On Going Beyond The Information Given & 'Cognition'
David Longley
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David Longley
Neil Rickert
>We face a major issue of truth-functionality if we fail to
>realise that when we say that someone 'said that.......', or
>'wrote that...', or 'thinks that...' etc. etc., we invariably
>*substitute* a clause which *we* consider to be logically
>equivalent to that which comprises the actual behaviour. In doing
>so, we often justify such actions (if and when pressed) by saying
>that the substituted clause 'means' the same thing.
When I say that someone 'said that ....', I am claiming that my
phrasing conveys a similar meaning. Whether my phrasing is logically
equivalent is of secondary importance, and often of little
relevance.
>Like it or not, I have taken this as a basic theme, and simply
>pointed out that we can not legitimately do this *and* claim that
>we are *reporting* anything.
In that case, reporting is impossible, and we should expunge the word
'reporting' from the language.
>Whether one refers to such behaviour as 'reading between the
>lines', 'cognition', 'interpretation', 'translation' or
>'meaning', matters little to my main point - namely that unless
>the original behaviour is quoted or described 'verbatim', one is
>not *reporting* observations at all. One is going dramatically
>beyond the information given.
Verbatim quoting can accurately convey the words spoken. But by
itself that is inadequate for reporting, for the reporter needs to
convey the meaning. However meaning depends on the context, and not
just on the words. Many a lie has been perpetrated with the use of
verbatim quotation which excluded the contextual considerations.
>The 'that' clause can be taken as a mark of the mental or
>cognitive idiom. As such, I see no way that there can be a
>*science* of cognition.
Are those two sentences supposed to be related? As for your "I see
no way that ...", I shall take it as an admission by you of an
unusual form of disability. I presume that your disability is a
result of your ideological committments.
> To pursue such a venture instead of
>behaviour science, can, I suggest, only be indicative of a
>failure to discriminate a basic, but nevertheless deviant feature
>of the way in which we use language.
A simple 32 bit adder is a component of most modern computer
processors. In order to analyze the adder behaviorally, one would
need to consider the output resulting from 2^64 different inputs.
In principle a computer can be analyzed behaviorally, but in
practice behaviorist approaches are absurdly primitive and
computers would never be built if we insisted on such methods.
You are foolishly arguing that because, in principle, behaviorist
methods are possible (at least on some theories), therefore one must
slavishly follow behaviorist principles in practice. You may prefer
to restrict yourself to behaviorist principles, but you should not be
insisting that others adopt the same foolishness.
David Longley
>
> Are those two sentences supposed to be related? As for your "I see
> no way that ...", I shall take it as an admission by you of an
> unusual form of disability. I presume that your disability is a
> result of your ideological committments.
There you go again, playing depth-psychologist (which has little
substance either).... To repeat my point again....if we do not
report what someone has *said* or *written* we do not report
their behaviour, if we do not report their behaviour, what are we
reporting? What we imagine? What we believe, certainly not what
they have physically done? If not what they have done - where do
we pick up this extra-sensory data from, how do we do it? - you
and some others seem to know......but there is no evidence,
ANYWHERE IN THE LITERATURE to substantiate such knowledge. It's
just very powerful folk-psychology - and like it or not, Quine
and others have blown a very big hole in it as a credible theory.
Only when one accepts this is one likely to begin to do any
useful work on the problem. Not recognising it as a problem is
probably just a matter of inexperience. Those have been most
vociferous in their objections so far are clearly working in what
are classical intensional paradigms.
What I am saying is that we create behaviours and act as if those
behaviours somehow belong to someone else - often by just 'saying
so'!
>
> You are foolishly arguing that because, in principle, behaviorist
> methods are possible (at least on some theories), therefore one must
> slavishly follow behaviorist principles in practice. You may prefer
> to restrict yourself to behaviorist principles, but you should not be
> insisting that others adopt the same foolishness.
>
>
No, I am arguing that what we know comes through our senses and
that all of this talk of meaning is just a poor substitute for
the necessary fine grained behaviour analysis.
--
David Longley
David Longley
fleh...@orion.oac.uci.edu "Fritz Lehmann" writes:
> In article <807627...@longley.demon.co.uk>,
> David Longley <Da...@longley.demon.co.uk> wrote:
> >To review the basic theme which runs through 'Fragments of
> >Behaviour: The Extensional Stance' [#1]:
> >We face a major issue of truth-functionality if we fail to
> >realise that when we say that someone 'said that.......', or
> >'wrote that...', or 'thinks that...' etc. etc., we invariably
> >*substitute* a clause which *we* consider to be logically
> >equivalent to that which comprises the actual behaviour. In doing
> >so, we often justify such actions (if and when pressed) by saying
> >that the substituted clause 'means' the same thing.
>
> This is a good point. But the solution lies in understanding
> the transformations (loss and gain of information) which take
> place in each stage of the chain of semiosis. There is a complicated
> chain of triadic sign-relations involved in communication....
Hold on hold on.......what actually happens is that people SAY
that other people have SAID something the latter have NOT said,
and the latter often COMPLAIN about it! Forget about your complex
chains of sign-relations, which are just, as Skinner says, arcane
DESCRIPTIONS of what you imagine is actually occurring, and
consider the fact that there is a genuine problem here, and that
all the literary juggling in the world is not going to explain it
away...
<snip>
>
> I don't trouble to carefully refute the view that what follows
> a "believes that..." or "says that..." clause is necessarily fictitious and
> meaningless, because that view just seems to me too obviously stupid
> and fundamentally vapid to deserve express refutation. The Plutonium
> Atom Whole Theory has more warrant --- and at least its propounder is
> occasionally witty (and to me _less_ irritating than the often pretentious
> and evasive Longley). If one has to say something positive and constructive,
> I say to Longley: study the hard (not mushy) part of semiotic theory
> and recognize the role of "meanings" in the chain of sign-relations. For
> an interesting idea of how semantic structure is transformed in
> intersubjective communication, see "Foliated Semantic Networks" by Robert
> Marty, Computers and Mathematics with Applications, v. 23, no.6-9,
> p.679-696, 1992, reprinted in Semantic Networks in Artificial Intelligence,
> Fritz Lehmann,
> ed., Pergamon Press, Oxford, 1992.
>
'Foliated Semantic Networks' - so now the trees have leaves as
well do they? There is no end of these models, they come and go
every year and just about nothing remains of them of any
substance. As it claims to have applications, I'll read it if you
recommend it (and are prepared to send me a copy).
The reason why you don't 'refute' my claim that when x says that
y said ' z ' when y actually said ' w ' is because one can't.
Everyone can see this behaviour happening all the time.
I have no desire to be scientistic, there is plenty of room for
humour, literature and its 'interpretation', and so on - the
world would be a gray place without these things - but one can
not apply scientific method to the idioms of propositional
attitude except in their de dicto sense, which is to say, as
behaviours. Stich says this very eloquently:
'This argument was part of a larger project. Influenced
by Quine, I have long been suspicious about the
integrity and scientific utility of the commonsense
notions of meaning and intentional content. This is not,
of course, to deny that the intentional idioms of
ordinary discourse have their uses, nor that the uses
are important. But, like Quine, I view ordinary
intentional locutions as projective, context sensitive,
observer relative, and essentially dramatic. They are
not the sorts of locutions we should welcome in serious
scientific discourse. For those who share this Quinean
scepticism, the sudden flourishing of cognitive
psychology in the 1970s posed something of a problem. On
the account offered by Fodor and other observers, the
cognitive psychology of that period was exploiting both
the ontology and the explanatory strategy of commonsense
psychology. It proposed to explain cognition and certain
aspects of behavior by positing beliefs, desires, and
other psychological states with intentional content, and
by couching generalisations about the interactions among
those states in terms of their intentional content. If
this was right, then those of us who would banish talk
of content in scientific settings would be throwing out
the cognitive psychological baby with the intentional
bath water. On my view, however, this account of
cognitive psychology was seriously mistaken. The
cognitive psychology of the 1970s and early 1980s was
not positing contentful intentional states, nor was it
(adverting) to content in its generalisations. Rather, I
maintained, the cognitive psychology of the day was
"really a kind of logical syntax (only psychologized).
Moreover, it seemed to me that there were good reasons
why cognitive psychology not only did not but SHOULD not
traffic in intentional states. One of these reasons was
provided by the Autonomy argument.'
Stephen P. Stich (1991)
Narrow Content meets Fat Syntax
in MEANING IN MIND - Fodor And His Critics
and writing with others in 1991, even more dramatically:
'In the psychological literature there is no dearth of
models for human belief or memory that follow the lead
of commonsense psychology in supposing that
propositional modularity is true. Indeed, until the
emergence of connectionism, just about all psychological
models of propositional memory, except those urged by
behaviorists, were comfortably compatible with
propositional modularity. Typically, these models view a
subject's store of beliefs or memories as an
interconnected collection of functionally discrete,
semantically interpretable states that interact in
systematic ways. Some of these models represent
individual beliefs as sentence like structures - strings
of symbols that can be individually activated by their
transfer from long-term memory to the more limited
memory of a central processing unit. Other models
represent beliefs as a network of labelled nodes and
labelled links through which patterns of activation may
spread. Still other models represent beliefs as sets of
production rules. In all three sorts of models, it is
generally the case that for any given cognitive episode,
like performing a particular inference or answering a
question, some of the memory states will be actively
involved, and others will be dormant......
The thesis we have been defending in this essay is that
connectionist models of a certain sort are incompatible
with the propositional modularity embedded in
commonsense psychology. The connectionist models in
question are those that are offered as models at the
COGNITIVE level, and in which the encoding of
information is widely distributed and subsymbolic. In
such models, we have argued, there are no DISCRETE,
SEMANTICALLY INTERPRETABLE states that play a CAUSAL
ROLE in some cognitive episodes but not others. Thus
there is, in these models, nothing with which the
propositional attitudes of commonsense psychology can
plausibly be identified. If these models turn out to
offer the best accounts of human belief and memory, we
shall be confronting an ONTOLOGICALLY RADICAL theory
change - the sort of theory change that will sustain the
conclusion that propositional attitudes, like caloric
and phlogiston, do not exist.'
W. Ramsey, S. Stich and J. Garon (1991)
Connectionism, eliminativism, and the future of folk
psychology.
--
David Longley
David Longley
> In article <807627...@longley.demon.co.uk>,
> David Longley <Da...@longley.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>
> >Like it or not, I have taken this as a basic theme, and simply
> >pointed out that we can not legitimately do this *and* claim that
> >we are *reporting* anything.
>
> In that case no "reporting" at all would be possible. Every
> report involves some level of interpretation and abstraction. Even
> Longley's direct quotes lose certain information in the originals
> (and gain some pretty silly information too in the uses of them).
>
> >Whether one refers to such behaviour as 'reading between the
> >lines', 'cognition', 'interpretation', 'translation' or
> >'meaning', matters little to my main point - namely that unless
> >the original behaviour is quoted or described 'verbatim', one is
> >not *reporting* observations at all. One is going dramatically
> >beyond the information given.
>
> All interpretation goes beyond the _data_ given; without
> interpretation data do not deserve to be called "information".
> Suppose Longley meticulously reports what he sees on a televised
> interview: "Subject prisoner rolls head back, shouts the word
> 'HELP!' " In fact all Longley can "report" is that field of
> pixels had certain apparent color/grey-scale values, and sounds.
> These data are of no interest.....
I'm not dealing with 'interpretation', 'cognition' etc., I'm
trying to minimise this. You will find, in 'Fragments...' a
relational system for PROfiling BEhaviour which in education is
known as Criterion Referencing. Ideally this becomes a matching
task where the behaviour is recorded as assent/dissent to
Observation Sentences. In practice the teachers, workshop
instructors and landing staff will have specific objectives which
they are teaching/training/supervising to and they will also have
specific tests to assess whether the requisite skills have been
mastered and to what extent. One of the advantages of rDBMS
routines and Statistical analyses such a regressions is that such
analyses will be standard and extensional. The system outlined as
'Sentence Management and Record of Targets' is not open to the
criticisms you correctly raise above. In fact, the whole system
was designed to avoid such problems. The system does end up
recording marks on OMR sheets, but these marks tie together pre-
requisites of courses and the demonstrable performance of those
behaving in relation to those requirements - that is, what is
recorded are inmate-environment interactions, and these classes
are related to other classes of behaviour. I don't claim that the
level the system now operates at is optimal, but it's better than
what has gone under the name of reporting as a basis for decision
making and judgment in the past.
--
David Longley
Neil Rickert
>In article <400mb0$l...@mp.cs.niu.edu> ric...@cs.niu.edu "Neil Rickert" writes:
>> Are those two sentences supposed to be related? As for your "I see
>> no way that ...", I shall take it as an admission by you of an
>> unusual form of disability. I presume that your disability is a
>> result of your ideological committments.
>There you go again, playing depth-psychologist (which has little
>substance either).... To repeat my point again....if we do not
>report what someone has *said* or *written* we do not report
>their behaviour, if we do not report their behaviour, what are we
>reporting?
I am not sure why you repeat your point. Perhaps you want to be sure
that everybody can see its absurdity. Physicists study electrons,
and report the behavior of electrons. They certainly don't report
exactly what the electrons say (i.e. nothing at all), for that would
be no basis for doing science. Biologists report animal behavior
without thinking that their reports must consist of exactly what the
animals say (i.e. nothing). If we were to follow your narrow
prescription we would have to completely abandon science.
> What we imagine? What we believe, certainly not what
>they have physically done? If not what they have done - where do
>we pick up this extra-sensory data from, how do we do it? - you
>and some others seem to know......but there is no evidence,
>ANYWHERE IN THE LITERATURE to substantiate such knowledge. It's
>just very powerful folk-psychology - and like it or not, Quine
>and others have blown a very big hole in it as a credible theory.
The problem is that your prescription on how things must be done goes
far beyond folk psychology. Keep in mind that I don't even believe
in folk psychology, yet your prescriptions seem obviously wrong to
me.
And you are surely misrepresenting Quine. For sure Quine has great
respect for mathematics. He considers it useful for analyzing what
goes on inside complex systems. This is quite contrary to your
interpretation of Quine.
>> You are foolishly arguing that because, in principle, behaviorist
>> methods are possible (at least on some theories), therefore one must
>> slavishly follow behaviorist principles in practice. You may prefer
>> to restrict yourself to behaviorist principles, but you should not be
>> insisting that others adopt the same foolishness.
>No, I am arguing that what we know comes through our senses and
>that all of this talk of meaning is just a poor substitute for
>the necessary fine grained behaviour analysis.
It doesn't matter whether you talk about meaning, or whether you deny
that meaning exists. If is of no import whether you talk about
intension and knowledge, or you deny that they exist. What is
important is that you consider internal structure and processes. The
"necessary fine grained behaviour analysis" is simply not possible,
because the complexity far exceeds our abilities to completely
measure that behavior in full detail. This is not likely to change
in the forseeable future.
Neil Rickert
> Stich says this very eloquently:
> .... But, like Quine, I view ordinary
> intentional locutions as projective, context sensitive,
> observer relative, and essentially dramatic. They are
> not the sorts of locutions we should welcome in serious
> scientific discourse.
It seems to me that part of your quote from Stich contradicts your
demand that only verbatim reports be allowed. The problem is that
verbatim reports rarely convey the contextual, relative and dramatic
aspects of what was said.
David Longley
To review the basic theme which runs through 'Fragments of
Behaviour: The Extensional Stance' [#1]:
We face a major issue of truth-functionality if we fail to
realise that when we say that someone 'said that.......', or
'wrote that...', or 'thinks that...' etc. etc., we invariably
*substitute* a clause which *we* consider to be logically
equivalent to that which comprises the actual behaviour. In doing
so, we often justify such actions (if and when pressed) by saying
that the substituted clause 'means' the same thing.
Like it or not, I have taken this as a basic theme, and simply
pointed out that we can not legitimately do this *and* claim that
we are *reporting* anything.
Whether one refers to such behaviour as 'reading between the
lines', 'cognition', 'interpretation', 'translation' or
'meaning', matters little to my main point - namely that unless
the original behaviour is quoted or described 'verbatim', one is
not *reporting* observations at all. One is going dramatically
beyond the information given.
The 'that' clause can be taken as a mark of the mental or
cognitive idiom. As such, I see no way that there can be a
*science* of cognition. To pursue such a venture instead of
behaviour science, can, I suggest, only be indicative of a
failure to discriminate a basic, but nevertheless deviant feature
of the way in which we use language.
This theme must be understood as the basic context for all that
is presented in Fragments of Behaviour: The Extensional Stance'
[#1].
[#1] sci.cognitive
sci.psychology.theory
comp.ai.philosophy
or e-mail request
--
David Longley
Russell Dale
>lines', 'cognition', 'interpretation', 'translation' or
>'meaning', matters little to my main point - namely that unless
>the original behaviour is quoted or described 'verbatim', one is
David,
In your remarks presented under the title given in the present
subject line, you made the above remark.
I am baffled.
Why "dramatically"? If I were *dramatically* wrong in saying
David believes that Quine is a smart fellow
I should expect that David actually has no relation whatsoever to the
ordinary reference of "Quine", for example.
There must be some motivation for the choice of words found in most
ordinary "that"-clauses! We can, in fact, predict each others behavior
too well on the basis of such reports for us to be *dramatically*
wrong.
Saying this is rather modest. I don't need to be committed here
(though I actually don't mind being committed - I just want to be
neutral right now) to intentional realism in any interesting sense.
--Russell E. Dale
russ...@ix.netcom.com
David Longley
To review the basic theme which runs through 'Fragments of
Behaviour: The Extensional Stance' [#1].
We face a major issue of truth-functionality if we fail to
realise that when we say that someone 'said that.......', or
'wrote that...', or 'thinks that...' etc. etc., we invariably
*substitute* a clause which *we* consider to be logically
equivalent to that which comprises the actual behaviour. In doing
so, we often justify such actions (if and when pressed) by saying
that the substituted clause 'means' the same thing.
Like it or not, I have taken this as a basic theme, and simply
pointed out that we can not legitimately do this *and* claim that
we are *reporting* anything.
Whether one refers to such behaviour as 'reading between the
lines', 'cognition', 'interpretation', 'translation' or
'meaning', matters little to my main point - namely that unless
the original behaviour is quoted or described 'verbatim', one is
not *reporting* observations at all. One is going dramatically
beyond the information given.
The 'that' clause can be taken as a mark of the mental or
cognitive idiom. As such, I see no way that there can be a
*science* of cognition. To pursue such a venture instead of
behaviour science, can, I suggest, only be indicative of a
failure to discriminate a basic, but nevertheless deviant feature
of the way in which we use language.
This theme must be understood as the basic context for all that
is presented in Fragments of Behaviour: The Extensional Stance'
[#1].
[#1] sci.cognitive
sci.psychology.theory
comp.ai.philosophy
or e-mail request
In article <4002ue$1...@ixnews4.ix.netcom.com>
russ...@ix.netcom.com "Russell Dale " writes:
> >Whether one refers to such behaviour as 'reading between the
> >lines', 'cognition', 'interpretation', 'translation' or
> >'meaning', matters little to my main point - namely that unless
> >the original behaviour is quoted or described 'verbatim', one is
> "One is going dramatically beyond the information given."
>
> David,
>
> In your remarks presented under the title given in the present
> subject line, you made the above remark.
>
> I am baffled.
>
> Why "dramatically"? If I were *dramatically* wrong in saying
>
> David believes that Quine is a smart fellow
>
> I should expect that David actually has no relation whatsoever to the
> ordinary reference of "Quine", for example.
The point is one of truth-functionality. For instance, in an
automated report writer, if one were to try to program such
behaviour one would need to have some sort of look-up table of
synonyms (and as Quine made a point of arguing in 'Two Dogmas of
Empiricism and everything since, we have no adequate criterion of
synonymy or analyticity).
My use of the word 'dramatically' in that context was unfortunate
perhaps. It is often used in this context to indicate 'dramatic
protrayal. That is, we imitate (euphemistically 'empathise') our
source. Perhaps story telling was the only way to get the gist of
something across long ago. However, regardless of how it 'seems'
we just *aren't* as good as we think we are at predicting each
other's behaviour (read also as 'understanding each other'). We
tend to collude without realising.
Good story-telling skills are not scientific skills, perhaps they
are somewhat incompatible indeed. (There's little doubt in my
mind which is more socially desirable, and lucrative though ).
One should never underestimate the forces of social-desirability
of course (;^>).
---
David Longley
Fritz Lehmann
>We face a major issue of truth-functionality if we fail to
>realise that when we say that someone 'said that.......', or
>'wrote that...', or 'thinks that...' etc. etc., we invariably
>*substitute* a clause which *we* consider to be logically
>equivalent to that which comprises the actual behaviour. In doing
>so, we often justify such actions (if and when pressed) by saying
>that the substituted clause 'means' the same thing.
This is a good point. But the solution lies in understanding
the transformations (loss and gain of information) which take
place in each stage of the chain of semiosis. There is a complicated
chain of triadic sign-relations involved in communication. The
informant A means B by utterance C, whereas the investigator D
interprets the (possibly corrupted) message C' as meaning E. In
diagram form the simplest version is:
Informant A Investigator D
\ /
\ /
\ /
SRE1----Message C------>SRE2
/ \
/ \
/ \
Meaning B Meaning E
where SRE1 and SRE2 are two triadic sign-relation-events and
Meaning E is a function (loosely speaking) of Meaning B and of
other contextual factors. Although one cannot conclude that Meaning
B and Meaning E are identical, that doesn't mean they don't exist.
It just means that the study of semiosis is not as easy or as simple
as straightforward "logical" shortcuts. There is nothing scientific
about dismissing as non-scientific whatever is hard to analyze.
The meaning B is not in arbitrary relation to meaning E, but
rather B generally very strongly constrains E.
>Like it or not, I have taken this as a basic theme, and simply
>pointed out that we can not legitimately do this *and* claim that
>we are *reporting* anything.
In that case no "reporting" at all would be possible. Every
report involves some level of interpretation and abstraction. Even
Longley's direct quotes lose certain information in the originals
(and gain some pretty silly information too in the uses of them).
>Whether one refers to such behaviour as 'reading between the
>lines', 'cognition', 'interpretation', 'translation' or
>'meaning', matters little to my main point - namely that unless
>the original behaviour is quoted or described 'verbatim', one is
>not *reporting* observations at all. One is going dramatically
>beyond the information given.
All interpretation goes beyond the _data_ given; without
interpretation data do not deserve to be called "information".
Suppose Longley meticulously reports what he sees on a televised
interview: "Subject prisoner rolls head back, shouts the word
'HELP!' " In fact all Longley can "report" is that field of
pixels had certain apparent color/grey-scale values, and sounds.
These data are of no interest -- but even abstracting from that the
existence of a prisoner's head, the opening of his/her mouth, the
uttering of sound, the formation of (some theoretical notion of)
"phonemes", the disambiguation and interpretation of these as
"words" (bringing in meaning immediately if these are to be distinguished
from squawks), etc., each requires a level of interpretation.
The statistical techniques in which Longley has faith will be of
little use, and depend themselves on crude assignments of pure instances
to predicate-classes.
>The 'that' clause can be taken as a mark of the mental or
>cognitive idiom. As such, I see no way that there can be a
>*science* of cognition. To pursue such a venture instead of
>behaviour science, can, I suggest, only be indicative of a
>failure to discriminate a basic, but nevertheless deviant feature
>of the way in which we use language.
This obsession with the word "science" is, as I truthfully joked before,
characteristic of Skinnerians, Marxists, polygraph salesmen and quacks.
Real scientists do not go around insisting that their work is scientific.
The fact that some subjects, like cognition, do not (now) admit of easy
measurement and mathematizing makes them no less "scientific", although
it makes the field ripe for suppositious theories other than Behaviorism.
In Artificial Intelligence we often joke about this concern to look and
act scientific as "physics envy" -- very true of Skinnerian Behaviorists.
I don't trouble to carefully refute the view that what follows
a "believes that..." or "says that..." clause is necessarily fictitious and
meaningless, because that view just seems to me too obviously stupid
and fundamentally vapid to deserve express refutation. The Plutonium
Atom Whole Theory has more warrant --- and at least its propounder is
occasionally witty (and to me _less_ irritating than the often pretentious
and evasive Longley). If one has to say something positive and constructive,
I say to Longley: study the hard (not mushy) part of semiotic theory
and recognize the role of "meanings" in the chain of sign-relations. For
an interesting idea of how semantic structure is transformed in intersubjective
communication, see "Foliated Semantic Networks" by Robert Marty, Computers
and Mathematics with Applications, v. 23, no.6-9, p.679-696, 1992,
reprinted in Semantic Networks in Artificial Intelligence, Fritz Lehmann,
ed., Pergamon Press, Oxford, 1992.
>David Longley
Yours truly, Fritz Lehmann
Clay Thurmond
> On Fragments of Behaviour and 'Going Beyond The Information Given'
>
> To review the basic theme which runs through 'Fragments of
> Behaviour: The Extensional Stance' [#1]:
>
> We face a major issue of truth-functionality if we fail to
> realise that when we say that someone 'said that.......', or
> 'wrote that...', or 'thinks that...' etc. etc., we invariably
> *substitute* a clause which *we* consider to be logically
> equivalent to that which comprises the actual behaviour. In doing
> so, we often justify such actions (if and when pressed) by saying
> that the substituted clause 'means' the same thing.
You say "invariably" here. Aren't you going beyond the information
given? *Nobody* *ever* realizes the provisional nature of their
paraphrases? Each instance of the use of a that-clause leads inexorably
and absolutely to a rigid equation of identity? (Where, by the way, does
this postulation of equivalence occur--in the mind(!?)?)
>
> Like it or not, I have taken this as a basic theme, and simply
> pointed out that we can not legitimately do this *and* claim that
> we are *reporting* anything.
What, then, are the criteria for being justified in claiming that we are
reporting something? Why is quoting someone's words considered reporting
something significant? Is it because this is a form of behavior which
happens to have as a property the ability to be transmitted as information
without subtracting from or adding to the literal message? If so, this
seems, in the context of the complexity of behavior, to be a rather
arbitrary criterion. How much of behavior conforms to this criterion?
Isn't it entirely possible that using only data that is so strictly
filtered gives scientists access to an infinitessimally small fraction of
all that makes up behavior? What then is the source of the optimism that
behaviorism can possibly be at all efficacious? How does this optimism
differ from a sort of blind faith? If the only data we can use is that
which is "quotable", how do we know we have not simply forbidden ourselves
at the outset from any understanding? If we are forbidden from
speculating about what might be under the tip of the iceberg, how can we
know that a survey of this tip will yield anything with any causal
relation whatever to any observable outcome?
[warning: the following is intensional] My impression of your arguments
is that you start from an argument against the efficacy of intensional
idioms, and conclude from that somehow that the avoidance thereof by only
engaging in direct quotation will lead to techniques which will give us a
firm grip on various social problems. I don't see how this follows.
Maybe I haven't been exposed to the evidence of the dazzling success of
this behaviorism. Meanwhile, you seem so preoccupied with showing the
limits of intensionality that it begins to seem that you are suggesting
that the conclusion you are offering about them leads quite naturally to a
faith in behaviorism.
>
> Whether one refers to such behaviour as 'reading between the
> lines', 'cognition', 'interpretation', 'translation' or
> 'meaning', matters little to my main point - namely that unless
> the original behaviour is quoted or described 'verbatim', one is
> not *reporting* observations at all. One is going dramatically
> beyond the information given.
>
> The 'that' clause can be taken as a mark of the mental or
> cognitive idiom. As such, I see no way that there can be a
> *science* of cognition. To pursue such a venture instead of
> behaviour science, can, I suggest, only be indicative of a
> failure to discriminate a basic, but nevertheless deviant feature
> of the way in which we use language.
I find this an odd use of the word "deviant". Maybe I'm going beyond the
information given in thinking that (sorry, I can't seem to help myself).
It suggests, among other things, that a behavior scientist is forbidden
from speculating about why we compulsively use "that-clauses."
Apparently, one can only be exasperated about this as one of the
curiosities of the "daft ways of man." But surely any psychologist must
have some sort of rudimentary theory or hypothesis about why so much
discourse is carried out in this fashion. It seems, however, that to
allow such ideas to influence the carrying out of behavior science would
be a going beyond the information given, which must be relentlessly
suppressed.
Your alternative to having a theory is to simply label the phenomenon
"deviant." Doesn't this still go "beyond the information given?" What
does it deviate from? What indeed might be the behaviorial effects on his
subjects of the tendency on the part of a practitioner to use such
language, which labels deviant that which is precisely natural and
ubiquitous? Or can a true hard-minded self-disciplined behaviorist
preventing any possible harmful connotations from infecting the carrying
out of the method in an encounter with a client?
Let me get back to your earlier statement:
> We face a major issue of truth-functionality if we fail to
> realise that when we say that someone 'said that.......', or
> 'wrote that...', or 'thinks that...' etc. etc., we invariably
> *substitute* a clause which *we* consider to be logically
> equivalent to that which comprises the actual behaviour. In doing
> so, we often justify such actions (if and when pressed) by saying
> that the substituted clause 'means' the same thing.
Here you are offering a conclusion about something "cognitive", aren't
you? You say "...*[W]e* consider [the that-clause] to be logically
equivalent to that which comprises the actual behavior." (I hope I haven't
mangled the quote too much.) This seems to be skirting dangerously close
to speculating about inner states. (What does it mean to "consider"?) Is
this a lapse on your part? A momentary fall into daftness? Or does it
hint at a covert cognitive theory? Such a theory would say that speakers
of intensional idioms are actually logicians. They use a very strict
identity logic ("invariably") to come to conclusions about their
hopelessly mentalistic formulations. They have a notion of "actual
behavior" which they wantonly conflate with their own ad hoc idiomatic
expressions (thus they are also underdeveloped behaviorists). They are
sort of larval mathematicians, having naively absorbed certain elements of
scientific logical thinking, which they then compulsively use ("if and
when pressed") to structure their own homey folk psychology. The
intensional idiom then is a sort of odd combination of a full fledged
behaviorism with a rudimentary and bizarre reliance on "that-clauses".
(If intentional idioms are so illogical, why is it that they always go
astray in a perfectly logical fashion? ("invariably") It's as if the
logic module is compelled to perform operations on the intensional
module.)
Thus we are all behavior scientists, only some of us are in a position to
be able to enter into a realm where we no longer mistakenly apply logical
rules to intensional idioms. We have achieved this state, presumably, by
submitting ourselves to behaviorial modification (otherwise known as
school). The rest of the world, not being professional behavior
scientists, must then allow themselves to be submitted to behavioral a
modification apparatus we have designed for them, the design process
having taken into consideration that they will stubbornly persist in their
deviant slavery to this combination of intensional idiom and logical
calculus. As for this stubborn persistence, we can only throw up our
hands and apply more pressure. (After all, it seems that everyone is a
behaviorist "if and when pressed")
To work your above quote over a bit more, I note that there is a "that-clause":
"...if we fail to realise that...we invariably
*substitute*..."
You are implying that you *do* realise what others fail to realise. Thus
"I (David Longley) realise that when we use the intensional idiom, we
invariably substitute a clause *we* consider to be logically equivalent to
what comprises the actual behavior." Is this an unfair deduction? Now,
isn't this formulation shot through with the intentional idiom? The form
is indistinguishable from, "I think that this happens invariably." By
applying this proposition to itself one can see that you are suggesting
that this invariable phenomenon--the "substitution of a clause which is
considered to be logically equivalent to the actual behavior" (slight
paraphrase), is itself logically equivalent to "what comprises the actual
behavior (the usage, that is, of the intensional idiom)." Aside from the
dizzying contradictions here, if you are right, then a phenomenon called,
say, "postulation of logical equivalence" is a behavior, it happens
invariably, and to "realise" it, as you recommend, is to engage in that
very behavior, "dramatically going beyond the information given." Your
system then is founded on a dramatic act and makes a claim that an
internal process is a behavior. Both of these moves are ruled deviant and
nonsensical by that very system.
Clay Thurmond
David Longley
>
> >There you go again, playing depth-psychologist (which has little
> >substance either).... To repeat my point again....if we do not
> >report what someone has *said* or *written* we do not report
> >their behaviour, if we do not report their behaviour, what are we
> >reporting?
>
> I am not sure why you repeat your point. Perhaps you want to be sure
> that everybody can see its absurdity. Physicists study electrons,
> and report the behavior of electrons. They certainly don't report
> exactly what the electrons say (i.e. nothing at all), for that would
> be no basis for doing science. Biologists report animal behavior
> without thinking that their reports must consist of exactly what the
> animals say (i.e. nothing). If we were to follow your narrow
> prescription we would have to completely abandon science.
>
What has this non sequitor got to do with anything? It is quite
clear that the subject is language, either spoken or written. My
point was that if we do not report what someone else says or
writes *we* must be adding something to what they have said or
written. Your remarks are a clear and extreme example of exactly
what I am talking about!
> > What we imagine? What we believe, certainly not what
> >they have physically done? If not what they have done - where do
> >we pick up this extra-sensory data from, how do we do it? - you
> >and some others seem to know......but there is no evidence,
> >ANYWHERE IN THE LITERATURE to substantiate such knowledge. It's
> >just very powerful folk-psychology - and like it or not, Quine
> >and others have blown a very big hole in it as a credible theory.
>
> The problem is that your prescription on how things must be done goes
> far beyond folk psychology. Keep in mind that I don't even believe
> in folk psychology, yet your prescriptions seem obviously wrong to
> me.
>
> And you are surely misrepresenting Quine. For sure Quine has great
> respect for mathematics. He considers it useful for analysing what
> goes on inside complex systems. This is quite contrary to your
> interpretation of Quine.
I'm not misrepresenting Quine at all. Intervening variables are
one thing, 'internal' processes another. IFF Quine has succumbed
to the internal/external metaphor somewhere, he and I part
company on there. I'd be interested to see where this is though.
>
> >> You are foolishly arguing that because, in principle, behaviorist
> >> methods are possible (at least on some theories), therefore one must
> >> slavishly follow behaviorist principles in practice. You may prefer
> >> to restrict yourself to behaviorist principles, but you should not be
> >> insisting that others adopt the same foolishness.
>
> >No, I am arguing that what we know comes through our senses and
> >that all of this talk of meaning is just a poor substitute for
> >the necessary fine grained behaviour analysis.
>
> It doesn't matter whether you talk about meaning, or whether you deny
> that meaning exists. If is of no import whether you talk about
> intension and knowledge, or you deny that they exist. What is
> important is that you consider internal structure and processes. The
> "necessary fine grained behaviour analysis" is simply not possible,
> because the complexity far exceeds our abilities to completely
> measure that behavior in full detail. This is not likely to change
> in the forseeable future.
>
Epicycles to you Rickert! <g>
Have you ever considered that the complexity is 'all in your
mind'. That's the trouble with cognitivism - you get lost in the
complexity and wonder of it all not realising that the complexity
is the result of all your 'internal' machinations. Probably
unlike you, I actually studied such models as part of my
professional training at one stage.
--
David Longley
David Longley
> In <807664...@longley.demon.co.uk> David Longley <Da...@longley.demon.co.
> uk> writes:
>
> > Stich says this very eloquently:
>
> > .... But, like Quine, I view ordinary
> > intentional locutions as projective, context sensitive,
> > observer relative, and essentially dramatic. They are
> > not the sorts of locutions we should welcome in serious
> > scientific discourse.
>
> It seems to me that part of your quote from Stich contradicts your
> demand that only verbatim reports be allowed. The problem is that
> verbatim reports rarely convey the contextual, relative and dramatic
> aspects of what was said.
>
> >and writing with others in 1991, even more dramatically:
>
>
That's another point about redundancy and the nature of communication. One
cam always ask for more infornmation.
What is critical is that there is a creative act which is additional to
the behaviour ostensibly being reported which is treated *as if* it is
part of the observed behaviour. The receipient of such serially reproduced
behaviour frequently is unaware that this is the case. (These are empirically
demonstrable facts - so don't bother arguing with me).
The themes developed in 'Word & Object' (1960) took some time to filter
into 'Cognitive Psychology', but when they did in the 1970s, the effect
was dramatic. I recall being told as much (though not undestanding this
back in 1979). I think we have a wave of graduates who are simply
confused about all of this - those graduating from the mid 60s onwards
were led to believe in the 'New Look' ushered in by Bruner and others -
by the late 1970s it all began to look like a 'flash in the pan'. Now,
we just have people confusedly talking about 'Cognitive-Behaviourism',
which actually means verbal behaviour most of the time.
1. "In the 1970's, Cognitive Science was formulated in
terms of Putnam's doctrine of functionalism, in which
mental states are the functional states of an abstract
digital computer, thinking is abstract symbol
manipulation as in the operation of a computer program,
and the mind's symbols get their meaning by denoting
things in the world. Functionalism has since become the
mainstream doctrine within the philosophy of mind. But
in the mid-1970's, overwhelming empirical evidence
against functionalism began to pile up, and in the late
1970's, Putnam himself found functionalism to be
logically incoherent. In this volume, Putnam brilliantly
reveals the philosophical fallacies in the doctrine he
founded, showing why functionalism must fail as a
philosophy of mind. The fall of functionalism has major
consequences for generative linguistics, artificial
intelligence, and cognitive and developmental
psychology".
Lakoff (1988).
2. "In short, "functionalism", if it were correct, would
imply behaviorism! If it is true that to possess given
mental states is simply to possess a certain "functional
organisation", then it is also true that to possess
given mental states is to possess certain behavior
dispositions!."
Putnam (1988)
3. The Chinese Room The Luminous Room
---------------- -----------------
Axiom 1 Computer programs are Axiom 1 Electricty and
formal (syntactic) Magnetism are forces.
Axiom 2 Human minds have Axiom 2 The essential property
mental contents (semantics) of light is luminence.
Axiom 3 Syntax by itself is Axiom 3 Forces by themselves are
neither consitutive nor neither consitutive nor
sufficient for semantics. sufficient for luminence.
Conclusion 1. Programs are Conclusion 1. Electricity and
neither constitutive of nor magnetism are neither constitutive
sufficient for minds. of nor sufficient for light.
P.M Churchland & P.S Churchland (1990)
As an applied psychologist with a research angle, I can assure you that
there is a move away from the muddle of cognitivism back to behaviour.
--
David Longley
David Longley
cla...@panix.com "Clay Thurmond" writes:
<snip>
> [warning: the following is intensional] My impression of your arguments
> is that you start from an argument against the efficacy of intensional
> idioms, and conclude from that somehow that the avoidance thereof by only
> engaging in direct quotation will lead to techniques which will give us a
> firm grip on various social problems. I don't see how this follows.
> Maybe I haven't been exposed to the evidence of the dazzling success of
> this behaviorism. Meanwhile, you seem so preoccupied with showing the
> limits of intensionality that it begins to seem that you are suggesting
> that the conclusion you are offering about them leads quite naturally to a
> faith in behaviorism.
As you say, much of what you say is <intensional>. What I have
said doesn't lead to faith in anything - if you want to see what
I am trying to offer as an alternative - read 'Fragments of
Behaviour: The Extensional' - those of my colleagues who have,
acknowledge that it addresses a genuine problem - perhaps you
might agree.
Much of the rest of what you say is not deduction, but induction.
I misrepresent what others say as frequently as anyone else under
natural circumstances, but..and its a big but.....when I claim to
be behaving as a professional, I advocate the use of extensional
technology. Socially it is almost impossible not to be shaped
into behaving the way that we professionally know is dubious.
C'est la vie.
--
David Longley
Aaron Sloman
> Date: Sat, 05 Aug 95 23:18:09 GMT
>
> In article <400r2l$g...@news.service.uci.edu>
> fleh...@orion.oac.uci.edu "Fritz Lehmann" writes:
> ....
> > This is a good point. But the solution lies in understanding
> > the transformations (loss and gain of information) which take
> > place in each stage of the chain of semiosis. There is a complicated
> > chain of triadic sign-relations involved in communication....
>
> Hold on hold on.......what actually happens is that people SAY
> that other people have SAID something the latter have NOT said,
> and the latter often COMPLAIN about it!
^^^^^
This is a pretty poor argument. Are you aware of the difference in
meaning between "often", "always", "most of the time" ? The fact
that electricity meters often go wrong does not entail that they are
always wrong, mostly wrong, or that there's nothing for them to
measure, rightly or wrongly.
Similarly, the fact that reports of utterances are OFTEN wrong does
not entail that they are ALWAYS wrong, or MOSTLY wrong, or that it
makes NO SENSE for them ever to be right.
> <snip>
[FL]
> > I don't trouble to carefully refute the view that what follows
> > a "believes that..." or "says that..." clause is necessarily fictitious and
> > meaningless, because that view just seems to me too obviously stupid
> > and fundamentally vapid to deserve express refutation.
>....
> The reason why you don't 'refute' my claim that when x says that
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> y said ' z ' when y actually said ' w ' is because one can't.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
The reason one can't is that the words underlined do not form a
grammatically complete sentence and do not say anything capable of
being true or false, and therefore there's nothing to support or
refute. Perhaps you meant to write:
When x says that y said ' z ' when y actually said ' w ' then
x is saying something false.
This is just false, people often truly say what someone else said,
while using different words than the original. E.g. every time a
good paraphrase or translation is produced. I have had students or
colleagues summarise or paraphrase some of what I've said and
written and I can assure you they very often (not always) produce
correct accounts of what I've said.
> Everyone can see this behaviour happening all the time.
^^^^^^^^^^^^
Wow! Is this a documented result of behavioural analysis?
In my social and academic life I am surrounded by people who much of
the time get their reporting and paraphrasing and summarising right.
Of course mistakes can happen and do happen. But, for your purposes
(persuading everyone to use PROBE?) you need to prove that there's
no possibility of getting non-quotational reporting right. You
can't: because there's already enough evidence that some such
reports are correct, and even ONE example proves that it's possible.
(That's a theorem of modal logic.)
If you learn to live with that you'll be able to get on and do
useful statistical analyses of behaviour and maybe give practical
help to some people.
If you go on trying to banish intensional and intentional utterances
(NB they are two distinct categories, with some overlap, and not to
be confused) from serious scientific and engineering reports and
theories, by repeatedly quoting Quine, Stitch, or anyone else, you
are going to be very disappointed.
There's my prediction about your mental state (not your behaviour)
in the foreseeable future. Sorry!
Cheers.
Aaron
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
<snip>
> This is a pretty poor argument. Are you aware of the difference in
> meaning between "often", "always", "most of the time" ? The fact
> that electricity meters often go wrong does not entail that they are
> always wrong, mostly wrong, or that there's nothing for them to
> measure, rightly or wrongly.
>
> Similarly, the fact that reports of utterances are OFTEN wrong does
> not entail that they are ALWAYS wrong, or MOSTLY wrong, or that it
> makes NO SENSE for them ever to be right.
>
<snip>
All you need to do is look at the exchanges here on the net. As o the rest
of what you are doing here - it's errm pedantic and obfuscatory.
--
David Longley
Neil Rickert
>In article <4017k9$p...@mp.cs.niu.edu> ric...@cs.niu.edu "Neil Rickert" writes:
>> I am not sure why you repeat your point. Perhaps you want to be sure
>> that everybody can see its absurdity. Physicists study electrons,
>> and report the behavior of electrons. They certainly don't report
>> exactly what the electrons say (i.e. nothing at all), for that would
>> be no basis for doing science. Biologists report animal behavior
>> without thinking that their reports must consist of exactly what the
>> animals say (i.e. nothing). If we were to follow your narrow
>> prescription we would have to completely abandon science.
>What has this non sequitor got to do with anything? It is quite
>clear that the subject is language, either spoken or written.
Then perhaps you are under the illusion that language is central to
cognition. Surely this was a position Quine has been arguing
against.
Even if you want to say that the subject is language, my argument
holds. If the only way to report language is with verbatim reports,
then the only way to report visual observation must be with an exact
duplication of the stream of photons. You simply cannot do science
in that way. When you speak, and I listen, I do not record a
verbatim reproduction of your speech in my brain. I interpret it,
and my memory will be of my interpretation. On your theory,
listening must be impossible since it depends on interpretation
rather than on verbatim recording.
>> It doesn't matter whether you talk about meaning, or whether you deny
>> that meaning exists. If is of no import whether you talk about
>> intension and knowledge, or you deny that they exist. What is
>> important is that you consider internal structure and processes. The
>> "necessary fine grained behaviour analysis" is simply not possible,
>> because the complexity far exceeds our abilities to completely
>> measure that behavior in full detail. This is not likely to change
>> in the forseeable future.
>Epicycles to you Rickert! <g>
Perhaps you think there was something logically wrong with
epicycles. There wasn't. Today we would recognize the epicycles as
the first terms in a Fourier series expansion. The advantage of the
Copernican system is that the mathematics is much simpler.
>Have you ever considered that the complexity is 'all in your
>mind'.
Are you suggesting solipsism, or perhaps idealism? On an ordinary
view the eye has something like a billion receptors. That is a lot
of complexity. You would not be able to see were there not internal
processes to sort it all out.
> That's the trouble with cognitivism - you get lost in the
>complexity and wonder of it all not realising that the complexity
>is the result of all your 'internal' machinations. Probably
>unlike you, I actually studied such models as part of my
>professional training at one stage.
Please don't assume I am an adherent of cognitivism. I am not. As
you suggest, I have not had the misfortune of being indoctrinated in
cognitivism as part of my training. Perhaps that is why it seems
silly to me. But your extreme behaviorism seems just as silly.
Neil Rickert
>In article <40182q$p...@mp.cs.niu.edu> ric...@cs.niu.edu "Neil Rickert" writes:
>> In <807664...@longley.demon.co.uk> David Longley <Da...@longley.demon.co.
>> uk> writes:
>> It seems to me that part of your quote from Stich contradicts your
>> demand that only verbatim reports be allowed. The problem is that
>> verbatim reports rarely convey the contextual, relative and dramatic
>> aspects of what was said.
>That's another point about redundancy and the nature of communication. One
>cam always ask for more infornmation.
If we are talking about a report of speech, one can ask the reporter
for more information, but one often cannot ask the original speaker
for more information. But, on your theory, the reporter cannot give
more information for he is restricted to verbatim reports. Even the
request for more information requires that the reporter interpret.
>2. "In short, "functionalism", if it were correct, would
> imply behaviorism! If it is true that to possess given
> mental states is simply to possess a certain "functional
> organisation", then it is also true that to possess
> given mental states is to possess certain behavior
> dispositions!."
> Putnam (1988)
I agree with Putnam's point, but I disagree with the way you are
interpreting it. Putnam did not propose that we should all go back
to behaviorism.
Behavioral evidence is all there is. A scientist must rely on such
evidence. But that does not imply that scientific descriptions must
be limited to behavior. Theories about interal processes might
provide good summaries of the behavioral evidence, much as theories
about nuclear reactions inside the sun provide a good summary of the
evidence from surface radiation.
>3. The Chinese Room The Luminous Room
> ---------------- -----------------
>...
I do not understand the purpose of the quote. The Churchlands are by
no means behaviorists.
>As an applied psychologist with a research angle, I can assure you that
>there is a move away from the muddle of cognitivism back to behaviour.
If the move is to a sophisticated behaviorism which uses behavioral
evidence to develop effective theories about internal processes, then
this will be a positive move. If the move is to a stultifying
Longley-style behaviorism, which requires all theories to be framed
in purely behavioral terms, then that would be most unfortunate for
psychology.
David Longley
>
> > The reason why you don't 'refute' my claim that when x says that
> ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> > y said ' z ' when y actually said ' w ' is because one can't.
> ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
>
It seems clear to me....
> The reason one can't is that the words underlined do not form a
> grammatically complete sentence and do not say anything capable of
> being true or false, and therefore there's nothing to support or
> refute. Perhaps you meant to write:
>
> When x says that y said ' z ' when y actually said ' w ' then
> x is saying something false.
>
> This is just false, people often truly say what someone else said,
> while using different words than the original. E.g. every time a
> good paraphrase or translation is produced. I have had students or
> colleagues summarise or paraphrase some of what I've said and
> written and I can assure you they very often (not always) produce
> correct accounts of what I've said.
>
> > Everyone can see this behaviour happening all the time.
> ^^^^^^^^^^^^
>
> Wow! Is this a documented result of behavioural analysis?
Yes, see:
G W Allport and L Postman (1947) 'The psychoogy of Runor'
H H Holt and Co.
It's known as Serial Reproduction and is a standard 1st year lab practical.
>
> In my social and academic life I am surrounded by people who much of
> the time get their reporting and paraphrasing and summarising right.
>
> Of course mistakes can happen and do happen. But, for your purposes
> (persuading everyone to use PROBE?) you need to prove that there's
> no possibility of getting non-quotational reporting right. You
> can't: because there's already enough evidence that some such
> reports are correct, and even ONE example proves that it's possible.
> (That's a theorem of modal logic.)
I seriously propose that what is happening above is collusion. One says
something, someone else rephrases it, you then agree with what what they
have said and 'believe' it is the same as what you said originally - but
it isn't - it is in akin to hearsay!
Collusion is a very good description of what's going on.
>
> If you learn to live with that you'll be able to get on and do
> useful statistical analyses of behaviour and maybe give practical
> help to some people.
>
This is just social conformity - see the Asch experiments.
> If you go on trying to banish intensional and intentional utterances
> (NB they are two distinct categories, with some overlap, and not to
> be confused) from serious scientific and engineering reports and
> theories, by repeatedly quoting Quine, Stitch, or anyone else, you
> are going to be very disappointed.
>
Not banish so much as find more effective alternatives.
> There's my prediction about your mental state (not your behaviour)
> in the foreseeable future. Sorry!
>
So we should all just jump on the popular bandwagons eh? That's exactly
what I think the problem is in contemporary cognitive science.....
--
David Longley
David Longley
>
> Then perhaps you are under the illusion that language is central to
> cognition. Surely this was a position Quine has been arguing
> against.
>
Please see:
'The Five Milestones of Empiricism' in Quine's Theories and Things
(1981).
I'm not prepared to argue something so clearly documented. We are talking
about science - and scientists talk languages, preferably formal ones.
--
David Longley
Neil Rickert
>Please see:
That Quine supports formal languages, I do not doubt. My comment was
about natural language. If you think that natural languages and
formal languages are the same type of thing, you are surely
mistaken.
You may prefer that scientists talk in formal languages. The fact is
that they mainly use natural language. Even mathematicians use
natural language far more than they use formal languages. The
assumption that science could be carried out purely in formal
language is fallacious. The evident failure of logical positivism is
evidence of that fallaciousness.
Jim Balter
David Longley <Da...@longley.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>In article <400mb0$l...@mp.cs.niu.edu> ric...@cs.niu.edu "Neil Rickert" writes:
>>
>> Are those two sentences supposed to be related? As for your "I see
>> no way that ...", I shall take it as an admission by you of an
>> unusual form of disability. I presume that your disability is a
>> result of your ideological committments.
>
>substance either).... To repeat my point again....if we do not
>report what someone has *said* or *written* we do not report
>their behaviour, if we do not report their behaviour, what are we
>we pick up this extra-sensory data from, how do we do it? - you
>and some others seem to know......but there is no evidence,
>ANYWHERE IN THE LITERATURE to substantiate such knowledge. It's
>just very powerful folk-psychology - and like it or not, Quine
>and others have blown a very big hole in it as a credible theory.
>useful work on the problem. Not recognising it as a problem is
>probably just a matter of inexperience. Those have been most
>vociferous in their objections so far are clearly working in what
>are classical intensional paradigms.
Tycho Brahe reported the behavior of the stars. What, then did Johannes
Kepler do? Was Brahe doing science but not Kepler? Do you suppose that, just
because there is nothing in the literature to substantiate the knowledge
claimed by astrologers, the same applies to Kepler, Newton, Einstein,
et. al.?
BTW *what* someone has said or written is not *behavior*, it is the *saying*
and the *writing* that is behavior. If you want to report their behavior,
get a video camera. And then start teaching mathematics, history, etc. by
playing video tapes of mathematicians, historians, etc. at work.
>No, I am arguing that what we know comes through our senses and
>that all of this talk of meaning is just a poor substitute for
>the necessary fine grained behaviour analysis.
I'm sure my cat, with her fine senses, would make a great behavior scientist.
What really worries me is that "behavior scientists" want to be, not merely
scientists, but also engineers, politicians, and administrators. Perhaps a
keener understanding of what science *is* would help. And perhaps what is
missing here is a fine-grain analysis of the behavior of "behavior
scientists", along with some coarse correction to stem their anti-societal
tendencies.
--
<J Q B>
Jim Balter
David Longley <Da...@longley.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>In article <4017k9$p...@mp.cs.niu.edu> ric...@cs.niu.edu "Neil Rickert" writes:
>>
>> >substance either).... To repeat my point again....if we do not
>> >report what someone has *said* or *written* we do not report
>> >their behaviour, if we do not report their behaviour, what are we
>> >reporting?
>>
>> that everybody can see its absurdity. Physicists study electrons,
>> and report the behavior of electrons. They certainly don't report
>> exactly what the electrons say (i.e. nothing at all), for that would
>> be no basis for doing science. Biologists report animal behavior
>> without thinking that their reports must consist of exactly what the
>> animals say (i.e. nothing). If we were to follow your narrow
>> prescription we would have to completely abandon science.
>>
>
>What has this non sequitor got to do with anything? It is quite
>point was that if we do not report what someone else says or
>writes *we* must be adding something to what they have said or
>written. Your remarks are a clear and extreme example of exactly
>what I am talking about!
Yes, we add analysis, redaction, comprehension, sense, and understanding.
You are welcome to continue to eschew such qualities.
--
<J Q B>
Jim Balter
David Longley <Da...@longley.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>In article <402fck$i...@sun4.bham.ac.uk> a...@cs.bham.ac.uk "Aaron Sloman" writes:
>
>
>> This is a pretty poor argument. Are you aware of the difference in
>> meaning between "often", "always", "most of the time" ? The fact
>> that electricity meters often go wrong does not entail that they are
>> always wrong, mostly wrong, or that there's nothing for them to
>> measure, rightly or wrongly.
>>
>> Similarly, the fact that reports of utterances are OFTEN wrong does
>> not entail that they are ALWAYS wrong, or MOSTLY wrong, or that it
>> makes NO SENSE for them ever to be right.
>>
><snip>
>
>All you need to do is look at the exchanges here on the net. As o the rest
>of what you are doing here - it's errm pedantic and obfuscatory.
Yes, looking at the exchanges here on the net does seem quite clearly to
support Aaron's statement, although you do your bit to push "often wrong"
toward "mostly wrong". Your "pedantic and obfuscatory" is certainly
self-fulfilling as a misrepresentation.
--
<J Q B>
David Longley
>
> If the move is to a sophisticated behaviorism which uses behavioral
> evidence to develop effective theories about internal processes, then
> this will be a positive move. If the move is to a stultifying
> Longley-style behaviorism, which requires all theories to be framed
> in purely behavioral terms, then that would be most unfortunate for
> psychology.
>
>
'Longley-style behaviourism actually is - - I agree it would be a
bad thing for psychology. I think behaviour science is a totally
different discipline as I have said in the text of 'Fragments of
Behaviour: The Extensional Stance'. Or are you confusing
psychology and behaviour science?
If not phrased in behavioural terms, what terms do you think it
should be framed in ?
Don't confuse your own poor understanding of radical behaviourism
with what what is the case. The reason for peppering my remarks
with direct quotation has been to try to forestall the type of
remarks you have frequently been making. (it is just silly to
suggest that I might be unaware of the difference between natural
and formal languages given all that has been said on FOL as a
medium). As to the problem of natural language. surely the
extract below in conjunction with all of the material on
intensional idioms (which is the larger set which includes
intentional terms) should suffice to explain why natural language
is not truth functional (cf. also extract from Tarski's classic
paper on Truth in Formalised Languages). See the following by
Skinner also.
[For the record, many, including myself consider Quine to have
taken what the early positivists to a successful conclusion
through 'Two Dogmas of Empiricism' and 'Word and Object'] No
doubt this will be made more explicit in his forthcoming book
'From Stimulus to Science' due out in the Autumn]..
'The major contributions of operationism have been
negative, largely because operationists failed to
distinguish logical theories of reference from
empirical accounts of language. behaviorism never
finished an adequate formulation of verbal reports
and therefore could not convincingly embrace subjective
terms. But verbal responses to private stimuli can
arise as social products through the contingencies
of reinforcement arranged by verbal communities.
In analysing traditional psychological terms, we need
to know their stimulus conditions ("finding the
referent"), and why each response is controlled
by that condition. Consistent reinforcement of
verbal responses in the presence of stimuli
presupposes stimuli acting upon both the speaker
and the reinforcing community, but subjective terms,
which apparently are responses to private stimuli, lack
this characteristic. Private stimuli are physical,
but we cannot account for these verbal responses by
pointing to controlling stimuli, and we have not shown
how verbal communities can establish and maintain
the necessary consistency of reinforcement
contingencies.
Verbal responses to private stimuli may be maintained
through appropriate reinforcement based on public
accompaniments, or through reinforcements accorded
responses made to public stimuli, with private cases
then occurring by generalisation. These
contingencies help us understand why private terms
have never formed a stable and uniform vocabulary:
It is impossible to establish rigorous vocabularies
of private stimuli for public use, because
differential reinforcement cannot be made contingent
upon the property of privacy. The language of private
events is anchored in the public practices of the
verbal community, which make individuals aware only by
differentially reinforcing their verbal responses with
respect to their own bodies. The treatment of verbal
behavior in terms of such functional relations between
verbal responses and stimuli provides a radical
behaviorist alternative to the operationism of
methodological behaviorists.'
B. F. SKINNER
The Operational analysis of psychological terms.
BBS (1984),7 547-81
(originally 1945 psych. rev 32: 270-77,291-94).
'....it is surely a strange irony of contemporary
psychology that an approach which, as far back as 1945,
established its identity on the basis of its recognition
of the "inner life" of humans should be so often be
charged with the error of ruling it out of
court.....Recently for example, a new movement within
clinical psychology, known as cognitive behavior therapy
has found it necessary to adopt the conceptual apparatus
of cognitivism apparently out of a mistaken belief that
the behavioral approach cannot deal with the
modification of people's covert behavior...'
F. Lowe (1984)
Commentary on Skinner's 'Terms' BBS p563
'Lowe has predictably, summarised my position correctly,
and I am happy to join him in calling for the next step:
research on self-knowledge and self-management and their
possible effects on human behavior in general. I would
formulate his questions in a rather different way,
however. I doubt whether "the effects of reinforcement
are altered qualitatively when subjects acquire the
skill of generating verbal descriptions" of their own
behavior and its consequences. When they do, they
generate other controlling variables which play a part
in controlling subsequent behavior. That it why it is so
hard to do research on operant behavior in human
subjects who have learned to analyse the contingencies
to which they are exposed. Their analyses (whether or
not they are correct) enter into the control of their
behavior as self generated rules. Research on human
behavior which compares most successfully in small
children and retarded persons or when the contingencies
are concealed. My answer to Lowe's second question (Is
"human performance that is free of this 'interfering'
consciousness...indistinguishable from that of animals")
is yes, although the data Lowe (1983) cites may prove me
wrong.
Skinner 'Response to Lowe' TERMS PAPER, p576
Canonical Papers BBS 1984 ed. Catania
--
David Longley
Neil Rickert
>In article <402lak$9...@mp.cs.niu.edu> ric...@cs.niu.edu "Neil Rickert" writes:
>> If the move is to a sophisticated behaviorism which uses behavioral
>> evidence to develop effective theories about internal processes, then
>> this will be a positive move. If the move is to a stultifying
>> Longley-style behaviorism, which requires all theories to be framed
>> in purely behavioral terms, then that would be most unfortunate for
>> psychology.
>Perhaps you would care to explicate exactly what you think this
>'Longley-style behaviourism actually is - - I agree it would be a
>bad thing for psychology.
It is a foolish insistence that everything be framed in purely
behavioral terms (as if that were even possible).
>If not phrased in behavioural terms, what terms do you think it
>should be framed in ?
It should be framed in terms of hypothesized internal processes which
would generate the behavior. That would be a far more compact form
of representation. The complexity of human behavior is such that a
method which insists on a restriction to behavioral terms will
quickly be choked in data. Either that, or it risk missing many of
the important variables.
>Don't confuse your own poor understanding of radical behaviourism
>with what what is the case.
Whether or not I understand radical behaviorism is beside the point.
I am mainly discussing Longley behaviorism, which may be a different
and more restrictive form of behaviorism.
> The reason for peppering my remarks
>with direct quotation has been to try to forestall the type of
>remarks you have frequently been making.
No doubt this is a lead in to more of your infuriating quotes.
A quote from Skinner may tell me about Skinner's behaviorism, but
it tells me nothing about Longley's behaviorism. A quote from
Quine may tell me something about Quine's behaviorism (which is
not the same as Skinner's behaviorism), but it is not informative
about Longley's behaviorism.
> (it is just silly to
>suggest that I might be unaware of the difference between natural
>and formal languages given all that has been said on FOL as a
>medium).
You make assertions which seem wrong. When challenged you do not
defend your assertions, but just include quotes which often seem to
not fit the circumstances. We are left never being sure of what
Longley is proposing. If you will not defend and explain your
proposals, I am left with no alternative but to interpret them at
face value.
> As to the problem of natural language. surely the
>extract below in conjunction with all of the material on
>intensional idioms (which is the larger set which includes
>intentional terms) should suffice to explain why natural language
>is not truth functional (cf. also extract from Tarski's classic
>paper on Truth in Formalised Languages). See the following by
>Skinner also.
I shall interpret this as an admission that you are incapable of
arguing the position yourself. Instead you just quote and the quotes
do not directly argue the issue. Incidently my text editor could
not find the string 'tru' anywhere in the quotes -- so much for
your purported evidence about truth functionality in natural
language.
>[For the record, many, including myself consider Quine to have
>taken what the early positivists to a successful conclusion
>through 'Two Dogmas of Empiricism' and 'Word and Object'] No
>doubt this will be made more explicit in his forthcoming book
>'From Stimulus to Science' due out in the Autumn]..
Quine is usually taken as having separated himself from positivism.
That you should interpret "Two Dogmas" as bringing positivism
to a successful conclusion seems to be a misinterpretation.
Neil Rickert
>In article <402lak$9...@mp.cs.niu.edu> ric...@cs.niu.edu "Neil Rickert" writes:
>> >2. "In short, "functionalism", if it were correct, would
>> > imply behaviorism! ...
>> > Putnam (1988)
>> I agree with Putnam's point, but I disagree with the way you are
>> interpreting it. Putnam did not propose that we should all go back
>> to behaviorism.
>No, perhaps not, but he says in several places that he knows where he is
>being led by the points that Quine has raised. It is also the case that
>elsewhere, functionalism has been regarded as a form of behaviourism,
>albeit cognitive-behaviourism.
Putnam not only says that he knows where he is being led -- he tell
us where that is. His conclusion is that cognition has to do with
the relation between the individual and the environment. He also
adopts a non-reductionist view. Perhaps you think that equivalent to
behaviorism, but Putnam's views are rather more sophisticated than
Skinner's version of behaviorism or than your version (as I interpret
it). And Putnam spends a great deal of time talking about meaning.
If I understand you, talk about meaning should be abolished under
your behaviorism.
>> Behavioral evidence is all there is. A scientist must rely on such
>> evidence. But that does not imply that scientific descriptions must
>> be limited to behavior. Theories about interal processes might
>> provide good summaries of the behavioral evidence, much as theories
>> about nuclear reactions inside the sun provide a good summary of the
>> evidence from surface radiation.
>It does if you accept that one can only describe what there 'is', ie what
>can be quantified into.
If I correctly interpret what you are saying, I think it rather
silly. Quite often we don't decide that something 'is' until after
it has been described. It is not at all clear that you could make
such a decision before it were described. Priestley described
phlogiston, which was thought to be something that 'was', while
Lavoisier described oxygen which many thought didn't exist. We all
know how that turned out. The point is that the scientist needs to
be able to make plausible conjectures, and sometimes these will
include postulated entities which turn out not to exist. If the
scientist cannot describe these postulated entities, then their
existence can be neither proved nor disproved. Your program would
halt scientific progress.
>> I do not understand the purpose of the quote. The Churchlands are by
>> no means behaviorists.
>I think the Churchlands *are* behaviourists. Connectionism was behaviourism
>in the hands of Hebb and everyone after.
Perhaps connectionism was behaviorism to Hebb, but surely not to
everyone after. There are many connectionist papers which say
relatively little about behavior but say a great deal about
attractors or about sub-symbolic representations. Generally speaking
these attractors and sub-symbolic representations are not identified
physically, but are only postulated. This does not seem very
compatible with the type of behaviorism you are talking about. The
Churchlands seem to be mainly interested in explanations based on
activations sets, and I have difficulty squaring that with
behaviorism. And if I recall correctly, Paul Churchland clearly
distinguishes between behaviorism and his eliminative neurophilosopy
in "Matter and Consciousness."
David Longley
> In <807692...@longley.demon.co.uk> David Longley <Da...@longley.demon.co.uk>
> writes:
>
> >That's another point about redundancy and the nature of communication. One
> >cam always ask for more infornmation.
>
> If we are talking about a report of speech, one can ask the reporter
> for more information, but one often cannot ask the original speaker
> for more information. But, on your theory, the reporter cannot give
> more information for he is restricted to verbatim reports. Even the
> request for more information requires that the reporter interpret.
>
Yes, that's true, but asking for more information still gives you the limits
of what is available, ie the person with the message can say 'that's all I
know', and 'it may not be verbatim either'.
> >2. "In short, "functionalism", if it were correct, would
> > imply behaviorism! If it is true that to possess given
> > mental states is simply to possess a certain "functional
> > organisation", then it is also true that to possess
> > given mental states is to possess certain behavior
> > dispositions!."
>
> > Putnam (1988)
>
> I agree with Putnam's point, but I disagree with the way you are
> interpreting it. Putnam did not propose that we should all go back
> to behaviorism.
>
No, perhaps not, but he says in several places that he knows where he is
being led by the points that Quine has raised. It is also the case that
elsewhere, functionalism has been regarded as a form of behaviourism,
albeit cognitive-behaviourism.
> Behavioral evidence is all there is. A scientist must rely on such
> evidence. But that does not imply that scientific descriptions must
> be limited to behavior. Theories about interal processes might
> provide good summaries of the behavioral evidence, much as theories
> about nuclear reactions inside the sun provide a good summary of the
> evidence from surface radiation.
>
It does if you accept that one can only describe what there 'is', ie what
can be quantified into.
> >3. The Chinese Room The Luminous Room
> > ---------------- -----------------
>
> >...
>
> I do not understand the purpose of the quote. The Churchlands are by
> no means behaviorists.
>
I think the Churchlands *are* behaviourists. Connectionism was behaviourism
in the hands of Hebb and everyone after.
--
David Longley
David Longley
> What really worries me is that "behavior scientists" want to be, not merely
> scientists, but also engineers, politicians, and administrators. Perhaps a
> keener understanding of what science *is* would help. And perhaps what is
> missing here is a fine-grain analysis of the behavior of "behavior
> scientists", along with some coarse correction to stem their anti-societal
> tendencies.
>
Why is trying to record, measure and systematically analyse observations of
behaviour anti-societal? Surely such a service is no more than an effort to
be explcit and accountable?
--
David Longley
David Longley
> You are welcome to continue to eschew such qualities.
> --
to be clearer about what one is dealing with. If we can't find terms
which are more reliable, and do at least as well as the intensional
terms, we are stuck - for such terms can't be regimented within formal
languages, and that's what we need to do if we are going to deal with
them quantitatively. In the final analysis, the merits of any alternative
terms will be seen pragmatically.
Take the example in 'Fragments..' which considers the use of the term
'subversive'. We can derive a better set of terms from the actions which
we find to be the basis for such ascriptions (report rates, baroning,
movement rate, etc etc). Rather than label someone 'subversive', one can
profile the behaviours which go with such a label (using logistsic regression)
When the behaviours change, so should the label. Often, as one would expect,
once one is labelled, .... that's the end of it.
--
David Longley
David Longley
>
> >[For the record, many, including myself consider Quine to have
> >taken what the early positivists to a successful conclusion
> >through 'Two Dogmas of Empiricism' and 'Word and Object'] No
> >doubt this will be made more explicit in his forthcoming book
> >'From Stimulus to Science' due out in the Autumn]..
>
> That you should interpret "Two Dogmas" as bringing positivism
> to a successful conclusion seems to be a misinterpretation.
>
>
'The Greatest Logical Positivist'
Putnam H. 'Realism with A Human Face'
Harvard University Press (1990)
I do not think Quine and Skinner's behaviourism all that
different. Too much time is being spent here on asserting who is
misinterpreting who. If you want to understand 'Longley-
behaviourism', read 'Fragments of Behaviour: The Extensional
Stance'. In the overview of that, 10 field psychologists
independently read the original volumes and came up with
remarkably similar reviews which clearly understood what the work
was designed to support - that may be difficult for those who are
not very familiar withe the corrections business, but I think it
is clear enough.
I'm not spending a lot of time defending a thesis here because
what is being characterised as my stance is unrecognisable and
I'm not going to waste my time justifying a stance or defending
arguments I am not advancing.
Show me you have understood the project first and then we will
discuss.
--
David Longley
David Longley
> In article <807756...@longley.demon.co.uk>,
> > David Longley <Da...@longley.demon.co.uk> wrote:
> >Take the example in 'Fragments..' which considers the use of the term
> >'subversive'. We can derive a better set of terms from the actions which
> >we find to be the basis for such ascriptions (report rates, baroning,
> >movement rate, etc etc). Rather than label someone 'subversive', one can
> >profile the behaviours which go with such a label (using logistsic
> >regression. When the behaviours change, so should the label. Often, as one
> >would expect, once one is labelled, .... that's the end of it.
>
> As with "intensional", "unscientific", "pedantic", "obfuscatory", etc.?
>
> Over and over again you bring up these examples that may be wonderfully
> relevant to your prison psychology but have no bearing on your *greater*
> program regarding intensionality and science. How does constantly repeating
> strawman arguments and ignoring the content of all responses add to *clarity*?
Over and over again, you and others come up with petty objections
which are nothing to do with the project at hand.
Consider the case of reporting what someone has said:
1) In practical contexts, we rarely report verbatim (although the police have
now largely corrected this through recording interviews).
2) the other propositional attitudes present the same problem, but more subtly.
As a consequence, we lose the original observations through a process of
confabulation.
3) recording behaviour as observation sentences as I am proposing is no
different from what other physical scientists do. Subjecting such data
to deductive analysis within and via a 'database' is essentially how we
work as scientists as opposed to folk-psychology. To get a clear idea of
what this involves one would do better to read Quine rather than argue
with me:
'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
'We think of a science as comprising those truths which are
expressible in terms of 'and', 'not', quantifiers, variables,
and certain predicates appropriate to the science in
question....To specify a science, within the described mold,
we still have to say what the predicates are to be, and what
the domain of objects is to be over which the variables of
quantification range.'
W.V.O. Quine (1954)
The Scope and Language of Science
The Ways of Paradox and other essays p.242
'Ultimately the objects referred to in a theory are to be
accounted not as the things named by the singular terms, but
as the values of the variables of quantification.'
W.V.O. Quine (1953,1961)
Reference and Modality
From a Logical Point of View p.144-145
Read the 400K of 'Fragments of Behaviour: The Extensional Stance'
and *then* put forward your criticisms. To date, those you have
put forward (like those others who have not read the material)
seem rather independent of what that material lays out. As author
of that material, I *am* in a position to judge whether you and
others have indeed understood what is being developed.
To anyone else reading this thread (and others). Please note that
there is a fundamental difference between the objective of
'Cognitive Scientists' and those pursuing 'Behaviour Science' -
to date, the objections seem to be coming from 'Cognitive
Scientists', which is quite understandable, as my position
largely undermines the value of anything which might be called
'Cognitive Science' - which is either psychologised logic or
scientized folk-psychology.
The stance developed in 'Fragments..' outlines how and why we
actually do better to work with behavioural analysis using
effective procedures. The study of human 'reasoning' processes
has *empirically* revealed evidence which is quite threatening to
the programme of Cognitive Science:
'It does strike me as odd that in most cognitivist
thought the truth of folk psychology is taken for
granted in setting up the discipline of cognitive
science (e.g. Fodor 1987; Ch. 1). This is true of both
functionalism and RTM. But knowledge of mind is a
product of cognitive science, one hopes, not a
presupposition of it.'
R. Nelson (1992)
Naming and Reference
Note 4. Ch. 9. Mechanism
"In the 1970's, Cognitive Science was formulated in
terms of Putnam's doctrine of functionalism, in which
mental states are the functional states of an abstract
digital computer, thinking is abstract symbol
manipulation as in the operation of a computer program,
and the mind's symbols get their meaning by denoting
things in the world. Functionalism has since become the
mainstream doctrine within the philosophy of mind. But
in the mid-1970's, overwhelming empirical evidence
against functionalism began to pile up, and in the late
1970's, Putnam himself found functionalism to be
logically incoherent. In this volume, Putnam brilliantly
reveals the philosophical fallacies in the doctrine he
founded, showing why functionalism must fail as a
philosophy of mind. The fall of functionalism has major
consequences for generative linguistics, artificial
intelligence, and cognitive and developmental
psychology".
Lakoff (1988).
'We cannot individuate concepts and beliefs without
reference to the ENVIRONMENT. Meanings aren't "in the
head."
The upshot of our discussion for the philosophy of mind
is that propositional attitudes, as philosophers call
them - that is, such things as 'believing that snow
is white' and 'feeling certain that the cat is on
the mat' - are not "states" of the human brain and
nervous system considered in isolation from the social
and nonhuman environment. A fortiori they are
not "functional states" - that is, states definable
in terms of parameters which would enter into a
software description of the organism. FUNCTIONALISM,
CONSTRUED AS THE THESIS THAT PROPOSITIONAL ATTITUDES ARE
JUST COMPUTATIONAL STATES OF THE BRAIN, CANNOT BE
CORRECT'.
The arguments I just summarised were, it might be
pointed out in this connection, arguments against
methodological solipsism.
Putnam (1988)
'Representation and Reality'
'The first three chapters actually grew out of two
earlier papers. Those papers were, in part, polemics
against the views of my good friend and student Jerry
Fodor. Fodor I hasten to say, is not the main target of
this book; but I have retained some of my polemic
against what I call "MIT mentalism"... The main target
of the present book is one H Putnam (one of my former
selves) and those who have adopted his views. Or perhaps
it would be more accurate to say that the present book
doesn't have a "main target"; for its aim is not so much
to refute one particular view as to establish the need
for a different way of looking at problems about "mental
states". At any rate, the intended contribution of these
three chapters to that end is to do two things: (1) to
establish a close connection (discovered and emphasised
throughout his career by W V Quine) between problems
about meaning and problems about belief fixation, by
showing that the holistic character of belief fixation
in science bears deeply on the issue of individuation of
"meanings" (or "contents" or "intentions", as they are
called by various philosophers; and (2) to argue that,
in fact, thinking of "meanings" (or "contents") as
"theoretical entities" - as scientific objects, objects
which can be isolated and which can play an explanatory
role in scientific theory - is a mistake. In the course
of the argument I defend the view that there is no
criterion for sameness of meaning except actual
interpretative practice - a view made famous by Quine
and Davidson'
H Putnam (1988)
Representation and Reality
I have provided lots of evidence from many other people, along
with a few simple but powerful day to day examples of why the
propositional attitudes of folk psychology present a serious
problem for behaviour profiling. The same case holds for
assessment and management of educational curricula, and possibly
diagnosis and management in medicine also. I urge those making
facile rhetorical arguments to look to the data before churning
out petty defences of cognitivism.
--
David Longley
David Longley
> In article <807755...@longley.demon.co.uk>,
> David Longley <Da...@longley.demon.co.uk> wrote:
> >In article <jqbDCw...@netcom.com> j...@netcom.com "Jim Balter" writes:
> >
> >> What really worries me is that "behavior scientists" want to be, not merely
> >> scientists, but also engineers, politicians, and administrators. Perhaps a
> >> keener understanding of what science *is* would help. And perhaps what is
> >> missing here is a fine-grain analysis of the behavior of "behavior
> >> scientists", along with some coarse correction to stem their anti-societal
> >> tendencies.
> >>
> >
> >Why is trying to record, measure and systematically analyse observations of
> >behaviour anti-societal? Surely such a service is no more than an effort to
> >be explcit and accountable?
>
> Is that what clinical psychologists do? Is that what you are talking about
> when you write of re-education, rather than "care and understanding", being
> what they should be doing? Is disingenuousness science?
>
See 'House of Cards: Psychology and Psychotherpy: Built on Myth' by Robyn
Dawes (1994) for a good critique of professional psychology. Or read what
is presented in 'Fragments of Behaviour: The Extensional Stance' in
sci.cognitive (29/7/95), comp.ai.philosophy, or 'sci.psychology.theory.
--
David Longley
David Longley
> Putnam not only says that he knows where he is being led -- he tell
> us where that is. His conclusion is that cognition has to do with
> the relation between the individual and the environment. He also
> adopts a non-reductionist view. Perhaps you think that equivalent to
> behaviorism, but Putnam's views are rather more sophisticated than
> Skinner's version of behaviorism or than your version (as I interpret
> it). And Putnam spends a great deal of time talking about meaning.
> If I understand you, talk about meaning should be abolished under
> your behaviorism.
>
I'm going to respond to this by citing Katz on Quine, and Quine's
reply (1990). It seems that some of the points discussed have not
reached the lofty heights of some who use the INTERNET.
'A well-chosen title, unlike a name, informs us about
its bearer. The title 'Uber Sinn und Bedeutung' was well
chosen, and so too was 'Word and Object'. Gottlob
Frege's essay claims that words have sense as well as
reference. W.V.O Quine's book denies precisely this. Its
counter-claim is eloquenctly expressed by the
conspicuous absence of a term translating 'Sinn' in its
title.
It is now widely thought that 'Word and Object',
together with Quine's earlier wrings in From a Logical
Point of View' establishes his claim that the
traditional intensionalist's notions of sense, synonymy,
and analyticity cannot be made objective sense of, and,
consequently, must be abandoned in serious studies of
language. Accordingly, these works have been a watershed
for twentieth century Anglo-American philosophy,
radically changing how philosophers think about
language, logic and nealrly every other area of
investigation. Quine's scepticism, especially as
expressed in his indeterminacy thesis, have all but
eliminated intensional approaches to language from the
current philosophical scene...'
....
Quine wants to show that the ordinary view of
translation as expressing the same meanings in
different languages involves as 'scientific mistake'
akin to believing in the gods of Homer. To show this,
he sets out to show the intensionalist tradition from
Kant to Carnap which claims to make objective sense of
this view is, at bottom, no better than
mythological explanation. Translation is critical
because it is the only relation that provides
interlinguistic identity conditions that are
discriminating enough to individuate the fine-grained
propositions on intensionalism....
...Hence, without the relation of translation, the
intensionalist can claim no advantage in the study of
language, and Frege's move to take propositions in
logic as senses of sentences in language does not get
off the ground. Thus, if Quine can establish that no
objective sense can be made sense of equivalence of
meaning for sentences of natural languages,
intensionalism will be discredited as completely as the
Homeric creation myths.'
Jerrold Katz
The Refutation of Indeterminacy
Perspectives On Quine (1990)
Quine replied:
'The thesis does not depend on reference to physical
objects: 'gavagai' is not characteristic. Nor does it
depend on a dogma of there being no such things as
intensions. It is the other way around: doubts about
intensions come from reflecting on radical translation.
They are doubts about how empirical criteria could in
general determine what intension is determined by a
sentence.'
Whatever one is doing when one looks for the meaning, I doubt very much
that those working on semantic nets, mentalese, and other intensional
pursuits 'know what they are talking about', (as Chosmky characterized
an attack of Stich's in the late 70s. I suspect the work with recurrent
neural networks may well model what you are implicitly alluding to, but
doubt whether such work will enlighten us much further. As I have said
ad nauseam, my main concern is to get the best observation sentences
we can, recorded in a formal system.
There are many who have strong committments to conventional semantics.
They understandably think their is something of substance in their
research programmes. I don't think there is. Behaviour analysis is just
physical analysis applied to what animals *do*.
--
David Longley
Jim Balter
David Longley <Da...@longley.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>In article <jqbDCw...@netcom.com> j...@netcom.com "Jim Balter" writes:
>
>> What really worries me is that "behavior scientists" want to be, not merely
>> scientists, but also engineers, politicians, and administrators. Perhaps a
>> keener understanding of what science *is* would help. And perhaps what is
>> missing here is a fine-grain analysis of the behavior of "behavior
>> scientists", along with some coarse correction to stem their anti-societal
>> tendencies.
>>
>
>Why is trying to record, measure and systematically analyse observations of
>behaviour anti-societal? Surely such a service is no more than an effort to
>be explcit and accountable?
Aside from pretending here that "behavior scientists" have no interest in
engineering behavior and no normative concerns as to what is "good" behavior
and what is "bad" behavior, and confusing bookkeeping with science, you also
ignored my example of Tycho Brahe doing "direct quotation" of star behavior
and Kepler doing something somewhat different. That we are all so aware of
examples such as this throughout science makes your pronouncements seem
nonsensical. Thus it would behoove you to address them.
--
<J Q B>
Jim Balter
David Longley <Da...@longley.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>In article <jqbDCw...@netcom.com> j...@netcom.com "Jim Balter" writes:
>>
>> You are welcome to continue to eschew such qualities.
>> --
>The *only* reason anyone wants to work with non-intensional terms is
>to be clearer about what one is dealing with.
a) The issue was additions to verbatim reports. We make these additions
in order to add clarity, among other things.
b) When ones' actions repeatedly fail to bring about the desired result,
it may be time to consider another course. Your postings, with their
long "direct quotations", are certainly not a model of clarity.
>If we can't find terms
>which are more reliable, and do at least as well as the intensional
>terms, we are stuck - for such terms can't be regimented within formal
>languages, and that's what we need to do if we are going to deal with
>them quantitatively. In the final analysis, the merits of any alternative
>terms will be seen pragmatically.
>
>Take the example in 'Fragments..' which considers the use of the term
>'subversive'. We can derive a better set of terms from the actions which
>we find to be the basis for such ascriptions (report rates, baroning,
>movement rate, etc etc). Rather than label someone 'subversive', one can
>profile the behaviours which go with such a label (using logistsic regression)
>When the behaviours change, so should the label. Often, as one would expect,
>once one is labelled, .... that's the end of it.
As with "intensional", "unscientific", "pedantic", "obfuscatory", etc.?
Over and over again you bring up these examples that may be wonderfully
relevant to your prison psychology but have no bearing on your *greater*
program regarding intensionality and science. How does constantly repeating
strawman arguments and ignoring the content of all responses add to *clarity*?
--
<J Q B>
Jim Balter
David Longley <Da...@longley.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>In article <jqbDCw...@netcom.com> j...@netcom.com "Jim Balter" writes:
>
>> scientists, but also engineers, politicians, and administrators. Perhaps a
>> keener understanding of what science *is* would help. And perhaps what is
>> missing here is a fine-grain analysis of the behavior of "behavior
>> scientists", along with some coarse correction to stem their anti-societal
>> tendencies.
>>
>
>Why is trying to record, measure and systematically analyse observations of
>behaviour anti-societal? Surely such a service is no more than an effort to
>be explcit and accountable?
Is that what clinical psychologists do? Is that what you are talking about
when you write of re-education, rather than "care and understanding", being
what they should be doing? Is disingenuousness science?
--
<J Q B>
David Longley
> In article <807755...@longley.demon.co.uk>,
> David Longley <Da...@longley.demon.co.uk> wrote:
> >In article <jqbDCw...@netcom.com> j...@netcom.com "Jim Balter" writes:
> >
> >> What really worries me is that "behavior scientists" want to be, not merely
> >> scientists, but also engineers, politicians, and administrators. Perhaps a
> >> keener understanding of what science *is* would help. And perhaps what is
> >> missing here is a fine-grain analysis of the behavior of "behavior
> >> scientists", along with some coarse correction to stem their anti-societal
> >> tendencies.
> >>
> >
> >Why is trying to record, measure and systematically analyse observations of
> >behaviour anti-societal? Surely such a service is no more than an effort to
> >be explcit and accountable?
>
> Aside from pretending here that "behavior scientists" have no interest in
> engineering behavior and no normative concerns as to what is "good" behavior
> and what is "bad" behavior, and confusing bookkeeping with science, you also
> ignored my example of Tycho Brahe doing "direct quotation" of star behavior
> and Kepler doing something somewhat different. That we are all so aware of
> examples such as this throughout science makes your pronouncements seem
> nonsensical. Thus it would behoove you to address them.
>
> --
> <J Q B>
>
In science one records one's observations and tries to make
predictions on the basis of those, Kepler came up with some
better fits to the data. The same story can be said with respect
to the more immediate constrast between intuitive vs actuarial
judgement (prediction) as reviewed by Dawes, Faust and Meehl
(1989) and in 'Fragments of Behaviour'. Just as one is likley to
encounter perceptual illusions if one does not sample the visual
array, one is prone to cognitive illusions if one does not resort
to formal extensional strategies. Furthermore,
'...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
I'm not alone in seeiong the extensional/instensional constract
as fundamental:
............... The language of physical and biological
science is largely extensional. It can be formulated
(approximately) in the familiar predicate calculus. The
language of psychology, however, is intensional. For the
moment it is good enough to think of an intensional sentence
as one containing words for intentional attitudes such as
belief.
Roughly what the counterpart thesis means is that important
features of extensional, scientific language on which
inference depends are not present in intensional sentences.
In fact intensional words and sentences are precisely those
expressions in which certain key forms of logical inference
break down.'
R. J. Nelson (1992)
Naming and Reference p.40
Note, '..intensional words and sentences are precisely those
expressions in which certain key forms of logical inference break
down' and '..the language of psychology, however, is intensional'.
Whilst it is clearly the case that folk psychology is largely
concerned with properties, characteristics or qualities of
individuals, their beliefs, desires, thoughts, feelings etc., it is
also the case that this is now true of much of contemporary
professional psychology (Fodor 1980). However, it may also be true
that many contemporary psychologists are not aware of the full
implications and quandaries implied by the this stance (Stich 1980).
Whilst it has been persuasively argued (Quine 1951,1956) that
quantification into intensional contexts is indeterminate, leading
inevitably to 'indeterminacy of translation' (Quine 1960). Nelson
(1992), a one time IBM senior mathematician goes on to point out:
'It is widely claimed today by philosophers of logic that
intensional sentences cannot be equivalently rephrased or
replaced by extensional sentences. Thus Brentano's thesis
reflected in linguistic terms asserts that psychology cannot
be framed in the extensional terminology of mathematics,
physics or biology'.
ibid p.42.
This point has not only been made by logicians. In fact it has been a
major, perhaps the major finding of research within Personality and
Social Psychology since the 1950s. Here is how Ross and Nisbett (1991)
put the matter:
'Finally, it should be noted that some commonplace
statistical failings help sustain the dispositional bias.
First, people are rather poor at detecting correlations of
the modest size that underlie traits (Chapman and Chapman
1967, 1969; Kunda and Nisbett 1986; Nisbett and Ross 1980).
Second, people have little appreciation of the relationship
of sample size to evidence quality. In particular, they have
little conception of the value of aggregated observations in
making accurate predictions about trait-related behavior
(Kahneman & Tversky 1973; Kunda & Nisbett 1986). The gaps in
people's statistical abilities create a vacuum that the
perceptual and cognitive biases rush in to fill.'
L. Ross and R. E. Nisbett (1991)
The Person and the Situation: Perspectives of Social
Psychology
and within Cognitive Psychology, Agnoli & Krantz, 1989:
'A basic principle of probability is the conjunction rule,
p(B) >= p(A&B). People violate this rule often, particularly
when judgements of probability are based on intensional
heuristics such as representativeness and availability.
Through other probabilistic rules are obeyed with increasing
frequency as people's levels of mathematical talent and
training increase, the conjunction rule generally does not
show such a correlation. We argue that this recalcitrance is
not due to inescapable "natural assessments"; rather, it
stems from the absence of generally useful problem-solving
designs that bring extensional principles to bear on this
class of problem. We predict that when helpful extensional
strategies are made available, they should compete well with
intensional heuristics. Two experiments were conducted, using
as subjects adult women with little mathematical background.
In Experiment I, brief training on concepts of algebra of
sets, with examples of their use in solving problems, reduced
conjunction-rule violations substantially, compared to a
control group. Evidence from similarity judgements suggested
that use of the representativeness heuristic was reduced by
the training....
...We conclude that such intensional heuristics can be
suppressed when alternative strategies are taught.
The development of formal thought does not culminate in
adolescence as Piaget (1928) held; rather, it depends on
education (Fong, Krantz, & Nisbett, 1986, Nisbett, Fong,
Lehmann & Cheng 1987) and may continue throughout adulthood.
Probabilistic reasoning has been an especially useful domain
in which to study the impact of training in adulthood on
formal thought. Probabilistic principles are cultural
inventions at most a few centuries old (Hacking 1975).....
Tversky and Kahneman (1983) focused on processes in which
people substitute intensional for extensional thinking. In
the latter mode, concepts are represented mentally in the
same way as sets, hence, rules of logic and probability are
followed in the main. By contrast, intensional thinking
represents concepts by prototypes, exemplars, or relations to
other concepts (Rosch, 1978, Smith & Medlin 1981). Processing
is affected strongly by imaginability of prototypes,
availability of exemplars, etc., and its results are not
constrained as strongly by logical relations. A prime example
is the representativeness heuristic (Kahneman & Tversky
1972), in which probability of a outcome is judged in terms
of the similarity of that outcome to a prototype.
Tversky and Kahneman (1983) drew far reaching conclusions
from the fact that, in most of their tests, the prevalence of
conjunction errors was not affected by statistical education.
They developed the concept of "natural assessment", a
computation that is 'routinely carried out as part of the
perception of events and the comprehension of messages......
even in the absence of a specific task set.' They defined a
"judgmental heuristic" as a 'strategy that relies on a
natural assessment to produce an estimation or a prediction.'
They compared such mechanisms to perceptual computations, and
cognitive errors to perceptual illusions. In their view,
people well trained in mathematics nonetheless perform
natural assessments automatically. The results of these
mental computations strongly influence probability judgement.
Therefore, statistics courses presumably affect probability
judgements, in problems such as "Linda," no more than
geometry courses affect geometric visual illusions, i.e.,
scarcely at all.
Agnoli & Krantz (1989)
Suppressing Natural Heuristics by Formal Instruction:
The Case of the Conjunction Fallacy [my emphasis]
Cognitive Psychology 21, 515-550 (1989)
Do you, and others who are resisting all that I have been presenting
appreciate how large the evidence base is?
Tycho Brahe, Fritz Lehmann, Aaron Sloman (and you if you wish)
are all in the same bag as Ptolemy in my book. I think 'Cognitive
Science' has all the hallmarks of the monster which Copernicus
was describing.
I'm not saying *I* have the alternative, but Quine might, and
what I had hoped to do here and in other newsgroups was
constructively discuss what seems like a very positive programme
drawing on problems which are characteristic of my own domain of
work.
--
David Longley
Neil Rickert
>In article <403c5o$f...@mp.cs.niu.edu> ric...@cs.niu.edu "Neil Rickert" writes:
>> >[For the record, many, including myself consider Quine to have
>> >taken what the early positivists to a successful conclusion
>> >through 'Two Dogmas of Empiricism' and 'Word and Object'] No
>> >doubt this will be made more explicit in his forthcoming book
>> >'From Stimulus to Science' due out in the Autumn]..
>> Quine is usually taken as having separated himself from positivism.
>> That you should interpret "Two Dogmas" as bringing positivism
>> to a successful conclusion seems to be a misinterpretation.
>Is that why Putnam entitled his review of Quiddities:
> 'The Greatest Logical Positivist'
I'm not familiar with that review. However "Quiddities" is hardly
the type of book on which one would judge the extent to which the
author is a positivist.
>I do not think Quine and Skinner's behaviourism all that
>different. Too much time is being spent here on asserting who is
>misinterpreting who. If you want to understand 'Longley-
>behaviourism', read 'Fragments of Behaviour: The Extensional
>Stance'.
I've read it, admittedly with some skimming in parts. It is an
interesting approach, but I am somewhat skeptical as to whether you
can use it to make sufficiently strong predictions to justify the
cost of the data collection.
>I'm not spending a lot of time defending a thesis here because
>what is being characterised as my stance is unrecognisable ...
You have that exactly backwards. If the characterisation of your
stance is unrecognizable, it is because you refuse to explain and
defend your thesis. When asked you simply post lengthy quotes which
rarely answer the questions being raised.
>Show me you have understood the project first and then we will
>discuss.
Enter into honest discussion of your project first, and perhaps
people will understand it. On second thoughts, don't bother. The
whole topic has become tiresome by now.
Neil Rickert
>In article <403vck$l...@mp.cs.niu.edu> ric...@cs.niu.edu "Neil Rickert" writes:
>> Putnam not only says that he knows where he is being led -- he tell
>> us where that is. His conclusion is that cognition has to do with
>> the relation between the individual and the environment. He also
>> adopts a non-reductionist view. Perhaps you think that equivalent to
>> behaviorism, but Putnam's views are rather more sophisticated than
>> Skinner's version of behaviorism or than your version (as I interpret
>> it). And Putnam spends a great deal of time talking about meaning.
>> If I understand you, talk about meaning should be abolished under
>> your behaviorism.
>I'm going to respond to this by citing Katz on Quine, and Quine's
>reply (1990). It seems that some of the points discussed have not
>reached the lofty heights of some who use the INTERNET.
You again respond with another infuriating quote. What is
infuriating about it is that (a) it is long, and (b) it seems largely
irrelevant to what was being discussed.
There is a particular irony in your selecting a quote from Katz. He
is an intensionalist, and I presume you would consider him an
adherent of methodological solipsism.
Pete Lupton
Now, although I don't intend to do anything illegal, I guess
that, through accident or bad luck or bad judgement,
I might end up in prison - an English prison.
Without seeking to pass judgement on the approriateness of
David Longley's *techniques*, it worries me in the extreme
that I might become someone at the receiving end of this sort
of closed-minded extensionalist dogma. It worries me enormously
that David is unable to separate extensionalism from what doesn't
seem particularly controversial - that clinical judgement would
benefit from improved documentation.
Pete Lupton
David Longley
> In <807757...@longley.demon.co.uk> David Longley <Da...@longley.demon.
co.uk>
> writes:
>
> >Is that why Putnam entitled his review of Quiddities:
>
> > 'The Greatest Logical Positivist'
>
> I'm not familiar with that review. However "Quiddities" is hardly
> the type of book on which one would judge the extent to which the
> author is a positivist.
>
This is what gives this medium such a bad name....It's not the
book that Putnam's calling a Positivist, it's the philopher
Quine.
[I think there *is* something peculiar about this medium - it
seems to bring out the worst in us *all*. I find myself getting
far more irritated and angry than really makes sense in terms of
the issues being discussed - maybe it has something to do with
the *delays* involved? - ie frustrative non-reward]
> >I do not think Quine and Skinner's behaviourism all that
> >different. Too much time is being spent here on asserting who is
> >misinterpreting who. If you want to understand 'Longley-
> >behaviourism', read 'Fragments of Behaviour: The Extensional
> >Stance'.
>
> I've read it, admittedly with some skimming in parts. It is an
> interesting approach, but I am somewhat skeptical as to whether you
> can use it to make sufficiently strong predictions to justify the
> cost of the data collection.
>
Having just said the above, can I compliment you on keeping a
cool head.. Yes, I think the whole business is depressingly
complex. I sometimes (the older I am getting the more frequently)
wonder if all the effort is worth it. If what I am proposing *is*
worth all the effort of data collection it will be years before
we find out. The only immediate justification I can come up with
now is that what I am proposing is less prone to abuse, and on
those grounds is more just.
> >I'm not spending a lot of time defending a thesis here because
> >what is being characterised as my stance is unrecognisable ...
>
> You have that exactly backwards. If the characterisation of your
> stance is unrecognisable, it is because you refuse to explain
and
> defend your thesis. When asked you simply post lengthy quotes which
> rarely answer the questions being raised.
>
> >Show me you have understood the project first and then we will
> >discuss.
>
> Enter into honest discussion of your project first, and perhaps
> people will understand it. On second thoughts, don't bother. The
> whole topic has become tiresome by now.
>
>
I *do* think I am being honest. Unfortunately, there are limits
to what I can present in terms of hard data because of the nature
of the work. I appreciate that makes things difficult though.
However, I do think there is an enormous amount of material in
the 9 extracts which are more than enough to be going on with.
Maybe, if interest is sustained, I could edit one of the
automated reports to provide an idea of what the system generates
in the way of a cumulative report(profile).
I agree it *is* all becoming rather tiresome - - - for me because
nobody is talking about the real work. The issues cover:
actuarial vs clinical judgment
extensional vs intensional strategies
descriptive vs inferential statistical methodology
evidence of anything working in inmate corrections
the use of database technology as a research environment
the possibility of teaching and practicing formal reasoning
--
David Longley
Neil Rickert
>In article <4059tq$2...@mp.cs.niu.edu> ric...@cs.niu.edu "Neil Rickert" writes:
>> >Is that why Putnam entitled his review of Quiddities:
>> > 'The Greatest Logical Positivist'
>> I'm not familiar with that review. However "Quiddities" is hardly
>> the type of book on which one would judge the extent to which the
>> author is a positivist.
>This is what gives this medium such a bad name....It's not the
>book that Putnam's calling a Positivist, it's the philopher
>Quine.
In this case it is not a matter of my misunderstanding you -- it is a
matter of your misunderstanding me. I quite realized that the term
was meant to apply to Quine. However it was presumably said in the
context of the review. Either it was stated as an unsupported
opinion (in which case its relevance would be doubtful), or it was
stated in reference to the book being reviewed. Hence my comment
that it seemed a strange remark to make as part of a review of
"Quiddities."
>[I think there *is* something peculiar about this medium - it
>seems to bring out the worst in us *all*.
In face to face conversation there is a considerable amount of body
language available to help one tell whether the speaker is using
irony, speaking metaphorically, etc. On usenet one has to read
between the lines (i.e. rely on contextual hints) in order to gather
this information. Regrettably, we are not very good at reading
between the lines, and some people even deny that it is possible.
>I agree it *is* all becoming rather tiresome - - - for me because
>nobody is talking about the real work. The issues cover:
>actuarial vs clinical judgment
I can't talk about that, due to a lack of experience.
>extensional vs intensional strategies
I think we have been talking about this. I think that one of my
disagreements with you is your apparent assumption that these are two
mutually excusive strategies which together cover all possibilities.
>descriptive vs inferential statistical methodology
The topic seems far too broad for meaningful discussion, unless
confined to the context of your project. But if so confined, I would
want to wait until all of the evidence is in as to the project's
success.
>evidence of anything working in inmate corrections
Again I plead lack of experience.
>the use of database technology as a research environment
Any useful discussion would have to be a discussion of the
application, so this reduces to one of your other topics.
>the possibility of teaching and practicing formal reasoning
Perhaps I am too much of a cynic, but I don't see any evidence that
it is possible. Children seem to learn their reasoning skills too
early in life for the classroom to play a critical role. I haven't
come across any examples of people who went into a logic class unable
to reason logically, and came out transformed into a logical
thinker. I suppose you could say that the parents teach reasoning,
but they don't consciously teach it.
Of course my comment is about informal reasoning, and your question
is about formal reasoning. My suggestion is that you should never
trust a human to do something as unnatural as formal reasoning. Use
a computer. Human reasoning is always informal, although logicians
and mathematicians sometimes attempt (with a limited degree of
success) to simulate formal reasoning.
David Longley
> In <807787...@longley.demon.co.uk> David Longley <Da...@longley.demon.co.uk>
> writes:
> >In article <403vck$l...@mp.cs.niu.edu> ric...@cs.niu.edu "Neil Rickert" writes:>
> >> Putnam not only says that he knows where he is being led -- he tell
> >> us where that is. His conclusion is that cognition has to do with
> >> the relation between the individual and the environment. He also
> >> adopts a non-reductionist view. Perhaps you think that equivalent to
> >> behaviorism, but Putnam's views are rather more sophisticated than
> >> Skinner's version of behaviorism or than your version (as I interpret
> >> it). And Putnam spends a great deal of time talking about meaning.
> >> If I understand you, talk about meaning should be abolished under
> >> your behaviorism.
>
> >I'm going to respond to this by citing Katz on Quine, and Quine's
> >reply (1990). It seems that some of the points discussed have not
> >reached the lofty heights of some who use the INTERNET.
>
> You again respond with another infuriating quote. What is
> infuriating about it is that (a) it is long, and (b) it seems largely
> irrelevant to what was being discussed.
So long as I am participating in this discussion, you can't
dismiss what I decide to cite as 'irrelevant'. You can ask *why*
I have cited it perhaps.
>
> There is a particular irony in your selecting a quote from Katz. He
> is an intensionalist, and I presume you would consider him an
> adherent of methodological solipsism.
>
There's no irony at all. Methodological Solipsism is a *very*
attractive approach - and *may* be the best way to go for a
descriptive *psychology*. Attribution Theory has produced quite a
lot of interesting work adopting such a phenomenological
approach. My point is that this is not behaviour science, and
that what is required in my domain of work (and possibly
education too) is *behaviour science*.
Most psychologists *do* seem to adopt some form of Methodological
Solipsistic stance (based on my having taught and examined
Master's level stats and computing to a large proportion of those
working in my own field). This is seen very clearly in applied
work such as 'Client Centred Therapy', 'Personal Construct
Theory', etc. 'Fragments of Behaviour..' is largely a critique of
contemporary 'cognitive' psychology as a training base for
applied work as it misleads one into taking the vicissitudes of
folk psychological practice as normative science. To many
Methodological Solipsists, anything normative is anathema.
If you have the time, have a look at Dawes' 'House of Cards:
Psychology and Psychotherapy Built on Myth' (1994). When I
presented elements of 'Fragments' at a BPS Division of
Criminological and Legal Psychology conference in spring 1993, I
could have done with some of what Dawes says in his book. I
suspect we will only start to see the fall-out from what his has
written over the nest couple of years, and I would like to think
that the material presented in 'Fragments' adds something.
--
David Longley
David Longley
jmen...@shawnee.cse.ucsc.edu "Pete Lupton" writes:
Well, don't worry. All tat I am proposing is a better system of
recording attainment as a basis for writing progress reports on
people as a basis for managing their sentences. It's a system
which is based on OPEN reporting so that those who are reported
upon can question the accuracy of what is being said, and a
system which allows for behaviour *change* to be recognised.
At present, the best predictors of recidivism are based on pre-
custody data! If you read Fragments, I think you will find your
fears to be groundless. Though I'd stay clear of prison
nonetheless (they are miserable places).
I'm a little puzzled as to why anything so benign has elicited so
much anxiety - although I do I recall my own reactions to
variants of behaviourism as an undergraduate being similar. Now
of course I think my reactions were based on a poor understanding
of the practicalities of behaviourism (but I had to do a PH.D. in
the neuroscience of learning and motivation to lose those
anxieties).
--
David Longley
Fritz Lehmann
-----
See 'House of Cards: Psychology and Psychotherpy: Built on Myth' by Robyn
Dawes (1994) for a good critique of professional psychology.
The fact that most academic psychological theories of the mind
have been suppositious speculation (and in the case of Freudianism,
once dictatorially oppressive in its day) is no argument whatever for
the radical (i.e. nontrivial) Skinnerian Behaviorism advocated by Longley,
which denies the existence of beliefs, fears, desires, etc.
Calling academic psychology "folk psychology" as Longley and Skinner
do as an intended insult, is not really an insult. It's flattery. Most "folk
science" is in fact correct; some is not, and scientists have departed from
"folk science" only when experimental evidence was A. available in fairly
rigorous form, B. interpreted in a more universal scientific theory than the
"folk theory", and C. _required_ the departure from the folk theory.
None of these factors is now available to psychologists or so-called "behavior
scientists". If Longley is unhappy with academic psychological theories,
he would do better to wholeheartedly embrace explicit folk-psychology
and (neo-Scottish?) common-sense-ism than to propound absurd claims
such as: there are no mental states, beliefs, desires, feelings, fears,
opinions, recollections, etc. This would not comport with his desire
to look and act like "a real scientist" (and wear a white coat at work)
but it would bring him closer to what (I predict) will eventually be
discovered to be the truth in due time. A matter of "doing justice to
what we know", in Hao Wang's phrase.
If I tell a Briton that a bridge has collapsed, in English, he will not
drive over it. If I tell a Tibetan that a bridge has collapsed, in Tibetan,
he will not drive over it either. I would say that after the warnings, in
different languages, they have mental constructs with something in common,
in fact shared beliefs and propositions, even though the words were totally
different. Any five-year-old would agree with me (folk psychology).
Longley, Skinner, and, if Longley is right about Quine, Quine, would not. I
would not waste time to point out the obviously obvious, if someone out
there were not busily denying it. I am now thinking that H. M. Prisons would
be literally better off consulting a bright British five-year-old than to
depend on all the crude and useless-if-uninterpreted statistical correlations
which could ever be produced by a team of "behavior scientists" like Longley.
There is reason to have some sympathy for B. F. Skinner himself since he
was educated at a time when totally speculative psychological theories
were dominant not only in academia but even in courts and clinics. But,
again, the fact that the mind is not yet understood is no reason to suppose
that it does not exist. In computers, the result of studying input-output
correlations is to _elicit_the_program_; to deny that computers _have_
programs is (almost) as bad as denying that people have minds. (Note that
this has nothing to do with issues of Cartesian dualism and the like; the
mind could be to the brain what a house design is to bricks, and all points
still preserved.)
These remarks are addressed not so much to Longley (few people are willing
to jettison twenty years of theoretical devotion, even if it's been devotion
to utter rubbish) but to anyone who reads these threads and might be
considering taking David Longley seriously.
Yours truly, Fritz Lehmann
Fritz Lehmann
---begin quote---
Tycho Brahe, Fritz Lehmann, Aaron Sloman (and you if you wish)
are all in the same bag as Ptolemy in my book. I think 'Cognitive
Science' has all the hallmarks of the monster which Copernicus
was describing.
I could do worse than to be remembered in that company.
Since Longley has grounded his whole scientistic programme of Skinnerian
Behaviorism on its allegedly superior access to statistical data-fitting
techniques in the governance of prisoners, it's worth noting that a major
obstacle to acceptance of Copernicus' theory was that the Ptolemaic epicycles
fitted the astronomical data much _better_ (as Tom Etter recently
pointed out to me) than Copernicus' theory did. Data fitting has its limits.
In the field of statistical classification, cluster analysis,
multidimensional scaling, numerical taxonomy, and related areas,
the sophisticates are keenly aware of the inherent limitations.
In particular, standard methods like least-squares are known to
be inherently bogus (being not scale-invariant) and systems intended
to yield "pure" unbiased clusters/classes and class/pyramid trees are known
to be vacuous (because noise-sensitive). The mathematician Rudolf
Wille has devastatingly criticized statistical approaches which
purport to lack humanly-provided intensional classes into which
objects are classified. No doubt, 20 years of extolling the statistical
approach should have made Longley familiar with the sophisticated,
statisticians' results but his postings here do not reveal this at all.
This has been a digression, of course, but not only is Longley's
radical Skinnerian Behaviorism obviously false from the common-sense
view (the "folk" view to use his intended insult), but the belief
in statistical salvation from intensional thoughts and classes is naive
even within statistical classification theory itself.
Yours truly, Fritz Lehmann
David Longley
fleh...@orion.oac.uci.edu "Fritz Lehmann" writes:
> David Longley, still pushing B. F. Skinner's Behaviorism, recommended:
> -----
> See 'House of Cards: Psychology and Psychotherpy: Built on Myth' by Robyn
> Dawes (1994) for a good critique of professional psychology.
> -----
>
> The fact that most academic psychological theories of the mind
> have been suppositious speculation (and in the case of Freudianism,
> once dictatorially oppressive in its day) is no argument whatever for
> the radical (i.e. nontrivial) Skinnerian Behaviorism advocated by Longley,
> which denies the existence of beliefs, fears, desires, etc.
>
> Calling academic psychology "folk psychology" as Longley and Skinner
> do as an intended insult, is not really an insult.
It's not an insult. Fritz Heider coined the term 'naive psychology' in the
1940s, and this matured into the empirical study of how people make judgements
undr consitions of uncertainty. Tversky and Kahneman's work (1974) is a well
respected development as is all of the work on Risk Assessment in the context
of actuarial vs. clinical judgment (Dawes, Faust and Meehl 1989).
To accept folk psychology as normatively acceptable is to reject every reason
we have for creating science in fact - think about it....
> These remarks are addressed not so much to Longley (few people are
> willing to jettison twenty years of theoretical devotion, even if it's
> been devotion to utter rubbish) but to anyone who reads these threads
> and might be considering taking David Longley seriously.
>
> Yours truly, Fritz Lehmann
>
>
Hmmm - - all anyone has to do is read either of the two SCIENCE reviews
to see who's devoted to promulgating 'rubbish'.
--
David Longley
Neil Rickert
>In article <405bbm$3...@mp.cs.niu.edu> ric...@cs.niu.edu "Neil Rickert" writes:
>> >> Putnam not only says that he knows where he is being led -- he tell
>> >>...
>> >I'm going to respond to this by citing Katz on Quine, and Quine's
>> >reply (1990). It seems that some of the points discussed have not
>> >reached the lofty heights of some who use the INTERNET.
>> You again respond with another infuriating quote. What is
>> infuriating about it is that (a) it is long, and (b) it seems largely
>> irrelevant to what was being discussed.
>So long as I am participating in this discussion, you can't
>dismiss what I decide to cite as 'irrelevant'. You can ask *why*
>I have cited it perhaps.
If the quote seems irrelevant to me, and if you used it to
communicate with me, then clearly your attempt at communication was
not effective. And I have long since given up on trying to
comprehend why you repeatedly spew out long largely irrelevant
quotes.
>> There is a particular irony in your selecting a quote from Katz. He
>> is an intensionalist, and I presume you would consider him an
>> adherent of methodological solipsism.
> My point is that this is not behaviour science, and
>that what is required in my domain of work (and possibly
>education too) is *behaviour science*.
I suspect you are making a distinction without a difference. If
psychology is not behavior science, then it is not science at all and
does not deserve the name 'psychology'. But psychology need not go
to the extremes of behaviorism in order to be the science of
behavior.
David Longley
fleh...@orion.oac.uci.edu "Fritz Lehmann" writes:
> David Longley, scathing his critics again, wrote:
> ---begin quote---
> Tycho Brahe, Fritz Lehmann, Aaron Sloman (and you if you wish)
> are all in the same bag as Ptolemy in my book. I think 'Cognitive
> Science' has all the hallmarks of the monster which Copernicus
> was describing.
All wrong again!
If you bothered to read instead of imagine you'd see that the work is
critical of much which is done under the guise of statistical analysis.
Skinner for one never extolled the virtues of the statistical approach.
There is very little which is rational in Lehmann's criticism, in fact,
it is so off target that I wonder what's prompted it in particular.
Here for instance, is Meehl, on the issue of clinical vs actuarial
prediction:
'No predictions made about a single case in clinical work are
ever certain, but are always probable. The notion of
probability is inherently a frequency notion, hence
statements about the probability of a given event are
statements about frequencies, although they may not seem to
be so. Frequencies refer to the occurrence of events in a
class; therefore all predictions; even those that from their
appearance seem to be predictions about individual concrete
events or persons, have actually an implicit reference to a
class....it is only if we have a reference class to which the
event in question can be ordered that the possibility of
determining or estimating a relative frequency exists.....
the clinician, if he is doing anything that is empirically
meaningful, is doing a second-rate job of actuarial
prediction. There is fundamentally no logical difference
between the clinical or case-study method and the actuarial
method. The only difference is on two quantitative continua,
namely that the actuarial method is #more explicit# and #more
precise#.'
P. E. Meehl (1954)
Clinical versus Statistical Prediction
A Theoretical Analysis and a Review of the Evidence
and Davidon 91967) on 'Saying that'..
'I wish I had said that', said Oscar Wilde in applauding one
of Whistler's witticisms, Whistler, who took a dim view of
Wilde's originality, retorted, 'You will, Oscar; you will.
This tale reminds us that an expression like 'Whistler said
that' may on occasion serve as a grammatically complete
sentence. Here we have, I suggest, the key to a correct
analysis of indirect discourse, an analysis that opens a lead
to an analysis of psychological sentences generally
(sentences about propositional attitudes, so-called), and
even, though this looks beyond anything to be discussed in
the present paper, a clue to what distinguishes psychological
concepts from others.'
D. Davidson (1969)
On Saying That p.93
'Finding right words of my own to communicate another's
saying is a problem of translation. The words I use in the
particular case may be viewed as products of my total theory
(however vague and subject to correction) of what the
originating speaker means by anything he says: such a theory
is indistinguishable from a characterization of a truth
predicate, with his language as object language and mine as
metalanguage. The crucial point is that there will be equally
acceptable alternative theories which differ in assigning
clearly non-synonymous sentences of mine as translations of
his same utterance. This is Quine's thesis of the
indeterminacy of translation.'
ibid. p.100
'Much of what is called for is to mechanize as far as
possible what we now do by art when we put ordinary English
into one or another canonical notation. The point is not that
canonical notation is better than the rough original idiom,
but rather that if we know what idiom the canonical notation
is for, we have as good a theory for the idiom as for its
kept companion.'
D. Davidson (1967)
Truth and Meaning
Now, what's wrong with trying to be expolict about what one is doing?
Why should it conjure up images of cattle prods etc? Only I suggest
because intensional idioms and 'cognitions' generally are not under
the control of the reinforcing community to any significant extent.
As a consequence, they can serve only as very unreliable scientific
terms.
--
David Longley
R. Mounce
>It's <folk psychology> not an insult. Fritz Heider coined the term 'naive
>psychology'
Now's your chance, what is your specific relationship to the masses? Is a
non-psychologist folk figure limited to giving naive analysis, or is the
scientific method universally available, regardless of discipline or
training, to anyone interested in thinking about thinking? Aristotle says
philosophy is the greatest of goods and fairly easy to acquire.
Hey! I just thought of something. Indian (nigger, kike, spick, etc.)
isn't an insult at all. Columbus coined the term in 1492, and that
classification matured into the empirical study of wild indians, civilized
indians, etc. It is a well respected development. You can't dispense
government checks without the actuarial context of this genetic judgement.
>To accept folk psychology as normatively acceptable is to reject every reason
>we have for creating science in fact - think about it....
Let's face it, folks aren't normal. How they ever got along all these
years is beyond me. We psychologists may be especially abnormal, but at
least we know it! Take Augustine, was he a psychologist? No, as a
"folk", his thought isn't scientific. Listen, you have to get in a
program and get the training! I can't emphasize how important
indoctrination in a discipline is. In fact, don't even talk to me if you
haven't had it. How can I relate?
>David Longley
Hmmmm...quite a character.
Aaron Sloman
[DL]
Hold on hold on.......what actually happens is that people SAY
that other people have SAID something the latter have NOT said,
and the latter often COMPLAIN about it!
^^^^^
To which I commented:
[AS]
> > This is a pretty poor argument. Are you aware of the difference in
> > meaning between "often", "always", "most of the time" ? The fact
> > that electricity meters often go wrong does not entail that they are
> > always wrong, mostly wrong, or that there's nothing for them to
> > measure, rightly or wrongly.
> >
> > Similarly, the fact that reports of utterances are OFTEN wrong does
> > not entail that they are ALWAYS wrong, or MOSTLY wrong, or that it
> > makes NO SENSE for them ever to be right.
and in response we get from David Longley yet another piece of
irrelevant abuse with an instruction to look at some other text,
instead of answering the point made.
> Date: Sun, 06 Aug 95 14:14:07 GMT
>
> All you need to do is look at the exchanges here on the net. As o the rest
> of what you are doing here - it's errm pedantic and obfuscatory.
> --
> David Longley
At this point I give up. David is either incapable of understanding
logic (e.g. seeing that "X is OFTEN Y" tells us nothing about "X is
ALWAYS Y") or so highly motivated to defend and promote the system
he has created that he is unable to apply his logical abilities to
anything that might threaten it.
Perhaps somebody who claims to understand and support his position
will defend it against all the counterarguments that have been put
by various people, since David clearly cannot, or will not, pay
attention to any detail in the arguments. But I've had enough of
this.
At least he has apparently provoked some people into reading at
their terminals bits of philosophy they would never read in a
library, and as a consequence maybe some of them now understand the
difference between "intensional" and "intentional", and perhaps even
understand why there are non-solipsistic forms of functionalism that
are immune to Putnam's criticisms, and for that we should probably
thank David.
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
rather than to mind, logical empiricism effectively
recast Hume's approach in a methodologically
sophisticated form. When W.V.O. Quine questioned the
analytic/synthetic distinction, when Karl R. Popper
challenged the observational/theoretical distinction,
and when Nelson Goodman displayed the limitations of
extensional logic, they thereby contributed to
undermining the plausibility of the logical empiricist
program. Yet even if most students agree that logical
empiricism can no longer be defended in its classic
guise, none of the views offered as alternatives has
been very successful in taking its place.
One approach has been to deny the
observational/theoretical distinction while (more or
less) retaining the analytic/synthetic distinction and
adopting an alternative conception of scientific
theories, which is known as the semantic conception.
This solution is represented here by the work of
Frederick Suppe. Another approach has been to deny the
analytic/synthetic distinction while (more or less)
preserving the observational/theoretical distinction and
adopting the conception of philosophy as continuous with
rather than different from science, a view that is known
as naturalized epistemology. This solution is
represented here by the work of Quine.
More historical approaches, however, explore the
dynamics of the process of discovery rather than focus
on the logical structure of its products. Popper, for
example, emphasizes the conception of scientific
discovery as a process of conjectures and (attempted)
refutations, an approach accenting the importance of
rational criticism. Thomas S. Kuhn goes so far as to
suggest that the growth of scientific knowledge involves
a process of exchange of "paradigms" by mutual agreement
within a scientific community, which-if there is nothing
more to truth in science than consensus among
scientists-may appear to lend support to various forms
of historical relativism.
Imre Lakatos attempts to reassert the rationality of
science by means of his alternative conception of the
methodology of research programmes. Taking as his point
of departure the dictum that, "Philosophy of science
without history of science is empty; history of science
without philosophy of science is blind," Lakatos
contends that histories of science can only be written
on the basis of normative commitments, but that
alternative conceptions of science nevertheless can be
subjected to empirical test on the basis of (normatively
interpreted) histories of science. This paper, which is
the longest in this volume, examines many of the most
basic problems.
Less familiar but no less promising are attempts to
improve upon the logical empiricist position by
abandoning the commitment to extensional language as a
necessary condition for an adequate explication. From
this perspective, Wesley C. Salmon's attempts to come to
grips with the issues posed by statistical explanations
and by probabilistic laws while remaining faithful to
the spirit of Hume provide a striking contrast to my own
efforts to resolve these problems by going far beyond
what Hume would allow. Indeed, no problems provide a
more severe test of the scope and limits of extensional
methodology than those encountered in this domain.
The pieces by Ellery Eells and by Robert Almeder are
very recent contributions to understanding the
subjective approach toward understanding probability and
the limitations of a naturalistic approach toward
epistemology. The first relates interpretations of
probability to problems of inference and decision-
making, while exploring the consequences of the
personalist account for understanding decisions. The
second examines several versions of naturalized
epistemology and of evolutionary epistemology,
suggesting that neither holds great promise for
displacing traditional conceptions of the philosophy of
science as a normative discipline.
The final paper (the "Postscript") by Charles S.
Peirce elaborates the conception of scientific inquiry
as a process of convergence on the truth over the long
run. But this conception, which exerts immense appeal,
is difficult to defend if there are any irreducibly
probabilistic natural laws, which suggests there may be
definite boundaries to scientific knowledge. The views
Peirce advances afford some fascinating anticipations of
those that Popper would propose, striking evidence of
his originality and depth. The perspective Peirce
supplies provides an overview to some of the most
important issues that have been explored in other papers
presented here.
For students approaching these problems for the very
first time, perhaps three aspects of the issues that
will be encountered in the pages of this book deserve to
be emphasized. The first is the difference between
thinking about the products of science and thinking
about the process of science. A product-oriented
approach that focuses on the logical structure of
theories, laws, and explanations is not necessarily
incompatible with a process-oriented approach that
examines the individual, group, and community activities
that scientists pursue in the course of their discovery.
Science can involve both distinctive processes and
distinctive products.
The second is the difference between descriptive and
normative conceptions of the philosophy of science. A
purely descriptive approach to science might attempt to
answer every question about science by examining the
history of science and the activities of scientists.
That appears to preempt the philosophical temptation to
utilize normative approaches that instead attempt to
identify how science should properly be pursued. The
difficulty with a purely descriptive approach, however,
is that it presumes that we already know which events
properly belong to the history of science as well as
which persons properly qualify as scientists and why.
If the normative dimension of these investigations
cannot be circumvented, then it may be beneficial to
consider precisely which conditions of adequacy are
appropriate for proper solutions to these problems. The
choice between extensional languages and intensional
languages reflects a great divide between philosophers
of science today. Surely, if certain methods are
inherently incapable of coping with specific problems
while other methods are promising for their solution, it
would be a mistake of enormous magnitude to continue to
insist on those inadequate methods. Some philosophical
problems exist only because of mistakes of method.
When all is said and done, the conception of science
that appears to survive is not so different from that
embraced by logical empiricism. Science still seems to
pursue the discovery of natural laws as its objective,
where those laws can be used for the explanation and
prediction of singular events. What may now be better
understood, however, is the relationship between the
history of science and the philosophy of science, on the
one hand, and the relationship between commitments to
specific methodologies and the capacity to solve
problems, on the other. These issues may be subtle, but
they are essential to understanding science.
Foundations of Philosophy of Science:
Recent Developments
J H Fetzer (1993)
Goodman's critique of counterfactuals accounts for Quine's
refusal to allow the subjunctive conditional a place in
extensional logic. In 'Fragments of Behaviour: The Extensional
Stance', induction therefore plays no part in the methodology, in
fact, Null Hypothesis Statistical Testing is explicitly rejected.
I suggest that those who have been quick to criticise the
programme I have been advocating, consider the issues outlined by
Fetzer, particularly his remarks in the penultimate paragraph.
--
David Longley
David Longley
mou...@u.washington.edu "R. Mounce" writes:
> Fritz Lehmann <fleh...@orion.oac.uci.edu> wrote:
> >....not only is Longley's
> >radical Skinnerian Behaviorism obviously false from the common-sense
> >view (the "folk" view to use his intended insult), but the belief
> >in statistical salvation from intensional thoughts and classes is naive
> >even within statistical classification theory itself.
>
> I noticed this too. He has been defending the insult as a professional
> category, which it may be, but he uses it as an insult. The defense (in
> the "insidious programme" thread) carried reference to its use as a
> neutral term for a particular data set. It appears that he imbues the
> data with meaning initially in the collection process. The unverified
> "theory" is used as a backward filter to influence how he notices evidence
> prior to the hypothesis arising from a scientific direction. His
> methodology is unexplicit. Observation and interpretation fit the theory,
> not the other way around.
>
> Time to stop wasting time, I suppose. My fault, naturally.
>
> Doug
>
>
Extract from an Open University Third Level Course:
Professional Judgment and Decision Making:
'There is no controversy in social science that shows such a large
body of qualitatively diverse studies coming out so uniformly in the
same direction as this one. When you are pushing 90 investigations,
predicting everything from the outcome of football games to the
diagnosis of liver disease and when you can hardly come up with a half
dozen studies showing even a weak tendency in favour of the clinician,
it is time to draw a practical conclusion, whatever theoretical
differences may still be disputed.'
Meehl 1986, pp373-4
--
David Longley
Neil Rickert
> 'By redefining these distinctions relative to language
> rather than to mind, logical empiricism effectively
...
I'm not sure why you posted this quote out of the blue under two
different threads. Such double posting seems a waste of disk space.
> One approach has been to deny the
> observational/theoretical distinction while (more or
> less) retaining the analytic/synthetic distinction and
> adopting an alternative conception of scientific
> theories, which is known as the semantic conception.
I must admit that I have never understood why philosophers make so
much out of the analytic/synthetic distinction, or its denial.
Whether the label 'analytic' happens to apply to a specific
proposition seems of little importance. I have spent some time
groping around the library trying to find a clear statement of the
supposed importance of the a/s distinction, but to no avail.
(Perhaps I am just betraying the fact that I don't take philosophy of
science very seriously).
>I suggest that those who have been quick to criticise the
>programme I have been advocating, consider the issues outlined by
>Fetzer, particularly his remarks in the penultimate paragraph.
I suggest that the problem is your attitute to philosophy of
science. You apparently take it as a normative standard as to how
science should be conducted. By contrast, I take it as a failed
attempt to adequately describe the processes of science.
R. Mounce
Tom Wetzel
---
David Longley quotes Putnam as follows:
> 'We cannot individuate concepts and beliefs without
> reference to the ENVIRONMENT. Meanings aren't "in the
> head."
>
> The upshot of our discussion for the philosophy of mind
> is that propositional attitudes, as philosophers call
> them - that is, such things as 'believing that snow
> is white' and 'feeling certain that the cat is on
> the mat' - are not "states" of the human brain and
> nervous system considered in isolation from the social
> and nonhuman environment. A fortiori they are
> not "functional states" - that is, states definable
> in terms of parameters which would enter into a
> software description of the organism. FUNCTIONALISM,
> CONSTRUED AS THE THESIS THAT PROPOSITIONAL ATTITUDES ARE
> JUST COMPUTATIONAL STATES OF THE BRAIN, CANNOT BE
> CORRECT'.
>
> The arguments I just summarised were, it might be
> pointed out in this connection, arguments against
> methodological solipsism.
>
> Putnam (1988)
> 'Representation and Reality'
Now, why does Longley think this is relevant? Longley seems to confuse
intentional realism with methodological solipsism. Thus, if intentional
states are to be real, they must be "internal" states of the brain.
If this is not plausible, then neither is intentional realism. But note
that this is just a non-sequitur. Even on the commonsensical interpretation
of intentional idioms, they *seem* to involve a relation to the world.
Seeings and believings are about the environment around us. When we report
these states, we *seem* to be reporting *relationships* between organisms
and their environment.
Functionalism attempted to reconstrue intentional states in terms of
purely internal states *because* functionalists were looking
for an account consistent with a reductionist physicalist program.
The alternative, which Longley doesn't consider, is to regard
intentional states as inherently relational. On the causal theory of
reference, for example, "meanings are in the world, not in the head."
Fodor suggests (in "A Theory of Content") that such a conception is
in fact consistent with a Skinnerian theory of meaning.
I also agree with Aaron Sloman's point that intentional idioms are simply
not as opaque ("intensional" with an "s") as Longley seems to believe.
A good example of this is the most common use of "sees" (in its veridical,
non-factive use). An account of "sees" in this sense will also require
a semantics in which "intensional" entities (situations and properties)
figure, I believe. Here I'm talking about constructions such as
(1) John saw a man shaved in Boston
(2) Fred saw Mary eat the trout
(3) Bernard saw a cat cross the road
The use of the indefinite article indicates that these are existential
generalizations from the more concrete particularity of actual experience.
I'd interpret (1) as:
(3x) (3p) (In(p,Boston) & Man(x) & JSawEXEM3[<x,p> |y||z| y is shaved in z])
where "EXEM3[<...,...>,...]" indicates the structure of a dyadic relational
situation. Thus, I take concrete situations to be the primary objects of
seeing. (1) does not entail, for example, that John was aware that the locale
of the shaving *was* in Boston. It doesn't even entail that he was aware it
was a *man* that was being shaved. (3) I would interpret as:
(3x) ( Cat(x) & BSawEXEM3[<x,r>,|y||z| y crosses z])
For example, "EXEM3[<Gato,r>, |x||y| x crosses y]" designates
the state of affairs of Gato's crossing the road.
Tom Wetzel
:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
thomas...@eng.sun.com
David Longley
one just can't pin 'em down! Putnam was critcising MIT mentalism in the book
cited above, and the MIT mentalist par excellence is Jerry Fodor. How does
the notion of a 'concrete situation' escape the inscrutability of reference
and indeterminacy of translation arguments?
Don't you find your examples just a little bit arcane? What's wrong with
the 'quotation' problem (cited in 'Word & Object' and here) as an example
par excellence of the problems of the intensional? Do you deny that such
things *do* happen as I suggest....??
--
David Longley
Patricia Lynch
:
: >the possibility of teaching and practicing formal reasoning
:
: Perhaps I am too much of a cynic, but I don't see any evidence that
: it is possible. Children seem to learn their reasoning skills too
: early in life for the classroom to play a critical role. I haven't
: come across any examples of people who went into a logic class unable
: to reason logically, and came out transformed into a logical
: thinker. I suppose you could say that the parents teach reasoning,
: but they don't consciously teach it.
:
: Of course my comment is about informal reasoning, and your question
: is about formal reasoning. My suggestion is that you should never
: trust a human to do something as unnatural as formal reasoning. Use
: a computer. Human reasoning is always informal, although logicians
: and mathematicians sometimes attempt (with a limited degree of
: success) to simulate formal reasoning.
I have been following this discussion with interest (and difficulty). I am
unqualified to comment on most of it, but do have personal experience in
this particular area. I took a logic class (as in was a pupil, not a teacher!)
in my first year at university, and have appreciated the benefits ever
since. I don't think I was "unable to reason logically" before attending the
class - I managed to pass GCSE A-Level Maths, chemistry and Physics, all
of which required reasoning from observation/description through
application of method to results. The logic class helped me to appreciate
the logical errors which the uneducated reasoner makes unwittingly. I
would concur with the argument that common rules of good reasoning can
be taught, and that it would be useful to teach them.
I will now drop back to observing and trying to understand more than half
of what the main parties are saying.
Regards, Tricia Lynch
Pete Lupton
> David Longley, scathing his critics again, wrote:
>---begin quote---
>are all in the same bag as Ptolemy in my book. I think 'Cognitive
>Science' has all the hallmarks of the monster which Copernicus
>was describing.
>
> I could do worse than to be remembered in that company.
>
> Since Longley has grounded his whole scientistic programme of Skinnerian
>Behaviorism on its allegedly superior access to statistical data-fitting
>techniques in the governance of prisoners, it's worth noting that a major
>obstacle to acceptance of Copernicus' theory was that the Ptolemaic epicycles
>fitted the astronomical data much _better_ (as Tom Etter recently
>pointed out to me) than Copernicus' theory did. Data fitting has its limits.
Actually, I don't think the lack of success of Copernicus' work is an example
of the limits of data fitting. As you say, the theory presented was harder and
gave rise to worse predictions than the Ptolemaic system. Quite rightly, it was
not (until other evidence came along) widely accepted.
What Copernicus *did* do was to explain in a qualitatively appealing way the
differences between the inner and outer planets (that is, those planets that
rotate right round the earth and those that don't). The theory raised immediate
conflicts with what was then known: some of these Copernicus resolved, some
of these Galileo resolved, but it wasn't until Kepler that Ptolemy was decisively
shown to have been out and another theory was in all respects superior.
The whole story is, I think, a rather nice example of data-fitting in action.
But look how extensive the problem has become - it is unlikely that Kepler's
laws would have been other than a curiosity if Galileo hadn't shown that
there is no reason to suppose that we can sense absolute motion and so
undid the need to fit a whole class of common-sense data. If it had become
a tussle between on the one hand our common sense experience that we don't
move and Tycho Brahe's data on the other, I don't think any clear outcome
would have resulted - the data would have been too much in conflict.
> In the field of statistical classification, cluster analysis,
>multidimensional scaling, numerical taxonomy, and related areas,
>the sophisticates are keenly aware of the inherent limitations.
>In particular, standard methods like least-squares are known to
>be inherently bogus (being not scale-invariant) and systems intended
>to yield "pure" unbiased clusters/classes and class/pyramid trees are known
>to be vacuous (because noise-sensitive). The mathematician Rudolf
>Wille has devastatingly criticized statistical approaches which
>purport to lack humanly-provided intensional classes into which
>objects are classified. No doubt, 20 years of extolling the statistical
>approach should have made Longley familiar with the sophisticated,
>statisticians' results but his postings here do not reveal this at all.
Abstractly, data fitting is not the above techniques. Data fitting
can be seen as the computational problem of finding short programs
which reproduce the data. By fitting the data in that way the data
are also structured (because the short program will produce a structure).
It is certainly possible (although not very likely) that some sorts of data
might be tersely represented by the techniques you list above. But that is a
tiny tiny subset of the techniques available to a data-reproducing program.
Pete Lupton
David Longley
The important thing to consider is *how many* people manage to
acquire, retain and generally apply such skills. To base conclusions
on limited samples is an inductive (intensional) heuristic which
results in un-representative samples. This is the base-rates made
famous by Tversky & Kahneman. This is just one example of the problem
of relying on folk-psychological (intuitive) judgement. Even in
university samples, the evidence is that formal principles are in the
main context specific. Note also that in general, 'knowing' this
doesn't help one much, any more than 'knowing' about the perceptual
illusions protects one from the effects. Consider this extract from
'Fragments of Behaviour: The Extensional Stance':
(c) Longley 1993,94,95
The rationale behind Sentence Management as outlined in the paper
'What are Regimes?' (Longley 1992) and in section D below, is that the
most effective way to bring about sustained behaviour change is not
through specific, formal training programmes, but through a careful
strategy of apposite allocation to activities which *naturally require
the behavioural skills* which an inmate may be deficient in. This
depends on standardised recording of activity and programme behaviour
*throughout sentence* which will provide a *historical and actuarial,
record of attainment.* This will provide differential information to
guide management's decisions as how best to help inmates lead a
constructive life whilst in custody, and, hopefully, after release.
Initially, it will serve to support actuarial analysis of behaviour as
a practical working, inmate, and management, information system. In
time, it should provide data to enable managers to focus resources
where they are most required (ie provide comprehensive regime
profiles, which highlight strong and weak elements). Such a system is
only interested in what inmates 'think' or 'believe' to the extent
that what they 'think' and 'believe' are specific skills which the
particular activities and programmes require, and which can therefore
be systematically assessed as criteria of formative behaviour
profiling. What is required for effective decision making and
behaviour management is a history of behavioural performance in
activities and programmes, much like the USA system of Grade Point
Averages and attendance. All such behaviours are the natural skills
required by the activities and programmes, and all such assessment is
criterion reference based.
The alternative, intensional approach, of asking staff to identify
risk factors from the documented account of the offence, and
subsequently asking staff to look out for them in the inmate's prison
behaviour may well only serve to shape inmates to inhibit
(conditionally suppress) such behaviour, especially if their
progression through the prison system is contingent on this. However,
from animal studies of acquisition-extinction-reacquisition, there is
no evidence that such behaviour inhibition is likely to produce a
*permanent* change in the inmate's behaviour in the absence of the
inmate *learning new behaviours*. Such an approach is also blind to
base rates of behaviours. Only through a system which encouraged the
acquisition of *new* behaviours can we expect there to be a change in
risk, and even this would have to be *actuarially* determined. For a
proper estimate of risk, one requires a system where inmates can be
assessed with respect to standard demands of the regime. The standard
way to determine risk factors was to derive these from *statistical
analysis,* not from *clinical (intensional) judgement*.
Much of the rationale for this stance can be deduced from the
following. Throughout the 20th century, psychologists' evaluation of
the extent to which reasoning can be formally taught has been
pessimistic. From Thorndike (1913) through Piaget (see Brainerd 1978)
to Newell (1980) it has been maintained that:
'the modern.....position is that learned problem-solving
skills are, in general, idiosyncratic to the task.'
A. Newell 1980.
Furthermore, it has been argued that whilst people may in fact use
abstract inferential rules, these rules can not be formally taught to
any significant degree. They are learned instead under natural
conditions of development and cannot be improved by formal
instruction. This is essentially Piaget's position.
The above is, in fact, how Nisbett et al (1987) opened their SCIENCE
paper '*Teaching Reasoning*'. Reviewing the history of the concept of
formal discipline which looked to the use of latin and the classics to
train the 'muscles of the mind', Nisbett et. al provided some
empirical evidence on the degree to which one class of inferential
rules can be taught. They describe these rules as 'a family of
pragmatic inferential rule systems that people induce in the context
of solving recurrent everyday problems'. These include "causal
schemas", "contractual schemas" and "statistical heuristics". The
latter are clearly instances of inductive rather than deductive
inference.
Nisbett et. al. clearly pointed out that the same can not be said for
the teaching of deductive inference (i.e. formal instruction in
deductive logic or other syntactic rule systems). With respect to the
teaching of logical reasoning, Nisbett et. al. had the following to
say:
'Since highly abstract statistical rules can be taught
in such a way that they can be applied to a great range
of everyday life events, is the same true of the even
more abstract rules of deductive logic? We can report no
evidence indicating that this is true, and we can
provide some evidence indicating that it is not.....In
our view, when people reason in accordance with the
rules of formal logic, they normally do so by using
pragmatic reasoning schemas that happen to map onto the
solutions provided by logic.'
ibid. p.628
Such 'causal schemas' are known as 'intensional heuristics' (Agnoli
and Krantz 1989) and have been widely studied in psychology since the
early 1970s, primarily by research psychologists such as Tversky and
Kahneman (1974), Nisbett and Ross (1980), Kahneman, Slovic and Tversky
(1982), Holland et. al (1986) and Ross and Nisbett (1991).
A longitudinal study by Lehman and Nisbett (1990) looked at
differential improvements in the use of such heuristics in college
students classified by different subject groups. They found
improvements in the use of statistical heuristics in social science
students, but no improvement in conditional logic (such as the Wason
selection task). Conversely, the natural science and humanities
produced significant improvements in conditional logic. Interestingly,
there were no changes in students studying chemistry. Whilst the
authors took the findings to provide some support for their thesis
that reasoning can be taught, it must be appreciated that the findings
at the same time lend considerable support to the view that each
subject area inculcates its own particular type of reasoning, even in
highly educated individuals. That is, the data lend support to the
thesis that training in particular skills must look to training for
transfer and application within particular skill areas. This is
elaborated below in the context of the system of Sentence Management.
Today, formal modelling of such intensional processes is researched
using a technology known as 'Neural Computing' which uses inferential
statistical technologies closely related to regression analysis.
However, such technologies are inherently inductive. They take samples
and generalise to populations. They are at best pattern recognition
systems.
Such technologies must be contrasted with formal deductive logical
systems which are algorithmic rather than heuristic (extensional
rather than intensional). The algorithmic, or computational, approach
is central to classic Artificial Intelligence and is represented today
by the technology of relational databases along with rule and
Knowledge Information Based System (KIBS) which are based on the First
Order Predicate Calculus, the Robinson Resolution Principle (Robinson
1965,1979) and the long term objectives of automated reasoning (e.g.
Wos et. al 1992 and the Japanese Fifth Generation computing project) -
see Volume 2 and 3.
The degree to which intensional heuristics can be suppressed by
training is now controversial (Kahneman and Tversky 1983; Nisbett and
Ross 1980; Holland et al. 1986; Nisbett et al 1987; Agnoli and Krantz
1989; Gladstone 1989; Fong and Nisbett 1991; Ploger and Wilson 1991;
Smith et al 1992). In fact, the degree to which they are or are not
may be orthogonal to the main theme of this paper, since the main
thrust of the argument is that behaviour science should look to
deductive inferential technology, not inductive inference. Central to
the controversy, however, is the degree to which the suppression is
sustained, and the degree of generalisation and practical application
of even 'statistical heuristics'. For example, Ploger and Wilson
(1991) said in commentary on the 1991 Fong and Nisbett paper:
'G. T. Fong and R. E. Nisbett argued that, within the
domain of statistics, people possess abstract rules;
that the use of these rules can be improved by training;
and that these training effects are largely independent
of the training domain. Although their results indicate
that there is a statistically significant improvement in
performance due to training, they also indicate that,
even after training, most college students do not apply
that training to example problems.
D. Ploger & M. Wilson
Statistical reasoning: What is the role of inferential rule training?
Comment on Fong and Nisbett.
Journal of Experimental Psychology General; 1991 Jun Vol
120(2) 213-214
Furthermore, Gladstone (1989) criticises the stance adopted by the
same group in an article in American Psychologist (1988):
'[This paper]' criticizes the assertion by D. R. Lehman
et al. that their experiments support the doctrine of
formal discipline. The present author contends that the
work of Lehman et al. provides evidence that one must
teach for transfer, not that transfer occurs
automatically. The problems of creating a curriculum and
teaching it must be addressed if teachers are to help
students apply a rule across fields. Support is given to
E. L. Thorndike's (1906, 1913) assessment of the general
method of teaching for transfer.'
R. Gladstone (1989)
Teaching for transfer versus formal discipline.
American Psychologist; 1989 Aug Vol 44(8) 1159
What this research suggests is that whilst improvements can be made by
training in formal principles (such as teaching the 'Law of Large
Numbers'), this does not in fact contradict the stance of Piaget and
others that most of these inductive skills are in fact learned under
natural lived experience ('erlbnis' and 'lebenswelt' Husserl 1952, or
'Being-in-the-world' Heidegger 1928). Furthermore, there is evidence
from short term longitudinal studies of training in such skills that
not only is there a decline in such skills after even a short time,
but there is little evidence of application of the heuristics to novel
problem situations outside the training domain. This is the standard
and conventional criticism of 'formal education'. Throughout this
work, the basic message seems to be to focus training on specific
skills acquisition which will not so much generalise to novel
contexts, but find application in other, similar if not identical
contexts.
Most recently, Nisbett and colleagues have looked further at the
criteria for assessing the efficacy of cognitive skills training:
'A number of theoretical positions in psychology
(including variants of case-based reasoning, instance-
based analogy, and connectionist models) maintain that
abstract rules are not involved in human reasoning, or
at best play a minor role. Other views hold that the use
of abstract rules is a core aspect of human reasoning.
The authors propose 8 criteria for determining whether
or not people use abstract rules in reasoning. They
examine evidence relevant to each criterion for several
rule systems. There is substantial evidence that several
inferential rules, including modus ponens, contractual
rules, causal rules, and the law of large numbers, are
used in solving everyday problems. Hybrid mechanisms
that combine aspects of instance and rule models are
considered.'
E. E. Smith, C. Langston and R. E. Nisbett:
The case for rules in reasoning.
Cognitive Science; 1992 Jan-Mar Vol 16(1) 1-40
We use rules, it can be argued, when we apply extensionalist
strategies which are of course, by design, domain specific. Note that
in the history of logic it took until 1879 to discover Quantification
Theory. Furthermore, research on deductive reasoning itself suggests
strongly that the view developed in this volume is sound:
'Reviews 3 types of computer program designed to make
deductive inferences: resolution theorem-provers and
goal-directed inferential programs, implemented
primarily as exercises in artificial intelligence; and
natural deduction systems, which have also been used as
psychological models. It is argued that none of these
methods resembles the way in which human beings usually
reason. They [humans] appear instead to depend, not on
formal rules of inference, but on using the meaning of
the premises to construct a mental model of the relevant
situation and on searching for alternative models of the
premises that falsify putative conclusions.'
P. N. Johnson-Laird
Human and computer reasoning.
Trends in Neurosciences; 1985 Feb Vol 8(2) 54-57
'Contends that the orthodox view in psychology is that
people use formal rules of inference like those of a
natural deduction system. It is argued that logical
competence depends on mental models rather than formal
rules. Models are constructed using linguistic and
general knowledge; a conclusion is formulated based on
the model that maintains semantic information, expresses
it parsimoniously, and makes explicit something not
directly stated by the premise. The validity of the
conclusion is tested by searching for alternative models
that might refute the conclusion. The article summarizes
a theory developed in a 1991 book by P. N. Johnson-Laird
and R. M. Byrne.'
P. N. Johnson-Laird & R. M. Byrne
Precis of Deduction.
Behavioral and Brain Sciences; 1993 Jun Vol 16(2) 323-380
That is, human reasoning tends to focus on content or intension. As
has been argued elsewhere, such heuristic strategies invariably suffer
as a consequence of their context specificity and constraints on
working memory capacity.
--
David Longley
Jasper Taylor
> What worries *me* is that I am English. Now, although I don't
> intend to do anything illegal, I guess that, through accident or bad
> luck or bad judgement, I might end up in prison - an English prison.
I'm English too, but I'm posting from the relative safety of Scotland.
> Without seeking to pass judgement on the approriateness of David
> Longley's *techniques*, it worries me in the extreme that I might
> become someone at the receiving end of this sort of closed-minded
> extensionalist dogma. It worries me enormously that David is unable
> to separate extensionalism from what doesn't seem particularly
> controversial - that clinical judgement would benefit from improved
> documentation.
Don't worry; if they can really convince themselves that only the
statistics are worth considering, they'll stop locking _anyone_ up ---
after all, recidivism rates are _much_ higher amongst criminals given
custodial sentences than amongst those convicted of the same crimes
who get non-custodial punishments. I'm sure David can supply the
figures.
--
Jasper Taylor | /www.cogs / | A politically-correct
Human Communication Research Centre | / c t | joke is like an
University of Edinburgh | :pt de.i rep | environment-friendly
2 Buccleuch Place, Edinburgh, UK. | t . s | stinkbomb.
Phone (44) 31 650 4450 | h ac.uk/~ja |
David Longley
A.Sl...@cs.bham.ac.uk "Aaron Sloman" writes:
Like Fodor, you are a master at band-wagon jumping, like many others
in cognitive science. The problem with the virtual research Aaron, is
that it can only produce virtual findings. Counterfactuals can be
great fun can't they?
--
David Longley
Sean Broadley
Fritz Lehmann writes:
>
> Since Longley has grounded his whole scientistic programme of Skinnerian
> Behaviorism on its allegedly superior access to statistical data-fitting
> techniques in the governance of prisoners, it's worth noting that a major
> obstacle to acceptance of Copernicus' theory was that the Ptolemaic epicycles
> fitted the astronomical data much _better_ (as Tom Etter recently
> pointed out to me) than Copernicus' theory did. Data fitting has its limits.
I'm confused. I had thought that one of the main reasons why Copernicus' book
was so successful was that it had by far the best tables for predicting which
planet would be where, when. The 'heliocentrism' (actually, the centre of the
sun's small epicycle, I think: Copernicus needed something to explain a slight
wobble in the sun's position) was not accepted immediately, but the book became
a standard text _despite_ the heliocentrism rather than because of it.
_Ptolemy's_ Ptolemaic system was very simple. The idea that you should keep on
explaining the data in a finer and finer manner by adding more and more
epicycles ad infinitum was a later development. Copernicus's epicycle system
was horrifically convoluted (40 or 50 different circles, I believe). It was a
slight simplification on a geocentric approach of his time, but only slight.
I had thought that the important detail was _not_ that it was _simpler_. The
important detail is that it _explained_things_ that a geocentric system did
not. It explained why the centre of the epicycles of venus and mercury was
always in line with the centre of the epicycle of the sun. It also explained
why the number of orbits of an outer planet, plus the number of retrogrades,
equals the number of earth years that have passed (have I screwed up that last
one? orbital geometry in my head... oh well, something like that).
_Kepler_ showed success in data-fitting. _Copernicus_ could have fit the data
just as well with a geocentric view as a heliocentric.
Sean Broadley
University of Canterbury
Fritz Lehmann
---begin quote---
At this point I give up. David is either incapable of understanding
logic (e.g. seeing that "X is OFTEN Y" tells us nothing about "X is
ALWAYS Y") or so highly motivated to defend and promote the system
he has created that he is unable to apply his logical abilities to
anything that might threaten it.
Perhaps somebody who claims to understand and support his position
will defend it against all the counterarguments that have been put
by various people, since David clearly cannot, or will not, pay
attention to any detail in the arguments. But I've had enough of
this.
At least he has apparently provoked some people into reading at
their terminals bits of philosophy they would never read in a
library, and as a consequence maybe some of them now understand the
difference between "intensional" and "intentional", and perhaps even
understand why there are non-solipsistic forms of functionalism that
are immune to Putnam's criticisms, and for that we should probably
thank David.
Aaron
Yes, Gents, I think it's time to quit. David Longley simply will
not respond to any specific criticisms; his quotes are now coming even
faster than before, and are even less relevant to what they respond
to. Maybe there's a "RANDOM" button on his QUOTE-A-MATIC. I have
made some very specific and bold assertions directly in Longley's
area of expertise, which _invited_ specific refutation, and all it
produced was apparently random quotes again. At least, as Aaron
Sloman acknowledges, the quotes themselves have sometimes been
interesting bits of philosophy (irrespective of their source).
More recently, to defend Moliere from Charles S. Peirce, Longley has tapped
the QUOTE-A-MATIC into a (potentially vaster) database of detailed
pharmacological quotes. An ominous development in itself.
We have given David Longley's absurd views more publicity by castigating
them than he could ever have given them by himself. I wish I could charge
a fee. It will test my steely reserve to try to refrain from excoriating
any further foolishness in these threads. Some time later, in the proper
newsgroup, a sensible discussion of Quine's translational indeterminacy
may be in order, without any reference to Skinnerian Behaviorism in
the handling of British prisoners.
Adieu (I hope) ... Yours truly, Fritz Lehmann
David Longley
fleh...@orion.oac.uci.edu "Fritz Lehmann" writes:
> More recently, to defend Moliere from Charles S. Peirce, Longley has tapped
> the QUOTE-A-MATIC into a (potentially vaster) database of detailed
> pharmacological quotes. An ominous development in itself.
>
Hmm, now I can't even quote my own research!
> We have given David Longley's absurd views more publicity by castigating
> them than he could ever have given them by himself. I wish I could charge
> a fee. It will test my steely reserve to try to refrain from excoriating
> any further foolishness in these threads. Some time later, in the proper
> newsgroup, a sensible discussion of Quine's translational indeterminacy
> may be in order, without any reference to Skinnerian Behaviorism in
> the handling of British prisoners.
>
All that we have seen is a few individuals who work within a
paradigm (cognitive science) which has been explicitly, and
fundamentally shown to be flawed by Putnam (who largely ushered
it in), Quine (who provides logical evidence for its
incoherence), Tversky and Kahneman (who show that whatever
cognitive processes are, they don't fit the normative models of
experimental cognitive scientists), Dawes, Faust and Meehl (who
show that there are a bunch of professionals out there who are
basing their services on unreliable judgement rather than
scientific evidence), Nisbett et. al (who show that even if we
*can* teach any rules which are not context specific, such rules
do not seem to help in mathematics and logic, only statistics
(such as the Law of Large Numbers)), Gigerenzer (and others who
reckon that the methodology of contemporary psychology is
fundamentally flawed in its reliance on inductive statistical
inference) and Stich, Churchland and others for highlighting that
the connectionists' artificial neural networks do a good job at
modelling the poor way we reason despite the claims of those
wedded to the old semantic net like paradigms, and that
behavioural approaches tend to be the only approaches which have
any 'treatment' efficacy.
The ease with which cognitive scientists dream up convoluted
arguments to support their research programmes *is*, I suggest, a
consequence of their ample opportunity to practice creative
writing.
Presented with just a simple example of how the propositional
attitudes such as 'x said y' lead us to go beyond the information
given unless we quote y verbatim, we have seen absurd attempts to
either obfuscate the point or somehow suggest that this is
legitimate practice. Said that is of course just one member of
the family of intensional idioms which Quine (1960;1992) has
repeatedly shown to resist regimentation within the formal
language of First Order Logic, which Quine proposes suffices for
a language of science.
Lehmann's final suggestion that discussion of the indeterminacy
thesis free from the shackles of real world examples is
characteristic of the sterility of academic cognitive science. In
an era when funding of research is so much under threat in such
areas, I suggest that the example set by Lehmann and company
justifies the concerns which many have about the value of
research in cognitive and social science.
I am, however, grateful to these individuals for the attention
they might have brought to the work under development. For anyone
wishing to read the material at first hand, please try the
following sources:
sci.cognitive
comp.ai.philosophy
sci.psychology.theory
If 'Fragments of Behaviour: The Extensional Stance' is not available there,
the 9 files (400K) cam be obtained from me via an e-mail request.
--------------------------------------------------------------------
PS Has anyone got a good condition IBM THINKPAD 755CD or CE for sale?
____________________________________________________________________
--
David Longley
David Longley
writes:
>
> ---
> David Longley writes:
> >Hmmmm the trouble with these intensional realists is that like their quarry,
> >one just can't pin 'em down! Putnam was critcising MIT mentalism in the book
> >cited above, and the MIT mentalist par excellence is Jerry Fodor. How does
>
> theory every few years. But I do agree with some of his points. Note also
> that you would be on better ground referring to Fodor as an "intentional
> realist" with a "t"...this is more important to him than quantifying
> over properties (however his approving words concerning "information
> semantics" suggests he also endorses "intensional realism" with an "s").
>
> >the notion of a 'concrete situation' escape the inscrutability of reference
> >and indeterminacy of translation arguments?
> >
> >Don't you find your examples just a little bit arcane? What's wrong with
> >the 'quotation' problem (cited in 'Word & Object' and here) as an example
> >par excellence of the problems of the intensional? Do you deny that such
> >things *do* happen as I suggest....??
>
> any empirical hypothesis. Or so I will assert here. If you're not willing
> to go beyond the data of sense, in some narrow empiricist/positivist
> sense, then you'd better hang it up as far as empirical science is concerned.
>
> My examples are hardly arcane...on the contrary, they are an absolutely
> pedestrian, paradigmatic use of the verb "to see." If your semantics
> can't handle "George saw a cat cross the road" you're in pretty bad shape
> if you're trying to understand the logic of "to see".
>
> Tom Wetzel
> :::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
> thomas...@eng.sun.com
>
'Sees' falls foul of the 'gavagai' problem, (inscrutability of reference). We
have a problem ascertaining what anyone else sees, hears, knows, believes etc,
and confabulate the same way we do with 'says that'. 'Sees' is, after all a
propositional attitude. (For more on these issues, see Quine, chapter 4
'Intension' in 'Pursuit of Truth' (1992).
--
David Longley
Tom Wetzel
---
David Longley writes:
>Hmmmm the trouble with these intensional realists is that like their quarry,
>one just can't pin 'em down! Putnam was critcising MIT mentalism in the book
>cited above, and the MIT mentalist par excellence is Jerry Fodor. How does
Well, don't ask me to explain Fodor. As is well-known, he invents a new
theory every few years. But I do agree with some of his points. Note also
that you would be on better ground referring to Fodor as an "intentional
realist" with a "t"...this is more important to him than quantifying
over properties (however his approving words concerning "information
semantics" suggests he also endorses "intensional realism" with an "s").
>the notion of a 'concrete situation' escape the inscrutability of reference
>and indeterminacy of translation arguments?
>
>Don't you find your examples just a little bit arcane? What's wrong with
>the 'quotation' problem (cited in 'Word & Object' and here) as an example
>par excellence of the problems of the intensional? Do you deny that such
>things *do* happen as I suggest....??
There is no more problem of interpretation of what someone says than in
Neil Rickert
David, you are ranting and raving. Your need to take a vacation to
recover your composure.
>All that we have seen is a few individuals who work within a
>paradigm (cognitive science) which has been explicitly, and
>fundamentally shown to be flawed by Putnam (who largely ushered
>it in),
Utter nonsense. What Putnam claims to have refuted is his version of
Turing machine functionalism. There is still some dispute even about
the validity of his refutation. Cognitive science is rather broader
than TM functionalism. Perhaps the particular approach known as
cognitivism is close to what Putnam claims to have refuted, but I
doubt that there is even agreement as to exactly what constitutes
cognitivism.
> Quine (who provides logical evidence for its
>incoherence),
More nonsense. Quine's criticisms are of a particular view of what
cognition should be. They do not demonstrate the incoherence of the
field of cognitive science as a whole.
> Tversky and Kahneman (who show that whatever
>cognitive processes are, they don't fit the normative models of
>experimental cognitive scientists),
At most this suggests that the normative models in use are
inappropriate. Moreover the conclusions of Kahneman & Tversky have
not gone unchallenged.
> Dawes, Faust and Meehl (who
>show that there are a bunch of professionals out there who are
>basing their services on unreliable judgement rather than
>scientific evidence),
There are charlatans in many professions. What else is new? There
have been similar criticisms of clinical practice in psychology for
as long as I can remember.
> Nisbett et. al (who show that even if we
>*can* teach any rules which are not context specific, such rules
>do not seem to help in mathematics and logic,
Ho, hum. This has surely been well known to teachers of mathematics
for a very long time.
> Stich, Churchland and others for highlighting that
>the connectionists' artificial neural networks do a good job at
>modelling the poor way we reason despite the claims of those
>wedded to the old semantic net like paradigms,
Since connectionism is normally considered an appropriate research
area within cognitive science, this should count against the validity
of your attack on the field. Incidently, you refer to the 'poor way
we reason'. Do you have any strong evidence to suggest that the way
we reason is poor, or are you arbitrarily assuming that the purported
normative standards inherited from the conventional wisdom tell the
whole story? Is there good evidence that a computer programmed to
exactly follow the purported normative standards for reasoning can
actually reason as well as we can when reasoning ranges over very
broad areas?
>The ease with which cognitive scientists dream up convoluted
>arguments to support their research programmes *is*, I suggest, a
>consequence of their ample opportunity to practice creative
>writing.
This is silly. Research scientists in many fields dream up
convoluted arguments. This is a consequence of their being required
to support their proposed research with arguments. It is the nature
of fundamental research that you cannot predict the outcome, and
therefore clean supporting arguments in favor of a research project
are often unavailable.
>Presented with just a simple example of how the propositional
>attitudes such as 'x said y' lead us to go beyond the information
>given unless we quote y verbatim,
The type of reporting that you criticize has been going on for
thousands of years. If you really think it is as hopeless as you
claim, I suggest that you take on the fundamentalist churches and
persuade them to ditch their bibles because of the prevalence of this
practice in that work.
> we have seen absurd attempts to
>either obfuscate the point or somehow suggest that this is
>legitimate practice.
When a practice has apparently been effectively used for thousands of
years, the burden of proof is on you to demonstrate it has actually
been ineffective. You cannot meet that burden with a few special
cases.
David Longley
PH...@daffodif.demon.co.uk writes:
> On 7 Aug 1995 20:49:53 -0500,
> Neil Rickert (ric...@cs.niu.edu) wrote:
>
> >> I suggest that the problem is your [David Longley] attitute to philosophy
> of science. You apparently take it as a normative standard as to how science
> should be conducted. By contrast, I take it as a failed attempt to
> adequately describe the processes of science.
>
> It's one of philsophy's great frustrations that - much to the amusement of
> other academics - philosophers have even a hard time agreeing on what
> philosophy is, on what philosophers are doing!
> Nevertheless some philsophers of science have seen their remarks as
> normative, others as descriptive, Popper for one seems to inconsistently
> oscillate between the two in his writings. But still, I think the philosophy
> of science is only a failed attempt to adequately describe the processes of
> science as much as science is a failed attempt to adequately describe the
> natural world.
> Bear in mind too that philosophy of science is of great interest to
> scientists too, not just philosophers, witness the writings of Einstein, and
> Stephen Hawking, to name but two famous examples.
>
>
>
> --
> Phil S.
>
> <PH...@daffodif.demon.co.uk>
>
Yes, and perhaps the reason for all the frustration (exaccerbated by the
delay in feedback) is that there are no facts of the matter when it comes
to philosophies. That's one of the reasons I don't want to get bogged down
in what I see as pointless arguments. There *is* a research programme here
which can generate useful data, and which *is* an application of Quine's
evidential behaviourism as a thorough going empiricism. It'd be a great
pity to lose this opportunity to do some useful practical work which draws
on such clear and thorough analysis. If it delivers what I claim it should
- it might do a great service for anglo-american philosophical research as
well as psychology.
Psychology alone will *never* do it.
--
David Longley
David Longley
> In <807867...@longley.demon.co.uk> David Longley <Da...@longley.demon.
Neil, the above really does *just* reveal a very shallow grasp of
the whole history and development of psychology and cognitive
science over the past 50 years. If you run what I have written by
anyone who has been actively involved in research in these areas
since the mid 60s say, I bet they will recognise that I am
talking about major issues, and that I'm not just articulating
some idiosyncratic views.
It's quite clear from what you have written that you start off
with the decision just to contradict. yet you do so in a manner
which just reveals how little you know about the fields. This
can't go unsaid since just a few articles back you said as much
yourself. Yet you seem to have no reservations about
pontificating (for that's all it can be described as when you say
you are unfamiliar with the literature - especially when I have
given you a fair potted summary of it).
Connectionism began with Thorndike, it was fleshed out by Hebb in
the 40s, and in the late 50s by Rosenblatt and Woodrow and Hoff.
In those days, one associated the word functionalism with Hull
and Spence, perhaps even Dewey - the term largely meant
adaptation in the evolutionary sense.
Functionalism as it is bandied about today arouse in the late 50s
and early 60s as a development of behaviourism. Putnam gave it
the explicit machine functionalist tag, but many had been working
in that vein for some time. When Putnam came to appreciate the
fact tat it essentially collapses into behaviourism it was a
recognition that little 'progress' had been made in the 60s and
70s.
Quine's influence has been operating here. What we are amidst is
the coming to fruition of a sophisticated evidential
behaviourism, which is, I have suggested, going to see the demise
of cognitive science simply because the latter is groundless.
That's what the Lakoff review was all about. I know you don't
like quotes (perhaps you don't like books and articles either ?)
But please read these extract carefully, and consider their
weighty implications in conjunction with Quine's work.
"In the 1970's, Cognitive Science was formulated in
terms of Putnam's doctrine of functionalism, in which
mental states are the functional states of an abstract
digital computer, thinking is abstract symbol
manipulation as in the operation of a computer program,
and the mind's symbols get their meaning by denoting
things in the world. Functionalism has since become the
mainstream doctrine within the philosophy of mind. But
in the mid-1970's, overwhelming empirical evidence
against functionalism began to pile up, and in the late
1970's, Putnam himself found functionalism to be
logically incoherent. In this volume, Putnam brilliantly
reveals the philosophical fallacies in the doctrine he
founded, showing why functionalism must fail as a
philosophy of mind. The fall of functionalism has major
consequences for generative linguistics, artificial
intelligence, and cognitive and developmental
psychology".
Lakoff (1988).
'We cannot individuate concepts and beliefs without
reference to the ENVIRONMENT. Meanings aren't "in the
head."
The upshot of our discussion for the philosophy of mind
is that propositional attitudes, as philosophers call
them - that is, such things as 'believing that snow
is white' and 'feeling certain that the cat is on
the mat' - are not "states" of the human brain and
nervous system considered in isolation from the social
and nonhuman environment. A fortiori they are
not "functional states" - that is, states definable
in terms of parameters which would enter into a
software description of the organism. FUNCTIONALISM,
CONSTRUED AS THE THESIS THAT PROPOSITIONAL ATTITUDES ARE
JUST COMPUTATIONAL STATES OF THE BRAIN, CANNOT BE
CORRECT'.
The arguments I just summarised were, it might be
pointed out in this connection, arguments against
methodological solipsism.
Putnam (1988)
'Representation and Reality'
'The first three chapters actually grew out of two
earlier papers. Those papers were, in part, polemics
against the views of my good friend and student Jerry
Fodor. Fodor I hasten to say, is not the main target of
this book; but I have retained some of my polemic
against what I call "MIT mentalism"... The main target
of the present book is one H Putnam (one of my former
selves) and those who have adopted his views. Or perhaps
it would be more accurate to say that the present book
doesn't have a "main target"; for its aim is not so much
to refute one particular view as to establish the need
for a different way of looking at problems about "mental
states". At any rate, the intended contribution of these
three chapters to that end is to do two things: (1) to
establish a close connection (discovered and emphasised
throughout his career by W V Quine) between problems
about meaning and problems about belief fixation, by
showing that the holistic character of belief fixation
in science bears deeply on the issue of individuation of
"meanings" (or "contents" or "intentions", as they are
called by various philosophers; and (2) to argue that,
in fact, thinking of "meanings" (or "contents") as
"theoretical entities" - as scientific objects, objects
which can be isolated and which can play an explanatory
role in scientific theory - is a mistake. In the course
of the argument I defend the view that there is no
criterion for sameness of meaning except actual
interpretative practice - a view made famous by Quine
and Davidson'
H Putnam (1988)
Representation and Reality
It is now only 1995 - things just don't move *that* fast.........
I stand by my statement that most of cognitive science, and much
of the research in cognitive psychology has been a waste of time.
That's one of the reasons why so many graduates can't draw on
their degrees for anything other than a record of the daft things
people do. Behaviour science should offer some useful tools for
the would be professional - the PROBE system provides just that.
Now I may well need a holiday to recompose myself, but the reason
I am so angry is that so much nonsense is being written in
response to what I have presented in 'Fragments..'. Of course
there are pockets of good research, but that cashes out as good
observation and measurement of behaviour, not a lot of mystical
speculation couched in the language chimerical intensionalism.
One can see in simple form *why* intensionalism is so vacuous
just be the quotation example. Why try to defend something which
is demonstrably indefensible? Evidential behaviourism is buy no
means a variant of epistemolgical or intellectual nihilism, any
more than any highly sophisticated skilled profession is - but it
*is* a set of skills nonetheless, and they are behavioural skills
as well.
--
David Longley
David Longley
> In <807867...@longley.demon.co.uk> David Longley <Da...@longley.demon.co.uk>
> writes:
>
> > Dawes, Faust and Meehl (who
> >show that there are a bunch of professionals out there who are
> >basing their services on unreliable judgement rather than
> >scientific evidence),
>
> There are charlatans in many professions. What else is new? There
> have been similar criticisms of clinical practice in psychology for
> as long as I can remember.
Yes - it's been a research topic since the early 1940s - the
point is:
Extract from an Open University Third Level Course:
Professional Judgment and Decision Making:
'There is no controversy in social science that shows such a large
body of qualitatively diverse studies coming out so uniformly in the
same direction as this one. When you are pushing 90 investigations,
predicting everything from the outcome of football games to the
diagnosis of liver disease and when you can hardly come up with a half
dozen studies showing even a weak tendency in favour of the clinician,
it is time to draw a practical conclusion, whatever theoretical
differences may still be disputed.'
Meehl 1986, pp373-4
COURSE TEXT:
JACK: Meehl's study set off, or at least much inflamed, the
'statistical versus clinical judgment' controversy, which has rumbled
on ever since, though it's somewhat less fashionable than it was.
PENELOPE: Why?
JACK: Cynically, because the human judges didn't like the results and
made sure that they or their authors didn't get the funding,
circulation or promotion they deserved. Closed shops (as most
professions are to some extent) are not likely to vote for what they
see as de-skilling, and alternative approaches that showed more
respect for the human judge became fashionable and fund worthy
(especially the expert systems we shall meet in the session after
next). Uncynically, the methodological problems in policy-capturing
research are real: it IS difficult to establish the external validity
of the results.'
Page 63 Volume 1 Introductory Text 2
>
> > Nisbett et. al (who show that even if we
> >*can* teach any rules which are not context specific, such rules
> >do not seem to help in mathematics and logic,
>
> Ho, hum. This has surely been well known to teachers of mathematics
> for a very long time.
>
Yes, but if the Ariadne Thread of 'Fragments..' is sound, ie the
failure of Leibniz Law in psychological contexts, such
individuals may well hold certain ideas and still not realise
their implications - LITERALLY! A lot of maths teachers have
given up teaching algorithms and have turned to teaching
'cognitive skills'. The implications of the research are that the
old ways may have been correct.
> > Stich, Churchland and others for highlighting that
> >the connectionists' artificial neural networks do a good job at
> >modelling the poor way we reason despite the claims of those
> >wedded to the old semantic net like paradigms,
>
> Since connectionism is normally considered an appropriate research
> area within cognitive science, this should count against the validity
> of your attack on the field. Incidently, you refer to the 'poor way
> we reason'. Do you have any strong evidence to suggest that the way
> we reason is poor, or are you arbitrarily assuming that the purported
> normative standards inherited from the conventional wisdom tell the
> whole story? Is there good evidence that a computer programmed to
> exactly follow the purported normative standards for reasoning can
> actually reason as well as we can when reasoning ranges over very
> broad areas?
I have quoted the *&*%$%$% evidence dozens of times, listed the
references cited the names - how many more times do I have to do
so - read Fragments and whilst doing so - try and hold onto the
point I make above, ie the failure of Leibniz law in contexts of
memory, and other psychological states - ie we just don;t make
the right connections - that's the theme and that's the
justification for turning to FOL and rDBMS technology.
>
> >The ease with which cognitive scientists dream up convoluted
> >arguments to support their research programmes *is*, I suggest, a
> >consequence of their ample opportunity to practice creative
> >writing.
>
> This is silly. Research scientists in many fields dream up
> convoluted arguments. This is a consequence of their being required
> to support their proposed research with arguments. It is the nature
> of fundamental research that you cannot predict the outcome, and
> therefore clean supporting arguments in favor of a research project
> are often unavailable.
>
Read Skinner's diatribe, and do so with respect. For him to be
driven to such extremes should make one sit up and ask *WHY*?
> >Presented with just a simple example of how the propositional
> >attitudes such as 'x said y' lead us to go beyond the information
> >given unless we quote y verbatim,
>
> The type of reporting that you criticize has been going on for
> thousands of years. If you really think it is as hopeless as you
> claim, I suggest that you take on the fundamentalist churches and
> persuade them to ditch their bibles because of the prevalence of this
> practice in that work.
>
This is supposed to be a science - we teach undergraduates it's a
science, and I examine a course at the University of London which
is a MASTER of science. In sciences, a large part of what you
teach are empirical facts. I have yet to see science
undergraduates argue in their tutorials as 'cognitive scientists'
do!
> > we have seen absurd attempts to
> >either obfuscate the point or somehow suggest that this is
> >legitimate practice.
>
> When a practice has apparently been effectively used for thousands of
> years, the burden of proof is on you to demonstrate it has actually
> been ineffective. You cannot meet that burden with a few special
> cases.
>
There is ample evidence that folk psychology is not adequate.
That's why, ironically, so many people turn to the mental health
professionals at one time or another in their lives. It then
hits them *how* inadequate our heuristics really are.
--
David Longley
Neil Rickert
>In article <407vts$3...@mp.cs.niu.edu> ric...@cs.niu.edu "Neil Rickert" writes:
>> In <807867...@longley.demon.co.uk> David Longley <Da...@longley.demon.
>> co.uk> writes:
>> David, you are ranting and raving. Your need to take a vacation to
>> recover your composure.
>> >All that we have seen is a few individuals who work within a
>> >paradigm (cognitive science) which has been explicitly, and
>> >fundamentally shown to be flawed by Putnam (who largely ushered
>> >it in),
>> Utter nonsense. ...
>> > Quine (who provides logical evidence for its
>> >incoherence),
>> More nonsense. ...
>Neil, the above really does *just* reveal a very shallow grasp of
>the whole history and development of psychology and cognitive
>science over the past 50 years.
This is quite unfair. It is you, after all, who has been insisting
that we must not read between the lines. Read what you said. You
made an inappropriate sweeping generalization. That is why I
referred to it as ranting and raving.
This time through you made a simpler and more reasonable statement.
You said:
I stand by my statement that most of cognitive science, and much
of the research in cognitive psychology has been a waste of time.
Now if you had said something more like that in the previous posting,
I might have almost agreed. Instead you had said that the whole
discipline of cognitive science is flawed and incoherent. That went
way to far.
> If you run what I have written by
>anyone who has been actively involved in research in these areas
>since the mid 60s say, I bet they will recognise that I am
>talking about major issues, and that I'm not just articulating
>some idiosyncratic views.
Only if they read between the lines, and read what you meant to say
instead of what you did say.
>It's quite clear from what you have written that you start off
>with the decision just to contradict.
Again, this is unfair. You posted an intemperate message which
attacked an entire discipline, instead of criticizing the work that
has been done by many (but not all) within that discipline.
>Quine's influence has been operating here.
I find it hard to judge the importance of Quine. Perhaps this is
because I find him difficult to stomach. He goes rather too far, and
thus I do not find him at all persuasive. He comes across to me as
being idealogically committed to a particular version of empiricism,
and as developing arguments for positions designed to support that
ideology. His arguments often seem somewhat strained. Although I
think the evidence supports some kind of empiricism, I don't see that
the Quinean version of empiricism can work.
> What we are amidst is
>the coming to fruition of a sophisticated evidential
>behaviourism, which is, I have suggested, going to see the demise
>of cognitive science simply because the latter is groundless.
Now you are back at sweeping generalizations. You again declare that
the whole discipline is groundless. Incidently, I lack your
enthusiasm for the type of behaviorism you favor, since I doubt that
it can ever be very effective without an adequate understanding of
cognitive processes.
> I know you don't
>like quotes (perhaps you don't like books and articles either ?)
I spend a great deal of time reading books and articles. For example
I am borrowing an average of about 5 books per week from the library,
mostly related to this area of study. I will admit that I only skim
some of them, read only a chapter or two from others, and that some
of the borrowings are repeats.
>But please read these extract carefully, and consider their
>weighty implications in conjunction with Quine's work.
The quotes seem more related to Putnam's work. Putnam gives credit
to Quine, although my impression is that Putnam came to this view
largely by himself, and later realized the relation to Quine's work.
It is difficult to know how much Putnam has been influenced by
Quine.
>Now I may well need a holiday to recompose myself, but the reason
>I am so angry is that so much nonsense is being written in
>response to what I have presented in 'Fragments..'.
I think the responses are more to your postings on the net other than
Fragments. I think part of what annoys you is that people are
responding to what you have been saying, instead of to what you had
meant to say. This has been made rather worse by your habit of not
adequately clarifying your messages when they have been
misunderstood.
> Of course
>there are pockets of good research, but that cashes out as good
>observation and measurement of behaviour, not a lot of mystical
>speculation couched in the language chimerical intensionalism.
As I see it, you bandy about the accusation of intensionalism far too
freely. I wonder whether you are trapped in an idealogical
committment which makes it difficult for you to digest alterative
views. I wonder whether you have considered the possibility that
extreme behaviorism might be as much a chimera as is extreme
intensionalism.
PH...@daffodif.demon.co.uk
Neil Rickert
>On 7 Aug 1995 20:49:53 -0500,
> Neil Rickert (ric...@cs.niu.edu) wrote:
>>> I suggest that the problem is your [David Longley] attitute to philosophy
>of science. You apparently take it as a normative standard as to how science
>should be conducted. By contrast, I take it as a failed attempt to
>adequately describe the processes of science.
>It's one of philsophy's great frustrations that - much to the amusement of
>other academics - philosophers have even a hard time agreeing on what
>philosophy is, on what philosophers are doing!
It is hardly a problem that philosophers don't know what philosophy
is. Mathematicians have seriously considered defining mathematics as
that which mathematicians do, just as psychologists have considered
defining intelligence as that which is measured by intelligence
tests. Computer scientist argue about whether computer programming
should be considered part of their discipline. I think it a common
feature of many disciplines that there is no clean definition as to
exactly what is the discipline.
[As a matter of disclosure I should state that I consider myself to
be a mathematician and computer scientist, but I do not consider
myself a philosopher.]
>Nevertheless some philsophers of science have seen their remarks as
>normative, others as descriptive,
How philosophers of science see themselves seems less important than
how working scientists see them. Most physical scientists (I mean to
include biologists, but to exclude psychologists and sociologists)
pay little attention to philosophers of science. They have probably
heard of falsification, and a few may have heard of paradigm shifts,
but that is about the extent of it. I suspect they would claim that
nature provides the normative standard for their work. Social
scientists pay more attention to philosophy, perhaps because they
recognize the need for a normative standard.
> But still, I think the philosophy
>of science is only a failed attempt to adequately describe the processes of
>science as much as science is a failed attempt to adequately describe the
>natural world.
Most scientists, and plenty of philosophers would disagree with
this. Science has made great progress, and continues to make
progress. By contrast, the progress of philosophy of science is not
very evident.
>Bear in mind too that philosophy of science is of great interest to
>scientists too, not just philosophers, witness the writings of Einstein, and
>Stephen Hawking, to name but two famous examples.
I think you make too much of this. Philosophizing is a human trait,
and scientists are not exempt from doing it. But few write on
philosophy of science in any general sense. They write on the
philosophy of their specialized areas. If you ask physical
scientists to name some philosophers of science, you will get few
answers. Many have heard of Popper, and perhaps of Mach. A few have
heard of Kuhn but know about little more than paradigm shifts. If
they have heard of Feyerabend it is because they have heard rumors
that he is an enemy of science. The names of most philosophers of
science are unfamiliar to most scientists.
Neil Rickert
>In article <407vts$3...@mp.cs.niu.edu> ric...@cs.niu.edu "Neil Rickert" writes:
>> In <807867...@longley.demon.co.uk> David Longley <Da...@longley.demon.co.uk>
>> writes:
>> > Nisbett et. al (who show that even if we
>> >*can* teach any rules which are not context specific, such rules
>> >do not seem to help in mathematics and logic,
>> Ho, hum. This has surely been well known to teachers of mathematics
>> for a very long time.
>Yes, but if the Ariadne Thread of 'Fragments..' is sound, ie the
>failure of Leibniz Law in psychological contexts, such
>individuals may well hold certain ideas and still not realise
>their implications - LITERALLY!
I'm not sure what relevance the failure Leibniz law has to the
teaching of mathematics and logic. One should not even expect to
validly use mathematics and logic in psychological contexts.
> A lot of maths teachers have
>given up teaching algorithms and have turned to teaching
>'cognitive skills'. The implications of the research are that the
>old ways may have been correct.
I will agree that there are many problems with the teaching of
mathematics. But it is too simple to blame this all on cognitive
science.
>> Incidently, you refer to the 'poor way
>> we reason'. Do you have any strong evidence to suggest that the way
>> we reason is poor, or are you arbitrarily assuming that the purported
>> normative standards inherited from the conventional wisdom tell the
>> whole story? Is there good evidence that a computer programmed to
>> exactly follow the purported normative standards for reasoning can
>> actually reason as well as we can when reasoning ranges over very
>> broad areas?
>I have quoted the *&*%$%$% evidence dozens of times, listed the
>references cited the names - how many more times do I have to do
>so - read Fragments and whilst doing so - try and hold onto the
>point I make above, ie the failure of Leibniz law in contexts of
>memory, and other psychological states - ie we just don;t make
>the right connections - that's the theme and that's the
>justification for turning to FOL and rDBMS technology.
This reads like a silly non-response. You have posted evidence that
when people are given artificial reasoning problems they do not do as
well as the experimenter claims they should. So what? In order to
test whether people reason well, you should evaluate how well they do
with natural reasoning problems. And your test should be purely
behavioral, so as to not confuse the explanation people give of their
reasoning with the actual results of that reasoning.
>> >Presented with just a simple example of how the propositional
>> >attitudes such as 'x said y' lead us to go beyond the information
>> >given unless we quote y verbatim,
>> The type of reporting that you criticize has been going on for
>> thousands of years. If you really think it is as hopeless as you
>> claim, I suggest that you take on the fundamentalist churches and
>> persuade them to ditch their bibles because of the prevalence of this
>> practice in that work.
>This is supposed to be a science - we teach undergraduates it's a
>science, and I examine a course at the University of London which
>is a MASTER of science. In sciences, a large part of what you
>teach are empirical facts. I have yet to see science
>undergraduates argue in their tutorials as 'cognitive scientists'
>do!
A large proportion of cognitive scientists are more philosophers than
they are scientists. One should not be surprised if they do not
argue as scientists. I don't see what this has to do with the point
being argued.
>> > we have seen absurd attempts to
>> >either obfuscate the point or somehow suggest that this is
>> >legitimate practice.
>> When a practice has apparently been effectively used for thousands of
>> years, the burden of proof is on you to demonstrate it has actually
>> been ineffective. You cannot meet that burden with a few special
>> cases.
>There is ample evidence that folk psychology is not adequate.
>That's why, ironically, so many people turn to the mental health
>professionals at one time or another in their lives. It then
>hits them *how* inadequate our heuristics really are.
Another non-responsive answer. From a discussion of the validity
of reporting 'x said y' you suddenly switch the subject to
folk psychology as if there were no change of subject.
Tom Wetzel
---
>'Sees' falls foul of the 'gavagai' problem, (inscrutability of reference). We
>have a problem ascertaining what anyone else sees, hears, knows, believes etc,
>and confabulate the same way we do with 'says that'. 'Sees' is, after all a
>propositional attitude. (For more on these issues, see Quine, chapter 4
>'Intension' in 'Pursuit of Truth' (1992).
I disagree that "the gavagai problem" is any more of a problem than any
other empirical hypothesis. Quine ignores a lot of the information the field
linguist has available to her. For example, how to rule out the hypothesis
that "gavagai" refers only to the current temporal state of the rabbit.
Note that *I* can't even refer to the temporal entity in question
except by linking it to a more persistent object whose temporary state
I take it to be, namely, a rabbit. It's not accidental that this is so.
Admittedly this is inconsistent with Quine's eventist metaphysics but
so much the worse for Quine's metaphysics.
It's hard to see how detection and tracking over time of persisting
loci of causal powers would not be especially useful -- indeed
indispensable -- (and thus adaptive) to organisms such as humans are.
Given the function of human language to facilitate sharing of
information and development of common action plans, it's hard to see
how its function could be carried out without devices for referring to
such persistent loci of causal powers. The centrality of object
reference in a language is thus a reasonable hypothesis for the field
linguist to make, hence ruling out much of the "indeterminacy"
Quine posits for "gavagai" in that situation.
Tom Wetzel
:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
thomas...@eng.sun.com
David Longley
>
> This reads like a silly non-response. You have posted evidence that
> when people are given artificial reasoning problems they do not do as
> well as the experimenter claims they should. So what? In order to
> test whether people reason well, you should evaluate how well they do
> with natural reasoning problems. And your test should be purely
> behavioral, so as to not confuse the explanation people give of their
> reasoning with the actual results of that reasoning.
>
We are going over old ground here, but I don't get the impression
that what I have said or written is 'hanging togther' as
designed. That's useful to know - you say that elsewhere too. If
you *have* read the 9 extracts, then I guess I need to go back
and work on it.
>
> >There is ample evidence that folk psychology is not adequate.
> >That's why, ironically, so many people turn to the mental health
> >professionals at one time or another in their lives. It then
> >hits them *how* inadequate our heuristics really are.
>
> Another non-responsive answer. From a discussion of the validity
> of reporting 'x said y' you suddenly switch the subject to
> folk psychology as if there were no change of subject.
>
Maybe I don't have to go back and re-work the main material! The
vernacular of folk-psychology is largely intensional. 'x said y'
was an example of how we tend to go beyond the information given
even when claiming to report what others actually *say*. Just
consider what happens when folk-psychology is unleashed on
reporting what we *do* !
(Behaviour *science*, on the other hand, requires discipline, the
same discipline which all empirical sciences require, and that
discipline requires one *not* to 'go beyond the information
given' - Bruner was right back in the late 1950s in his
characterisation of what typifies 'cognition', but the
implications drawn from that observation have been all *wrong*).
--
David Longley
Neil Rickert
> The
>vernacular of folk-psychology is largely intensional. 'x said y'
>was an example of how we tend to go beyond the information given
>even when claiming to report what others actually *say*.
An expression in a formal language has a precise well defined
meaning. But this is not so with natural language expressions. Talk
of going beyond the information given is meaningless unless there is
universal agreement on what is the information given. Natural
language does not lend itself to that sort of universal agreement.
> Just
>consider what happens when folk-psychology is unleashed on
>reporting what we *do* !
I don't understand what you are saying in that sentence.
David Longley
But tha language of folk-psychology is natural language, and what
renders natural language in large part difficult to formalise is
its idiomatic nature. The intensional idioms in particular.
What we call formal language, ie the truth functionality of our
regimented notations is to all extents and purposes the fact that
we do not allow such deviant idioms (which resist quantification)
*into* such systems.
I don't think I can repharase the second sentence, so I'll just
retract it.
--
David Longley
Karl Kluge
On popping into comp.ai today, there were 151 unread posts. 62 of them were
in this thread, which I notice is cross-posted to comp.ai.philosophy.
comp.ai.philosophy was created to improve the signal-to-noise ratio on
comp.ai by moving this sort of discussion elsewhere.
People who read comp.ai who are interested in material covered by the
charter of comp.ai.philosophy read comp.ai.philosophy. People who aren't,
don't, and don't want to see comp.ai cluttered up with this stuff.
David Longley
c...@castle.ed.ac.uk "Chris Malcolm" writes:
>
> I thought it was now well accepted that being prone to perceptual and
> cognitive illusions was one of the distinctive hallmarks of an
> efficient system? Agreed that these illusions are sometimes in error,
> and that when using the faculties far from their domain of
> evolutionary adaptedness they may frequently require correction,
> nevertheless the important point is that these illusions usually
> happen to be right. In fact, in complex systems it seems that
> "efficient" is a considerable understatement, "working" is nearer the
> mark, since any system trying scrupulously to be correct will founder
> in a bog of intractable ambiguity. "Sampling the visual array" and
> "resorting to formal extensional strategies" miss the point, and if
> taken too seriously lose the baby with the bathwater. Human science
> partakes of this hallucinatory approach to truth for the same
> ineluctable reasons as does human visual or linguistic processing.
>
> > Tversky and Kahneman (1983) drew far reaching conclusions
> > from the fact that, in most of their tests, the prevalence of
> > conjunction errors was not affected by statistical education.
> > They developed the concept of "natural assessment", a
> > computation that is 'routinely carried out as part of the
> > perception of events and the comprehension of messages......
> > even in the absence of a specific task set.' They defined a
> > "judgmental heuristic" as a 'strategy that relies on a
> > natural assessment to produce an estimation or a prediction.'
> > They compared such mechanisms to perceptual computations, and
> > cognitive errors to perceptual illusions. In their view,
> > people well trained in mathematics nonetheless perform
> > natural assessments automatically. The results of these
> > mental computations strongly influence probability judgement.
> > Therefore, statistics courses presumably affect probability
> > judgements, in problems such as "Linda," no more than
> > geometry courses affect geometric visual illusions, i.e.,
> > scarcely at all.
> >
> > Agnoli & Krantz (1989)
> > Suppressing Natural Heuristics by Formal Instruction:
> > The Case of the Conjunction Fallacy [my emphasis]
> > Cognitive Psychology 21, 515-550 (1989)
> >
> >Do you, and others who are resisting all that I have been presenting
> >appreciate how large the evidence base is?
>
> Depends how you look at it. Do you realise how this kind of evidence
> can equally easily be interpreted as supporting the view I sketched
> above, rather than yours? Such equivocal soldiers, however numerous,
> do not constitute a reliable support.
No, I don't see where the equivocation is. I have presented the
evidence on actuarial vs. clinical judgement in this context. Not
only is the former more reliable, but one can see that we have
actually built a culture on it! We trust science more than we
trust our intuitions - in all walks of life, and we have good
grounds for doing so (I don't know whether I'm a Platonist or
not, but I do think it's provided a pretty good heuristic
strategy to work as if Platonism is true).
I'd like to see you elaborate your perspective though. At the
moment I am thinking of the work by Cohen in the early 1980s
where he tried to take Tversky and Kahneman's 1970s work on, in
Brain and Behavior Science vol. 4 no. 3 Sept 1981 - 'Can Human
Irrationality be experimentally demonstrated?' L J Cohen p317 (it
has 28 commentaries).
--
David Longley
Chris Malcolm
>that, through accident or bad luck or bad judgement,
>I might end up in prison - an English prison.
>Without seeking to pass judgement on the approriateness of
>David Longley's *techniques*, it worries me in the extreme
>that I might become someone at the receiving end of this sort
>of closed-minded extensionalist dogma. It worries me enormously
>that David is unable to separate extensionalism from what doesn't
>seem particularly controversial - that clinical judgement would
>benefit from improved documentation.
This is excellent news. The next step is to work out how to
communicate this fear to the burglars, muggers, and other sundry
recidivists who currently overfill our prisons. The first step is
obviously to have philosophy classes in jail. Is David Longley's PROBE
the right tool for monitoring the philosophical progress of the
inmates? I think there could be difficulties here, at least as far as
traditional academic methods of establishing the philosophical views
and competences of students goes. While philosophy is rather too
subtle for multiple choice exams to be a good assessment tool, we
could perhaps compromise by encouraging the inmates to express their
views by means of extensive quotation from established authorities.
With suitable measurements, this would go some way towards bringing
their philosophical progress within PROBEable scope.
There does of course remain the knotty problem of critical review and
debate. I must confess this baffles me, since it is not possible to
capture this within the quotational style, yet stepping outside that
style renders their behaviour difficult to PROBE unless the
philosophical assumptions behind PROBE itself are changed. And we can
hardly do that if we hope to reduce recidivism by communicating Jose
Mendoza's fear of prison to them. It's all rather distressingly
circular.
--
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
Chris Malcolm
>Just as one is likley to
>encounter perceptual illusions if one does not sample the visual
>array, one is prone to cognitive illusions if one does not resort
>to formal extensional strategies.
David Longley
c...@castle.ed.ac.uk "Chris Malcolm" writes:
> --
> 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
>
I find it very difficult to see how anyone working in AI or Cognitive
Science can read the following extracts from a range of important
papers over the past 20 years and still have the termity to write the
audacious remarks that have been made about the need for 'debate'.
What is needed is more data and more analysis. Is anyone prepared to
contribute to *that* ? Here are a few key extracts:
'I should like to see a new conceptual apparatus of a
logically and behaviourally straightforward kind by
which to formulate, for scientific purposes, the sort of
psychological information that is conveyed nowadays by
idioms of propositional attitude.'
W V O Quine (1978)
The natural assessments of representativeness and
availability do not conform to the extensional logic of
probability theory.'
A. Tversky and D. Kahneman
Extensional Versus Intuitive Reasoning:
The Conjunction Fallacy in Probability Judgment.
Psychological Review Vol 90(4) 1983 p.294
Tversky and Kahneman (1983) focused on processes in which
people substitute intensional for extensional thinking. In
the latter mode, concepts are represented mentally in the
same way as sets, hence, rules of logic and probability are
followed in the main. By contrast, intensional thinking
represents concepts by prototypes, exemplars, or relations to
other concepts (Rosch, 1978, Smith & Medlin 1981). Processing
is affected strongly by imaginability of prototypes,
availability of exemplars, etc., and its results are not
constrained as strongly by logical relations. A prime example
is the representativeness heuristic (Kahneman & Tversky
1972), in which probability of a outcome is judged in terms
of the similarity of that outcome to a prototype.
Tversky and Kahneman (1983) drew far reaching conclusions
from the fact that, in most of their tests, the prevalence of
conjunction errors was not affected by statistical education.
They developed the concept of "natural assessment", a
computation that is 'routinely carried out as part of the
perception of events and the comprehension of messages......
even in the absence of a specific task set.' They defined a
"judgmental heuristic" as a 'strategy that relies on a
natural assessment to produce an estimation or a prediction.'
They compared such mechanisms to perceptual computations, and
cognitive errors to perceptual illusions. In their view,
people well trained in mathematics nonetheless perform
natural assessments automatically. The results of these
mental computations strongly influence probability judgement.
Therefore, statistics courses presumably affect probability
judgements, in problems such as "Linda," no more than
geometry courses affect geometric visual illusions, i.e.,
scarcely at all.
Agnoli & Krantz (1989)
Suppressing Natural Heuristics by Formal Instruction:
The Case of the Conjunction Fallacy [my emphasis]
Cognitive Psychology 21, 515-550 (1989)
'Shortcomings in reasoning have typically been attributed
to quantitative limitations of human beings as
processors of information. "Hard problems" are typically
characterized by reference to the "amount of knowledge
required," the "memory load," or the "size of the search
space"....Such limitations, however, are not sufficient
to account for all that is difficult about thinking. In
contrast to many complicated tasks that people perform
with relative ease, the problems investigated in this
paper are computationally very simple, involving a
single disjunction of two well defined states. The
present studies highlight the discrepancy between
logical complexity on the one hand and psychological
difficulty on the other. In contrast to the "frame
problem" for example, which is trivial for people but
exceedingly difficult for AI, the task of thinking
through disjunctions is trivial for AI (which routinely
implements "tree search" and "path finding" algorithms)
but very difficult for people. The failure to reason
consequentially may constitute a fundamental difference
between natural and artificial intelligence.'
E. Shafir and A. Tversky (1992)
Thinking through Uncertainty: Nonconsequantial Reasoning
and Choice
Cognitive Psychology 24,449-474
'[This paper]' criticizes the assertion by D. R. Lehman
et al. that their experiments support the doctrine of
formal discipline. The present author contends that the
work of Lehman et al. provides evidence that one must
teach for transfer, not that transfer occurs
automatically. The problems of creating a curriculum and
teaching it must be addressed if teachers are to help
students apply a rule across fields. Support is given to
E. L. Thorndike's (1906, 1913) assessment of the general
method of teaching for transfer.'
R. Gladstone (1989)
Teaching for transfer versus formal discipline.
American Psychologist; 1989 Aug Vol 44(8) 1159
'Contends that the orthodox view in psychology is that
people use formal rules of inference like those of a
natural deduction system. It is argued that logical
competence depends on mental models rather than formal
rules. Models are constructed using linguistic and
general knowledge; a conclusion is formulated based on
the model that maintains semantic information, expresses
it parsimoniously, and makes explicit something not
directly stated by the premise. The validity of the
conclusion is tested by searching for alternative models
that might refute the conclusion. The article summarizes
a theory developed in a 1991 book by P. N. Johnson-Laird
and R. M. Byrne.'
P. N. Johnson-Laird & R. M. Byrne
Precis of Deduction.
Behavioral and Brain Sciences; 1993 Jun Vol 16(2) 323-
380
'Meehl's classic book, published in 1954, summarised
evidence for the conclusion that simple linear
combinations of cues outdo the intuitive judgements of
experts in predicting significant behavioural criteria.
The lasting intellectual legacy of this work, and of the
furious controversy that followed it, was probably not
the demonstration that clinicians performed poorly in
tasks that, as Meehl noted, they should not have
undertaken. Rather, it was the demonstration of a
substantial discrepancy between the objective record of
people's success in prediction tasks and the sincere
beliefs of these people about the quality of their
performance. This conclusion was not restricted to
clinicians or to clinical prediction:
People's impressions of how they reason, and how well
they reason, could not be taken at face value.'
D. Kahneman, P. Slovic & A. Tversky (1982)
Judgment Under Conditions of Uncertainty: Heuristics and
Biases
'Surely we all know that the human brain is poor at
weighting and computing. When you check out at a
supermarket you don't eyeball the heap of purchases and
say to the clerk, "well it looks to me as if it's about
$17.00 worth; what do you think?" The clerk adds it up.
There are no strong arguments....from empirical
studies.....for believing that human beings can assign
optimal weight in equations subjectively or that they
apply their own weights consistently.'
P. Meehl (1986)
Causes and effects of my disturbing little book
J Person. Assess. 50,370-5,1986
'Distributional information, or base-rate data, consist
of knowledge about the distribution of outcomes in
similar situations. In predicting the sales of a new
novel, for example, what one knows about the author, the
style, and the plot is singular information, whereas
what one knows about the sales of novels is
distributional information. Similarly, in predicting the
longevity of a patient, the singular information
includes his age, state of health, and past medical
history, whereas the distributional information consists
of the relevant population statistics. The singular
information consists of the relevant features of the
problem that distinguish it from others, while the
distributional information characterises the outcomes
that have been observed in cases of the same general
class. The present concept of distributional data does
not coincide with the Bayesian concept of a prior
probability distribution. The former is defined by the
nature of the data, whereas the latter is defined in
terms of the sequence of information acquisition.
The tendency to neglect distributional information and
to rely mainly on singular information is enhanced by
any factor that increases the perceived uniqueness of
the problem. The relevance of distributional data can be
masked by detailed acquaintance with the specific case
or by intense involvement with it........
The prevalent tendency to underweigh or ignore
distributional information is perhaps the major error of
intuitive prediction. The consideration of
distributional information, of course, does not
guarantee the accuracy of forecasts. It does, however,
provide some protection against completely unrealistic
predictions. The analyst should therefore make every
effort to frame the forecasting problem so as to
facilitate utilising all the distributional information
that is available to the expert.'
A. Tversky & D. Kahneman (1983)
Extensional Versus Intuitive Reasoning: The Conjunction
Fallacy in Probability Judgment Psychological Review
v90(4) 1983
'The possession of unique observational capacities
clearly implies that human input or interaction is often
needed to achieve maximal predictive accuracy (or to
uncover potentially useful variables) but tempts us to
draw an additional, dubious inference. A unique capacity
to observe is not the same as a unique capacity to
predict on the basis of integration of observations. As
noted earlier, virtually any observation can be coded
quantitatively and thus subjected to actuarial analysis.
As Einhorn's study with pathologists and other research
shows, greater accuracy may be achieved if the skilled
observer performs this function and then steps aside,
leaving the interpretation of observational and other
data to the actuarial method.'
R. Dawes, D. Faust and P. Meehl (1989)
ibid.
--
David Longley
Pete Lupton
Witness the following:
>In article <405bi9$i...@zen.hursley.ibm.com> jmen...@shawnee.cse.ucsc.edu (Jose L. Mendoza) writes:
> And we can
>hardly do that if we hope to reduce recidivism by communicating Jose
>Mendoza's fear of prison to them. It's all rather distressingly
>circular.
Chris is the victim of a mischievous plot by my computer. I don't know who
'Jose Mendoza' is. Apparently, I replied to him once and my newsreader has
refused to allow me to alter that name. I am Pete Lupton - my apologies
to Jose for unwittingly stealing his name in the way that I have done.
Cheers,
Pete Lupton (aka Jose Mendoza)
Jim Balter
David Longley <Da...@longley.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>I find it very difficult to see how anyone working in AI or Cognitive
>Science can read the following extracts from a range of important
>papers over the past 20 years and still have the termity to write the
>audacious remarks that have been made about the need for 'debate'.
What, you mean that the tools of behavior science aren't sufficient for you to
resolve this quandary regarding behavior? I have had serious disagreements
with people such as you, Neil Rickert, Jeff Dalton, Wayne Throop, Matthew
Wiener, Steven Harnad, Chris Malcolm, Clayton Gillespie, Mikhail Zeleny, Ken
Colby, Pete Lupton, Timothy Murphy, et. al., in many cases concluding that
they are mistaken on some issue or concept or another. Yet in each case I
have some fairly detailed model as to how it could be that they are so
gawl-darn stubborn and pig-headed :-) as to disagree with me, considering the
amount of evidence and the careful reasoning I have provided. One aspect of
that model is the notion that, no matter how extensive my readings and
analysis of some subject, no matter how certain I am, *I may be wrong*. Would
you call suggesting the possibility that you also might be wrong "termity "
(sic) or audacity?
>What is needed is more data and more analysis. Is anyone prepared to
>contribute to *that* ? Here are a few key extracts:
>
> 'I should like to see a new conceptual apparatus of a
> logically and behaviourally straightforward kind by
> which to formulate, for scientific purposes, the sort of
> psychological information that is conveyed nowadays by
> idioms of propositional attitude.'
>
> W V O Quine (1978)
I'd like to see a scientific formulation that would tell me what to order
at Spago's, but I may have to settle for something as referentially opaque
as the chef's recommendations and my mood at the time.
--
<J Q B>
David Longley
> In article <808143...@longley.demon.co.uk>,
> David Longley <Da...@longley.demon.co.uk> wrote:
> >I find it very difficult to see how anyone working in AI or Cognitive
> >Science can read the following extracts from a range of important
> >papers over the past 20 years and still have the termity to write the
> >audacious remarks that have been made about the need for 'debate'.
>
> What, you mean that the tools of behavior science aren't sufficient for you to
> resolve this quandary regarding behavior? I have had serious disagreements
> with people such as you, Neil Rickert, Jeff Dalton, Wayne Throop, Matthew
> Wiener, Steven Harnad, Chris Malcolm, Clayton Gillespie, Mikhail Zeleny, Ken
> Colby, Pete Lupton, Timothy Murphy, et. al., in many cases concluding that
> they are mistaken on some issue or concept or another. Yet in each case I
> have some fairly detailed model as to how it could be that they are so
> gawl-darn stubborn and pig-headed :-) as to disagree with me, considering the
> amount of evidence and the careful reasoning I have provided. One aspect of
> that model is the notion that, no matter how extensive my readings and
> analysis of some subject, no matter how certain I am, *I may be wrong*. Would
> you call suggesting the possibility that you also might be wrong "termity "
> (sic) or audacity?
On the last sentence, not at all Jim. I'd like to think that I'd
at least learn something through finding something to be wrong.
But with respect to the themes of research covered in 'Fragments
of Behaviour..' it isn't so much a matter of *me* wanting to be
*right*. That just isn't the way to evaluate or appraise it -
what is important is whether it looks useful in a practical
sense. What this comes down to is, are we likely to go astray IFF
we use a relational database system in the way proposed, ie
limiting what we record on the grounds proposed, and investing
our time and efforts in work on automated report generation and
the generation of distributions of data as base rates to guide
behaviour management along actuarial lines?
That is, there are technical issues, which others may have
empirical experience with, which could be profitably discussed.
There has been none of this to date. If one looks over at the
neural networks group, one can see something like that...
How about some of it here?
(IF what I have said about the intensional idioms is true, one
will almost inevitably get into 'flame wars' once one slips into
that realm. There are no facts of the matter there, and the
indeterminacy is worse there than anywhere. Recall what
Skinner said about exactly the same matter back in 1984?
'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
Let's have more contributions which might help to progress
research programmes and less of the fruitless, rhetorical debate.
--
David Longley
Jim Balter
David Longley <Da...@longley.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>In article <jqbDD6...@netcom.com> j...@netcom.com "Jim Balter" writes:
>
>> In article <808143...@longley.demon.co.uk>,
>> David Longley <Da...@longley.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>> >I find it very difficult to see how anyone working in AI or Cognitive
>> >Science can read the following extracts from a range of important
>> >papers over the past 20 years and still have the termity to write the
>> >audacious remarks that have been made about the need for 'debate'.
>>
>> What, you mean that the tools of behavior science aren't sufficient for you to
>> resolve this quandary regarding behavior? I have had serious disagreements
>> with people such as you, Neil Rickert, Jeff Dalton, Wayne Throop, Matthew
>> Wiener, Steven Harnad, Chris Malcolm, Clayton Gillespie, Mikhail Zeleny, Ken
>> Colby, Pete Lupton, Timothy Murphy, et. al., in many cases concluding that
>> they are mistaken on some issue or concept or another. Yet in each case I
>> have some fairly detailed model as to how it could be that they are so
>> gawl-darn stubborn and pig-headed :-) as to disagree with me, considering the
>> amount of evidence and the careful reasoning I have provided. One aspect of
>> that model is the notion that, no matter how extensive my readings and
>> analysis of some subject, no matter how certain I am, *I may be wrong*. Would
>> you call suggesting the possibility that you also might be wrong "termity "
>> (sic) or audacity?
>
>On the last sentence, not at all Jim. I'd like to think that I'd
>at least learn something through finding something to be wrong.
Yes you would, but since your process (standing under Aaron's lamppost) keeps
you immune from finding such a thing, you will never obtain such learning.
>But with respect to the themes of research covered in 'Fragments
>of Behaviour..' it isn't so much a matter of *me* wanting to be
>*right*. That just isn't the way to evaluate or appraise it -
>what is important is whether it looks useful in a practical
>sense.
Do you even remember what you wrote that I responded to above? You repeatedly
equivocate over what is at issue here. As far as the practical value of PROBE
and related methods, this is distinctly off-topic for c.a.p, and I do wish you
would take your shameless huckstering elsewhere, somewhere that you wouldn't
feel compelled to make sweeping generalizations about "Cognitive Scientists"
and their "temerity". As for *philosophical* issues and interpretations,
issues of intensionality, what makes good or bad science, whether there is
"need for debate", etc. your "wanting to be right" is very much an issue.
>What this comes down to is, are we likely to go astray IFF
>we use a relational database system in the way proposed, ie
>limiting what we record on the grounds proposed, and investing
>our time and efforts in work on automated report generation and
>the generation of distributions of data as base rates to guide
>behaviour management along actuarial lines?
Perhaps you could explain the relationship between these questions and
philosophical issues regarding artificial intelligence. Maybe I've missed
something. Others have asked what the purpose of these reports is, what will
be done with them? Will your system make *decisions*, or is that left in the
hands of non-artificial systems (like prison administrators)?
And don't complain that I would know if I had read your megabytes of postings.
It is rather arrogant of you to assume that people will want to read this
stuff *before* they know what it says. As ole extensional Spock might say,
"That's not logical, Jim", but it is how the relatively slow chemical
processes of the human mind are able to do real-time processing of an
incredibly rich input stream. As Neil said, human judgement is better than
what we'd expect of a rational agent.
>That is, there are technical issues, which others may have
>empirical experience with, which could be profitably discussed.
>There has been none of this to date. If one looks over at the
>neural networks group, one can see something like that...
>
>How about some of it here?
Try comp.ai for technical issues and empirical experience. Here, we talk
*philosophy*.
>(IF what I have said about the intensional idioms is true, one
>will almost inevitably get into 'flame wars' once one slips into
>that realm. There are no facts of the matter there, and the
>indeterminacy is worse there than anywhere. Recall what
>Skinner said about exactly the same matter back in 1984?
Ah, no concern for you or Skinner "wanting to be right".
> Why have I not been more readily understood?
Poor misunderstood Skinner; if everyone weren't using all these inferior
techniques, they surely would agree with him. After all, what alternative is
there?
This is not an uncommon complaint: you disagree with me therefore you
misunderstand me (or haven't read what I've written). One can be
misunderstood in individual cases; but when you think you are being
misunderstood *in general*, by a large class of intelligent people, it is time
to consider the possibility of paranoia and delusions of grandeur (as well as
being *wrong* in some significant way).
> 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.
Or how about Velikovsky? Or Lysencko? Or von Daniken? Or people who write
letters to the editor with methods for trisecting angles or proofs that pi =
3.1416. *Those* are examples of people who also made these claims of not
being "understood", and compared themselves to proven giants. Such an
attitude doesn't mean that one is wrong, but it's not a good sign. Einstein
didn't fret about whether he would be understood, except perhaps in his
opposition to QM, where again being "misunderstood" was a matter of being
*wrong*.
>Let's have more contributions which might help to progress
>research programmes and less of the fruitless, rhetorical debate.
Hey, you go first. *Stop* making sweeping generalizations about "cognitive
scientists", the value of "the cognitive approach", the value of intensional
idioms, what pschologists ought to be doing instead of providing "care and
understanding", etc. etc. or stop claiming that all you are interested in is
the practicality of some rDBMS.
--
<J Q B>
David Longley
mou...@u.washington.edu "R. Mounce" writes:
> David Longley <Da...@longley.demon.co.uk> wrote:
> >It's <folk psychology> not an insult. Fritz Heider coined the term 'naive
> >psychology'
>
> Now's your chance, what is your specific relationship to the masses? Is a
> non-psychologist folk figure limited to giving naive analysis, or is the
> scientific method universally available, regardless of discipline or
> training, to anyone interested in thinking about thinking? Aristotle says
> philosophy is the greatest of goods and fairly easy to acquire.
>
I doubt that much that we leanr which is of value is easy to acquire,and
even harder to retain and apply. However, the 'technology' is there for
anyone to use and apply - there's no 'Magic Circle' - but it is counter-
intuitive, almost by definition.
I think the following makes the issue quite clear, and could be taken
to put out a few of the flames which have been bursting out quite recently.
'..the meaning of words are abstractions from the truth
conditions of sentences that contain them.'
W.V.O. Quine (1981)
The Five Milestones of Empiricism: Theories and Things p.69
If such a line is accepted, intensionalist practices may serve no
practical purpose other than to distract from more fruitful processes
of measuring, recording and contracting behaviour. That is,
intensional practices may serve no more than to limit, through poor
socialization and private record keeping, what could be learned from
extensional analysis of relations between classes of behaviours (e.g.
frequencies of problem behaviour, and the joint frequencies of these
classes with other classes of behaviour such as age, and index
offence. Intensional contexts (intentional ones being just a sub-set)
can be identified as follows:
'Chisholm proposes three independently operating criteria for
Intentional sentences.
(1) A simple declarative sentence is Intentional if it uses
a substantival expression - a name or a description - in such
a way that neither the sentence nor its contradictory implies
either that there is or that there isn't anything to which
the substantival expression truly applies.
(2) Any noncompound sentence which contains a propositional
clause...is Intentional provided that neither the sentence
nor its contradictory implies either that the propositional
clause is true or that it is false.
(3) If A and B are two names or descriptions designating the
same thing or things, and sentence P differs from sentence Q
only in having A where Q has B, then sentences P and Q are
Intentional if the truth of one together with the truth that
A and B are co-designative does not imply the truth of the
other'
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.
The Intentionalist thesis of irreducibility is widely
accepted, in one form or another, and there are two main
reactions to the impasse: Behaviourism and Phenomenology. The
behaviourist argues that since the Intentional idioms cannot
be made to fit into the going framework of science, they must
be abandoned, and the phenomena they are purported to
describe are claimed to be chimerical.'
D. C. Dennett (1969)
Content and Consciousness p32.
The choice was clearly spelled out by Quine in 1960, but remains
poorly appreciated:
'One may accept the Brentano thesis as showing the
indispensability of intentional idioms and the importance of
an autonomous science of intention, or as showing the
baselessness of intentional idioms and the emptiness of a
science of intention. My attitude, unlike Brentano's, is the
second. To accept intentional usage at face value is, we saw,
to postulate translation relations as somehow objectively
valid though indeterminate in principle relative to the
totality of speech dispositions. Such postulation promises
little gain in scientific insight if there is no better
ground for it than that the supposed translation relations
are presupposed by the vernacular of semantics and
intention.'
W. V. O Quine
The Double Standard: Flight from Intension
Word and Object (1960), p218-221
The alternative, methodologically incompatible approach of evidential
behaviourism, is restricted to extensional, normative analysis and
management of behaviour, drawing on natural inmate-environment
interactions, i.e., behaviour with respect to day to day activities.
This is eliminativist with respect to intensions (properties,
meanings, senses or thoughts, Quine, 1960; 1990; 1992), not on the
grounds that they comprise a body of pre-scientific 'folk' theoretical
idioms (Stich 1983; Churchland 1989), but because such idioms violate
the basic axiom of valid inference, namely Leibniz's Law: for any
objects x and y, if x is identical to y, then if x has a certain
property F, so does y. Symbolically: (x)(y)[(x=y) (Fx Fy)]. This is
the indiscernibility of identicals upon which all inference is
premised. ("Things are the same as each other, of which one can be
substituted for the other without loss of truth" - [Eadam sunt, quorum
unum potest substitui alteri salva veritate].
'...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
'There is a counterpart in modern logic of the thesis of
irreducibility. The language of physical and biological
science is largely extensional. It can be formulated
(approximately) in the familiar predicate calculus. The
language of psychology, however, is intensional. For the
moment it is good enough to think of an intensional sentence
as one containing words for intentional attitudes such as
belief.
Roughly what the counterpart thesis means is that important
features of extensional, scientific language on which
inference depends are not present in intensional sentences.
In fact intensional words and sentences are precisely those
expressions in which certain key forms of logical inference
break down.'
R. J. Nelson (1992)
Naming and Reference p.40
Note, '..intensional words and sentences are precisely those
expressions in which certain key forms of logical inference break
down' and '..the language of psychology, however, is intensional'.
Whilst it is clearly the case that folk psychology is largely
concerned with properties, characteristics or qualities of
individuals, their beliefs, desires, thoughts, feelings etc., it is
also the case that this is now true of much of contemporary
professional psychology (Fodor 1980). However, it may also be true
that many contemporary psychologists are not aware of the full
implications and quandaries implied by the this stance (Stich 1980).
Whilst it has been persuasively argued (Quine 1951,1956) that
quantification into intensional contexts is indeterminate, leading
inevitably to 'indeterminacy of translation' (Quine 1960). Nelson
(1992), a one time IBM senior mathematician goes on to point out:
'It is widely claimed today by philosophers of logic that
intensional sentences cannot be equivalently rephrased or
replaced by extensional sentences. Thus Brentano's thesis
reflected in linguistic terms asserts that psychology cannot
be framed in the extensional terminology of mathematics,
physics or biology'.
ibid p.42.
This point has not only been made by logicians. In fact it has been a
major, perhaps the major finding of research within Personality and
Social Psychology since the 1950s. Here is how Ross and Nisbett (1991)
put the matter:
'Finally, it should be noted that some commonplace
statistical failings help sustain the dispositional bias.
First, people are rather poor at detecting correlations of
the modest size that underlie traits (Chapman and Chapman
1967, 1969; Kunda and Nisbett 1986; Nisbett and Ross 1980).
Second, people have little appreciation of the relationship
of sample size to evidence quality. In particular, they have
little conception of the value of aggregated observations in
making accurate predictions about trait-related behavior
(Kahneman & Tversky 1973; Kunda & Nisbett 1986). The gaps in
people's statistical abilities create a vacuum that the
perceptual and cognitive biases rush in to fill.'
L. Ross and R. E. Nisbett (1991)
The Person and the Situation: Perspectives of Social
Psychology
and within Cognitive Psychology, Agnoli & Krantz, 1989:
'A basic principle of probability is the conjunction rule,
p(B) >= p(A&B). People violate this rule often, particularly
when judgements of probability are based on intensional
heuristics such as representativeness and availability.
Through other probabilistic rules are obeyed with increasing
frequency as people's levels of mathematical talent and
training increase, the conjunction rule generally does not
show such a correlation. We argue that this recalcitrance is
not due to inescapable "natural assessments"; rather, it
stems from the absence of generally useful problem-solving
designs that bring extensional principles to bear on this
class of problem. We predict that when helpful extensional
strategies are made available, they should compete well with
intensional heuristics. Two experiments were conducted, using
as subjects adult women with little mathematical background.
In Experiment I, brief training on concepts of algebra of
sets, with examples of their use in solving problems, reduced
conjunction-rule violations substantially, compared to a
control group. Evidence from similarity judgements suggested
that use of the representativeness heuristic was reduced by
the training....
...We conclude that such intensional heuristics can be
suppressed when alternative strategies are taught.
The development of formal thought does not culminate in
adolescence as Piaget (1928) held; rather, it depends on
education (Fong, Krantz, & Nisbett, 1986, Nisbett, Fong,
Lehmann & Cheng 1987) and may continue throughout adulthood.
Probabilistic reasoning has been an especially useful domain
in which to study the impact of training in adulthood on
formal thought. Probabilistic principles are cultural
inventions at most a few centuries old (Hacking 1975).....
--
David Longley
David Longley
> >Let's have more contributions which might help to progress
> >research programmes and less of the fruitless, rhetorical debate.
>
> Hey, you go first. *Stop* making sweeping generalizations about "cognitive
> scientists", the value of "the cognitive approach", the value of intensional
> idioms, what pschologists ought to be doing instead of providing "care and
> understanding", etc. etc. or stop claiming that all you are interested in is
> the practicality of some rDBMS.
> --
The title of this thread alludes to a J S Bruner's work in the
late 1950s which suggested that what is characteristics of human
cognition is that it 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, this is
anathema, since it is to record as observations, data which is
not observational 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:
'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)
Cognitive science is a science of half truths or no science at all.
Where it *is* science, it can only be a behavioural science.
--
David Longley
Neil Rickert
>The title of this thread alludes to a J S Bruner's work in the
>late 1950s which suggested that what is characteristics of human
>cognition is that it goes beyond the information given.
Whether humans actually go beyond the information given is very much
a question of definition. What is the information given? What would
it mean to go beyond that? I am inclined to think that talk of
"going beyond the information given" is largely meaningless rhetoric.
>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.
If the study of cognition is not a science, then the work of those
doing it (such as Kahneman & Tversky, or even B.F. Skinner) cannot be
science either, and we should reject all such work as worthless.
Or perhaps you think the study of cognition is a science after all?
I think you would do better to discontinue your blanket condemnations
of the whole field. Like most sciences, it contains some that is
good and some that is worthless. Perhaps you think that the majority
is worthless, and perhaps you are correct, but even so that could not
justify blanket condemnation of the whole discipline.
>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.
Scientific reports rarely report raw data either (that is, exact
copies of the original recording tape). Instead they present the
data reorganized in suitable tabular form, or perhaps they present
only a summary of the data. I understand that you have a PROBE
database which could not possibly record the raw data, and must
instead be recording some simplified version of it. If your
criticism of reporting of speakers is valid, then all scientific
reporting is questionable, and we should discontinue this pretense we
call science.
> 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 statement 'the meter reading was y' purports to be a behavioral
description of scientific apparatus.
>Such intensional contexts *do* indeed 'go beyond the information
>given', but from the perspective of any science, this is
>anathema, since it is to record as observations, data which is
>not observational at all.
Again, talk of going beyond the information given begs the question
as to what was the information given, or even the question of what is
information.
>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:
> '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.'
Personally, I think that talk of "limning the true and ultimate
structure of reality" is nonsensical. In my view, science is about
developing useful predictive working models, rather than about
seeking the "true and ultimate structure of reality." It is not even
clear what it could possibly mean to say that reality has a true and
ultimate structure.
I agree with Quine's point that we should be seeking knowledge about
the physical constitution and behavior of organisms. If some of the
seekers of that knowledge find it useful to postulate propositional
attitudes, why is that any different from postulating electrons or
photons or phlogiston or caloric or black holes or big bangs? If
they follow scientific methodologies, they should eventually uncover
evidence either to support the entities they postulate, or to refute
them. In either case this could be a stepping stone toward
scientific advancement.
The proper criticism of cognitive scientists should be based on
whether they are using scientific principles, rather on which
particular entities they are postulating.
> '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.'
I expect that intentional realists assume that propositional
attitudes will eventually be shown to be extensional once more is
known about the operating principles of the brain. For example
discovery of an actual 'belief box' in the brain would make them
extensional. Until it has conclusively been shown that they cannot
be extensional, you cannot use the above claim to repudiate the
assumptions of the intentional realist.
>Cognitive science is a science of half truths or no science at all.
>Where it *is* science, it can only be a behavioural science.
The meaning (or even the extension) of 'behavior' is as ill defined
as is the meaning of 'information given'.
David Longley
> In <808566...@longley.demon.co.uk> David Longley <Da...@longley.demon.co.uk>
> writes:
>
> >The title of this thread alludes to a J S Bruner's work in the
> >late 1950s which suggested that what is characteristics of human
> >cognition is that it goes beyond the information given.
>
> Whether humans actually go beyond the information given is very much
> a question of definition. What is the information given? What would
> it mean to go beyond that? I am inclined to think that talk of
> "going beyond the information given" is largely meaningless rhetoric.
>
The POINT is that it was largely through Bruner's work in the late 1950s
that COGNITION came into the research labs in psychology. I'm making a
point about the history and developmnet of psychology.
u can't see
--
David Longley
David Longley
> In <808566...@longley.demon.co.uk> David Longley <Da...@longley.demon.co.uk>
> writes:
>
> >The title of this thread alludes to a J S Bruner's work in the
> >late 1950s which suggested that what is characteristics of human
> >cognition is that it goes beyond the information given.
>
> Whether humans actually go beyond the information given is very much
> a question of definition. What is the information given? What would
> it mean to go beyond that? I am inclined to think that talk of
> "going beyond the information given" is largely meaningless rhetoric.
>
Please read some of the history of psychology, EVEN Kuhn draws on Bruner's
work to bolster his 'psychology of science'. Bruner pulled his work together
in a book in the mid 70s with the above title. In brief, it refers to how,
developmentally, people progressively become less 'stimulus bound' in their
behaviour.
> >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.
>
> If the study of cognition is not a science, then the work of those
> doing it (such as Kahneman & Tversky, or even B.F. Skinner) cannot be
> science either, and we should reject all such work as worthless.
No, Tverky and Kahneman are studying behaviour.
>
> Or perhaps you think the study of cognition is a science after all?
>
> I think you would do better to discontinue your blanket condemnations
> of the whole field. Like most sciences, it contains some that is
> good and some that is worthless. Perhaps you think that the majority
> is worthless, and perhaps you are correct, but even so that could not
> justify blanket condemnation of the whole discipline.
>
It isn't even a discipline. It is largely a group of philosophers who do
not seem to have understood Quine.
> >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.
>
> Scientific reports rarely report raw data either (that is, exact
> copies of the original recording tape). Instead they present the
> data reorganized in suitable tabular form, or perhaps they present
> only a summary of the data. I understand that you have a PROBE
> database which could not possibly record the raw data, and must
> instead be recording some simplified version of it. If your
> criticism of reporting of speakers is valid, then all scientific
> reporting is questionable, and we should discontinue this pretense we
> call science.
This is pedantic an besides the point. The objective is always to get better
and better measures of behaviour, just as is the case in any science. The
measurement diffciulties you refer to are just measurement ERROR. We try
to REDUCE that, but are realistic enough to appreciate that in the real
world there are constraints on what we can do. In time, we improve those
measures. (If you are not playing devils advocate here, you are revealing
a pitiful grasp of practical scientific method - I am assuming you are
playing DA).
>
> > 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 statement 'the meter reading was y' purports to be a behavioral
> description of scientific apparatus.
>
So? - that's an observation statement, my example is a propositional
attitude and is intensional (If the point is not clear by now, it'll
never be).
> >Such intensional contexts *do* indeed 'go beyond the information
> >given', but from the perspective of any science, this is
> >anathema, since it is to record as observations, data which is
> >not observational at all.
>
> Again, talk of going beyond the information given begs the question
> as to what was the information given, or even the question of what is
> information.
>
No - a tape recorded can record the information.
> >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:
>
> > '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.'
>
> Personally, I think that talk of "limning the true and ultimate
> structure of reality" is nonsensical. In my view, science is about
> developing useful predictive working models, rather than about
> seeking the "true and ultimate structure of reality." It is not even
> clear what it could possibly mean to say that reality has a true and
> ultimate structure.
>
You just muddy the waters wit this type of talk.
> I agree with Quine's point that we should be seeking knowledge about
> the physical constitution and behavior of organisms. If some of the
> seekers of that knowledge find it useful to postulate propositional
> attitudes, why is that any different from postulating electrons or
> photons or phlogiston or caloric or black holes or big bangs? If
> they follow scientific methodologies, they should eventually uncover
> evidence either to support the entities they postulate, or to refute
> them. In either case this could be a stepping stone toward
> scientific advancement.
>
I have already explained what the difference between intervening VARIABLES
are and intensional idioms. The former allow quantification, the latter
resist it.
> The proper criticism of cognitive scientists should be based on
> whether they are using scientific principles, rather on which
> particular entities they are postulating.
>
These *ARE* scientific principles. Quantification is about as basic as one
can get. All else follows.
> > '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.'
>
> I expect that intentional realists assume that propositional
> attitudes will eventually be shown to be extensional once more is
> known about the operating principles of the brain. For example
> discovery of an actual 'belief box' in the brain would make them
> extensional. Until it has conclusively been shown that they cannot
> be extensional, you cannot use the above claim to repudiate the
> assumptions of the intentional realist.
>
The same way that those who believed that epileptics were possessed
by devils and other religious zealots believed that they would be
vindicated huh?
> >Cognitive science is a science of half truths or no science at all.
> >Where it *is* science, it can only be a behavioural science.
>
> The meaning (or even the extension) of 'behavior' is as ill defined
> as is the meaning of 'information given'.
>
Read some of Bruner and it will probably see less so. I think Bruner
himself is now making noises about how things have tuned out. I don't
have the books to hand or I'd quote some for you.
--
David Longley
Jim Balter
David Longley <Da...@longley.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>In article <jqbDD7...@netcom.com> j...@netcom.com "Jim Balter" writes:
>
>> >research programmes and less of the fruitless, rhetorical debate.
>>
>> Hey, you go first. *Stop* making sweeping generalizations about "cognitive
>> scientists", the value of "the cognitive approach", the value of intensional
>> idioms, what pschologists ought to be doing instead of providing "care and
>> understanding", etc. etc. or stop claiming that all you are interested in is
>> the practicality of some rDBMS.
>> --
>
>late 1950s which suggested that what is characteristics of human
>cognition is that it goes beyond the information given.
Fine, then you are interested in fruitless rhetorical debate.
The point here is your *equivocation* as what is the issue, what it is you are
concerned with. When your sweeping philosophical overgeneralizations are
criticized, you say you are just offering a pragmatic program. When the
value, consequences, appropriateness to this forum, or whathaveyou, of your
program are criticized, you say you are discussing philosophy. Coming up with
elaborate methods to avoid criticism of your work or your position is not what
philosophy or science are about.
As for "going beyond the information given", perhaps you would like to discuss
the concepts of abduction and induction.
--
<J Q B>
David Longley
> Fine, then you are interested in fruitless rhetorical debate.
>
> The point here is your *equivocation* as what is the issue, what it is you are
> concerned with. When your sweeping philosophical overgeneralizations are
> criticized, you say you are just offering a pragmatic program. When the
> value, consequences, appropriateness to this forum, or whathaveyou, of your
> program are criticized, you say you are discussing philosophy. Coming up with
> elaborate methods to avoid criticism of your work or your position is not what
> philosophy or science are about.
>
> As for "going beyond the information given", perhaps you would like to discuss
> the concepts of abduction and induction.
> --
> <J Q B>
>
I agree that in empirical work one should try and falsify one's hypotheses
rather than protect them, but what I have presented is an *application* of
AI, and I have suggested that it *is* an AI application on the basis that
it makes use of rDBMS technology and 2) that the emphasis is on actuarial
rather than clinical judgment.
One way or another,the application draws on empirical research work, and
fragments reviews that research basis. In the case of general vs. context
specific rule learning, the current controvery is covered in some detail.
As to your last paragraph, I don't want to model "natural assessments", I
want to improve decision making. I don't want to spend a lot of time just
arguing over issues which are well known to be highly controversial.
--
David Longley
Jim Balter
David Longley <Da...@longley.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>In article <40t0nm$7...@mp.cs.niu.edu> ric...@cs.niu.edu "Neil Rickert" writes:
>
>> Or perhaps you think the study of cognition is a science after all?
>>
>> I think you would do better to discontinue your blanket condemnations
>> of the whole field. Like most sciences, it contains some that is
>> good and some that is worthless. Perhaps you think that the majority
>> is worthless, and perhaps you are correct, but even so that could not
>> justify blanket condemnation of the whole discipline.
>>
>
>It isn't even a discipline. It is largely a group of philosophers who do
>not seem to have understood Quine.
What appalling ignorance and arrogance.
--
<J Q B>
CM Elliott
to make sure that email messages get through to the address posted with
these articles of yours. I email'd you about a week ago, on another
subject and have heard nothing. Did I successfully transmit ?
CM
David Longley
> In article <808591...@longley.demon.co.uk>,
> David Longley <Da...@longley.demon.co.uk> wrote:
> >In article <40t0nm$7...@mp.cs.niu.edu> ric...@cs.niu.edu "Neil Rickert" writes:> >
> >> Or perhaps you think the study of cognition is a science after all?
> >>
> >> I think you would do better to discontinue your blanket condemnations
> >> of the whole field. Like most sciences, it contains some that is
> >> good and some that is worthless. Perhaps you think that the majority
> >> is worthless, and perhaps you are correct, but even so that could not
> >> justify blanket condemnation of the whole discipline.
> >>
> >
> >It isn't even a discipline. It is largely a group of philosophers who do
> >not seem to have understood Quine.
>
>
> What appalling ignorance and arrogance.
> --
Whatever my failings are, they pale into into insignificance next
to yours. Anyone with an undergraduate degree in psychology
after 1970 would know how much work there is which shows that
perception, let alone cognition, is influenced by expectations.
As a consequence, our observations naturally go beyond the
information given.
Arguing with me won't change this empirical fact.
'Where the control of perceptual activity is concerned,
two solutions are currently popular among cognitive
psychologists. The first, [...] distinguishes sharply
between perception and attention. Perception proper is
thought to be determined by impinging stimuli, while a
mechanism of selective attention remains under the
control of the individual himself. We have already seen
that this proposal will not do; selectivity is inherent
in the very process of information pickup and cannot be
relegated to any separate device. The second, which
must be considered here, is due to J. S. Bruner. He
assigns control to the perceiver who is said to go
increasingly far "beyond the information given" as he
acquires more sophisticated perceptual skills. In this
view, the main thrust of cognitive development is to
make the adult freer than the child: he is said to be
less "stimulus-bound" and more "inner-directed."'
U Neisser (1976)
Cognition and Reality
'Considers that intuitive predictions follow a
judgmental heuristic-representativeness. By this
heuristic, people predict the outcome that appears
most representative of the evidence. Consequently,
intuitive predictions are insensitive to the
reliability of the evidence or to the prior probability
of the outcome, in violation of the logic of
statistical prediction. The hypothesis that people
predict by representativeness was supported in
a series of studies with both naive and
sophisticated university students (N = 871). The
ranking of outcomes by likelihood coincided with
the ranking by representativeness, and Ss
erroneously predicted rare events and extreme values
if these happened to be representative. The
experience of unjustified confidence in predictions
and the prevalence of fallacious intuitions
concerning statistical regression are traced to
the representativeness heuristic.
- - -
rules determining intuitive predictions & judgments
of confidence; contrast to normative principles of
statistical prediction.
On the psychology of prediction.
Kahneman, Daniel; Tversky,-Amos
Hebrew U., Jerusalem, Israel
Psychological Review; 1973 Jul Vol. 80(4) 237-251
'Perhaps the simplest and the most basic qualitative law
of probability is the conjunction rule: The
probability of a conjunction, P (A&B), cannot
exceed the probabilities of its constituents, P (A)
and P (B), because the extension (or the possibility
set) of the conjunction is included in the extension of
its constituents. Judgments under uncertainty, however,
are often mediated by intuitive heuristics that are not
bound by the conjunction rule. A conjunction can be
more representative that one of its constituents, and
instances of a specific category can be easier to
imagine or to retrieve than instances of a more
inclusive category. The representativeness and
availability heuristics therefore can make a conjunction
appear more probable than one of its constituents. This
phenomenon is demonstrated in a variety of contexts,
including estimation of word frequency, personality
judgment, medical prognosis, decision under risk,
suspicion of criminal acts, and political forecasting.
Systematic violations of the conjunction rule are
observed in judgments of lay people and of experts
in both between- and within-Ss comparisons.
Alternative interpretations of the conjunction
fallacy are discussed, and attempts to combat it are
explored.
---
extensional vs intuitive reasoning; conjunction fallacy
in probability judgment
Extensional versus intuitive reasoning: The conjunction
fallacy in probability judgment.
Tversky, Amos; Kahneman, Daniel
Stanford U
Psychological Review; 1983 Oct Vol 90(4) 293-315
It was largely the work of Tversky & Kahneman (1974) and the work of
Meehl on Statistical vs Clinical Judgment which began to shift the above
interpretation to something altogether more interesting. That line of
development is explicated at length in 'Fragments of Behaviour: The
Extensional Stance' (sci.cognitive,comp.ai.philosophy 29/7/95).
It is the additional data which makes this new understanding possible.
--
David Longley