually anything can be rewarding depending on what your desires are like. Pain can be rewarding for a masochist or maybe for an athlete in intense training, and an M&M is not rewarding for those who don't like chocolate or who know that it will make them sick.
Skinner ultimately resorted to saying that a reinforcer is something that increases the frequency of emission of responses, but as I say that's a vacuously circular specification in relation to Skinner's main thesis: responses increase *because* they're being reinforced. (Similar problems occur for defining what a "response" is--if you're standing and looking at a painting, is that "looking behavior"? (=disguised mentalism) Is it behavior at all?) Now, if one adds mentalistic psychology: the response is increasing because the reinforcer is satisfying desires of the subject, then everying's fine; as Chomsky put it in his famous review of _Verbal Behavior_ what's beng touted as behavioristic psychology is really just common sense belief desire psychology with a new jargon that makes it appear like it's behaviorism.
Best,
Larry
-----Original Message-----
From: Glen M. Sizemore [mailto:gmsiz...@COX.NET]
Sent: Thursday, May 05, 2005 12:47 PM
To: PSYC...@LISTSERV.UH.EDU
Subject: Re: The Dance of the Copy Theorist
As Skinner was fond of saying, "...at some point the organism must do some of the things that were reinforced when it learned to see" (if this is not a direct quote, it is close enough). Say we reinforce a pigeon's key-pecking when the key is transilluminated by red light and have withheld reinforcement when the key is green, and the pigeon comes to peck when the key is red but little or not at all when the key is green. We say that the pigeon "sees red" or "can tell the difference" between green and red. Certainly this procedure involves seeing and, indeed, animal psychophysics is fairly standard laboratory science. But "where" is "the seeing" and just what is it? At some point all of the representing must come to an end (and the sooner the better!), but that "end" is precisely what is not specified by any form of representationalism. At some point the animal must take the sort of actions that we observe when we conclude that the animal is "seeing." The habit is to dismiss!
t!
he key-peck itself as not being the "seeing," and there is some usefulness to that distinction. But that does not mean that "seeing" is some pre-behavioral thing that happens before the animal behaves. Viewing perception as an action is, I think, explicit or implicit in all of what we have been calling here "direct perception." It is certainly explicit in radical behaviorism.
The final twist is this: Humans are trained to respond, not only to the public world, but also their own behavior. This is why we even talk about the "phenomenal aspects" of perception. With respect to "seeing," I have suggested, and will now do more than that now, that the ontogeny of eye movements holds much of the key to what "seeing" is. Eye movements have consequences (even during a saccade) and those consequences maintain the responses that produce them.
Skinner was also very fond of the so-called "observing procedure." In this procedure key-pecks on one key (the "food key") are reinforced (by delivery of food, of course) on some intermittent schedule when the light is, say, red, but this schedule of reinforcement alternates unpredictably with a period of time, during which the key is green, when key-pecks are never reinforced. After the pigeon develops discriminated responding, the conditions are changed such that the key color is neither red nor green but is, say, white. A second key (the observing key), however, is also illuminated white, and pecking that key changes the key color on the other key to the color that corresponds to the schedule that is in effect. Such behavior, of course, is maintained by the key-color change. Presumably, so is behavior that we can't see that we may label "seeing," and which occurs when the observing response is not explicitly required. The representationalist will not, of course, be happy !
with this view and argue that the "seeing" is something else. No doubt there is more to seeing than eye movements, but the subtlety of the response does not make it something other than behavior.
In conclusion, "seeing" and "hearing" etc. are responses maintained by their sensory changes and, ultimately, by the other consequences that characterize the contingencies in which such stimulation is embedded. The "phenomenal aspects" of seeing are LIKE something (as the overused quote goes) - and what they are like is seeing a literal copy in the sense that our eye movements will be similarly controlled by a photo and the world of which it is a representation. But that does not mean that we see a representation when we are looking at the world - it means exactly the opposite! The fact that seeing the world is LIKE something, and that particular something is "seeing a representation" gives rise to the persistent mistake of arguing that we see representations, and this mistake is the worse thing that ever happened to psychology, philosophy and "behavioral" neuroscience. Yes, what I am saying is that "qualia" is nothing more than the part behavior controlled by what we call v!
Glen M. Sizemore
main ones:
Many of the qualities we perceive are not physical qualities or kinds. for
instance, I can see a crumpled shirt. But there's no hope of providing a
reduction of that property to purely physcial properties. (Even though, no
doubt, these properties "supervene" on physical properties--every crumpled
shirt is made up of some complex set of physical attributes or other.)
Glen: I’m not sure it is impossible (nor am I sure what this has to do with Skinnerian behaviorism – this is a recurring theme), but as Herrnstein and Loveland pointed out in their studies of discrimination of natural categories, finding out what is controlling the behavior of individual subjects in the real world or in controlled experiments involving discrimination of natural objects is likely to be so difficult as to be nearly impossible and is not likely to tell us much. [My view is that it IS likely impossible – if there are enough of the features present in an example, that were present when behavior was reinforced,we get “accurate” responding. The next example might contain only a few of the features, but if other features are present, you will get accurate responding.] You somehow think that this is somehow antithetical to some principle espoused by behaviorists, but I don’t recognize the principle that you seem to be pointing to (see below) as one that is, in fact, !
espoused by behaviorism. We know, for example, that it is exposure to contingencies of reinforcement that is responsible for performance in experiments where non-humans are trained to respond “appropriately” to natural categories. I can get a pigeon to accurately call a shirt “crumpled” and so can you – but you would first have to read some of the literature generated by the experimental analysis of behavior (now usually called behavior analysis). The issue of “pinning down” the exact dimensions controlling behavior has nothing to do with the fact that the behavior that we do see is profoundly influenced by contingencies of reinforcement.
Larry:
also, by the way, likely that the so-called secondary qualities are not
physical/external--e.g., if color is not a property of the external
environment, then it can't be that I see color in virtue of being reinforced to
respond selectively to the colors. To get some idea of the problem: if you
claim that I have been reinforced to respond selectively to 520nm light waves
and label them "green" then you will have no explanation of why I also classify
the shadows of red and white light as green (since the reflected wavelengths
are not 520nms. But all the same, color shadows look vividly colored.) So the
first p!
roblem is that many of the qualities we see are not physical qualities of the
world, so an explanation in terms of reinforcement of selected reponses to
physically characterized inputs won't work.
Glen: I can gain control over responding by manipulating wavelength and arranging the proper contingencies. This does not mean that “wavelength” is the only variable that will control the response “red” or “green” or some equivalent response in a non-human animal. If I present a black valentine for a very brief period of time, observers will probably report that it is red. This does not mean, however, that the wavelength we associate with “red,” and the contingencies of which such stimuli are a part, are not important variables.
Larry: It's useful to consider the next two points together: Second, it seems obvious
that we respond to only a small amount of the vast number of things and
qualities that we actually see.
Glen: Right. This is because if we want to be sure to gain control by a particular dimension of a stimulus, we must arrange explicit contingencies [BTW, can you tell me how we would do this?]. In a classic experiment in the EAB, responding is reinforced in the presence of a circle on a red background, and extinguished in the presence of a square on a green background. Some animals will respond to a circle on a black background (rather than to a plain red stimulus), whereas others will respond to a plain red stimulus. We could, of course, make it so that the animals would only respond to color or to shape, but the necessary, specific contingencies were not arranged in the experiment described above.
Larry: Third, it is flattly false that in order to see
something novel a person must be reinforced in some way. I might, for instance,
pass a person on the street, take a good look at them and not respond in any
way.
Glen: The “looking” IS a response, and its characteristics can be plausibly attributed to contingencies – PAST contingencies.
Larry: And if I meet them again, I may well recognize that it's the same person.
But there's been no reinforcement of any sort, nor have I responded in any
way.
Glen: Where, in time, do you think the reinforcement is supposed to be? No reinforcement need be observable (especially by an outside observer) when you looked at the person. The characteristics of your “looking” have been produced by PAST reinforcement. A person whose behavior has been reinforced by, say, finding small fossils in the dirt, will likely do so better than someone who sees just as well, but has never found a small fossil in the dirt. This is because the behavior of looking has been shaped by reinforcement, not because the first person “sees better.”
Larry: It is equally possible to, say, spot a new kind of animal--a kind of bird I've
never seen before--and not respond in any way nor be reinforced in any way yet
see and recognize it again a while later.
Glen:
We learn to respond in subtle ways (at time “t=0”) that somehow “makes it so that we are later able to answer questions [and correct answers are reinforced] about what we have seen.” At first we are trained to describe our seeing while we are engaging in it, but with a gradual increase in delays we “come to note” (i.e. learn to respond in certain ways) because doing so has been reinforced (albeit at some delay) later when we correctly answer questions. But, again, your misconception here concerns the temporal locus of reinforcement; the behavior that you acquire is due to a PAST exposure to contingencies. Additionally, the behavior acquired is extremely subtle and complicated. Although cognitive psychologists might “study” such behavior, they have conceptualized it poorly AND they are not interested in its ontogeny – but the latter is simply an outcome of the former.
Larry: Think of a nice vacation in scenic vistas--how much of the scenery do we
actually respond to? Andwhat's the reinforcement--seeing the beauty of the
scene? (=disguised mentalism--see below)
Glen: Things seen can indeed be reinforcers – but what you are saying here has very little to do with behaviorism. Somehow you appear to have come to the conclusion that everything physically present when a response is reinforced should automatically be equally potent as a controlling variable.
Larry: Fourth, it's just not true that children learn to see in vitue of
"reinforcement", at least as far as, say, selectively being given food pellets
(or M&Ms, etc.) for appropriate responses. (What a horrible upbringing that
would be!) Parents typically begin rewarding and punishing children (for good
and bad behvior--which often has little to do with the kind of learning you're
thinking about) long after they can see/perceive, and for that matter
communicate a bit.
Glen: Even in non-human animals a variety of events function as reinforcers, and in humans it can no doubt be shown that certain sorts of novel visual and auditory stimuli function as reinforcers, as well as a variety of subtle (and often not-so-subtle) social stimuli. With reference to learning to see and hear etc. the early reinforcers are, I suggest, aspects of the sensory stimulation themselves. These very quickly become embedded in the larger set of contingencies that reinforce behavior that operates on the environment in a more dramatic fashion.
Larry: Fifth and finally, the underlying problem with the Skinnerian approach is that
there's no non-circular way of specifying what counts as a reinforcer.
Glen: Of course there is, and the answer given here basically covers all of the issues you raise below (even though I will respond more specifically to some of them). Reinforcement is simply the name give to a set of observations. These are:
1.) There must be a contingency between response and consequence.
2.) There must be an increase in the rate of the response.
3.) The rate increase must be due to the contingency (this last one requires some other observations and is often taken for granted – but I don’t wish to get unnecessarily complicated here).
Larry: As we
all know, virtually anything can be rewarding depending on what your desires
are like.
Glen: There are a bewildering variety of reinforcers, as I have already suggested, but saying that this is because of our “desires” is what is circular, since “our desires” are inferred from our behavior.
Larry: Pain can be rewarding for a masochist or maybe for an athlete in
intense training, and an M&M is not rewarding for those who don't like
chocolate or who know that it will make them sick.
Glen: The above observations are not at odds with the behaviorism that I am familiar with (except for the circularity implied by “masochist,” “don’t like chocalate,” as should be clear by now.
Larry: Skinner ultimately resorted to saying that a reinforcer is something that
increases the frequency of emission of responses, but as I say that's a
vacuously circular specification in relation to Skinner's main thesis:
responses increase *because* they're being reinforced. (Similar problems occur
for defining what a "response" is--if you're standing and looking at a
painting, is that "looking behavior"? (=disguised mentalism) Is it behavior at
all?) Now, if one adds mentalistic psychology: the response is increasing
because the reinforcer is satisfying desires of the subject, then everying's
fine; as Chomsky put it in his famous review of _Verbal Behavior_ what's beng
touted as behavioristic psychology is really just common sense belief desire
psychology with a new jargon that makes it appear like it's behaviorism.
Glen: I’ll just respond to the portions that I have not already covered. Our behavior when we stand in front of a painting is frequently quite subtle (but the “eye fixation point” literature directly measures some of it), and it is certainly a philosophical position to say that some behavior may be observable only to the observing individual (the issue of private events) or may not be observable by anyone! But this is not disguised mentalism because specifying the unobservable event as behavior constrains its nature, and suggests features of an animal’s ontogenic history that are important in order to observe the sorts of things from which the private behavior is inferred. Notice, however, that I am not saying that “having desires” is private behavior. There is nothing circular about the definition of reinforcement (as I have shown), and nothing that requires asserting the existence of unobservable entities (like “desires”) that are simply inferred from behavior and then emp!
loyed to explain it. Reinforcement is not a theory, but its extrapolation to complex behavior is philosophical, but there is no circularity there. I say, for example, that the way we behave when we look at something is reinforced behavior, but this is not circular in any sense. All it means is that the behavior exists at its current frequency because it has produced certain consequences in the past. It is not demonstrated – it is interpretation. So what? There are two issues: can the behavioral processes demonstrated in the laboratory lead to the cogent, internally-consistent interpretation of human behavior, and second, can that interpretation be shown to be correct (or at least likely) by experimental means. Despite what Chomsky says (nothing in his review is relevant to what Skinner wrote in Verbal Behavior, just as what you have written above has not much to do with what I said, or what Skinner said) I think that behaviorism does a pretty good job of interpreting comple!
x behavior in terms of the behavioral processes demonstrated in the la
boratory. “Proving” this is a different story (and some of the difficulties are primarily ethical – we could settle the dispute, for example, about how much exposure to language and other people, is necessary for acquisition of language and social behavior, but much of the easily imaginable research could not ethically be carried out in humans).
With the utmost respect,
Glen
<snip the tail>
>
> From: Larry Kaye <Larry...@UMB.EDU>
> Date: 2005/05/07 Sat PM 05:07:02 EDT
> To: PSYC...@LISTSERV.UH.EDU
> Subject: Re: The Dance of the Copy Theorist
>
Mark Peaty
Jose Monserrat Neto has been developing an explanatory schema much along the
lines of what you are proposing, which, judging by the quotes Jose supplies,
is also very much in line with proposals put forward by Antonio Damasio
certainly as far as your 'second order reps' goes.
See http://www.dcc.ufla.br/~monserrat/download/The_Wings_of_Imagination.pdf
<http://www.dcc.ufla.br/%7Emonserrat/download/The_Wings_of_Imagination.pdf>
Jose's schema is more radical [which you will find is an unavoidable pun if
you read his article :-] in proposing a flow of third order representations
as the basis of human consciousness.
For example: 'Extended memory does not suffice, because this does not
explain the symbolization capacity. Now in order that this capacity of
non-transitory symbolization emerges, still as an imaged, non-verbal
account, I posit the need for that third order flow of images, which is able
to have as its object the images of all modalities, including the images
produced by the third flow of images itself.'
This excerpt from his conclusion summarises his basic schema:
'I considered that the flow of images is generated in three levels: the
first order flow, which continuously maps the organism and the environment;
the second order flow , which maps the transformations of the organism
during its interaction with an object, generating in a primary and
transitory form the sense of self and the representation of the object; and
the third order flow, an original proposal of this work, which maps the
previous mapping, generating a meta-representation of the object and of self
of the organism, but now in a symbolic and non-transitory form.'
One thing I like in particular about Jose's proposal is that he is working
towards a way of talking about the status of representations as both
objective and subjective, as both real and fictitious. This is an issue
which I think is being referred to elliptically by several contributors to
Psyche-D. Some like to talk about a 'mystery' because, I assume, in our
workaday experience we rely absolutely on the successful perception of the
'real world' where we work, commute and so forth. Wrong perception could
have fatal results. Yet the evidence seems very good also that our
experience is all and always a construction within our brain [but *about*
the real world of course].
--
Regards
Mark Peaty
mpe...@arach.net.au
http://www.arach.net.au/~mpeaty/
>Subject: The Dance of the Copy Theorist
>
>
>The Dance of the Copy Theorist
>Despite his attack on the representationalism of
>Aristotle, the admonitions of Theophrastus went
>unheeded for thousands of years. Copy theory was just
>so compelling. It was so simple -
<<snip>>