Language vs linguistics, again; the case of Christiansen and Chater

Morten Christiansen and Nick Chater have done us all a favor. They have written a manifesto (here, C&C) outlining what they take to be a fruitful way of studying language. To the degree that I understand it, it seems plausible enough given its apparent interests. It focuses on the fact that language as we encounter it on a daily basis is a massive interaction effect and the manifesto heroically affirms the truism (just love those papers that bravely go out on a limb (the academic version of exercise?)) that explaining interaction effects requires an “integrated approach.” Let me emphasize how truistic this is: if X is the result of many interacting parts then only a story that enumerates these parts, describes their properties and explains how they interact can explain an effect that is the result of interacting parts interacting. Thus a non-integrated account of an interaction effect is a logical non-starter. It is also worth pointing out the obvious: this is not a discovery, it is a tautology (and a rather superficial one at that), and not one that anyone (and here I include C&C’s bête noir Monsieur Chomsky (I am just back from vacationing in Quebec so excuse the francotropism)) can, should or would deny (in fact, we note below that he made just this observation oh so many (over 60) years ago!).

That said, C&C, from where I sit, does make two interesting moves that go beyond the truistic. The first is that it takes the central truism to be revolutionary and in need of defence (as if anyone in their right mind would ever deny it). The second noteworthy feature is that the transparent truth of the truism (note truisms need not be self-evident (think theorems) but this one is) seems to license a kind of faith based holism, one that goes some distance in thwarting the possibility of a non-trivial integrated approach of the kind C&C urges. 

Before elaborating these points in more detail, I need (the need here is pathetically psychological, sort of like a mental tic, so excuse me) to make one more overarching point: C&C appears to have no idea what GG is, what its aims are or what it has accomplished over the last 60 years. In other words, when C&C talks about GG (especially (but not uniquely) about the Chomsky program) it is dumb, dumb, dumb! And it is not even originally dumb. It is dumb in the old familiar way. It is boringly dumb. It is stale dumb. Dumb at one remove from other mind numbing dumbness. Boringly, predictably, pathetically dumb. It makes one wonder whether or not the authors ever read any GG material. I hope not. For having failed to read what it criticizes would be the only half decent excuse for the mountains of dumb s**t that C&C asserts. If I were one of the authors, I would opt for intellectual irresponsibility (bankruptcy (?)) over immeasurable cluelessness if hauled before a court of scientific inquiry. At any rate, not having ever read the material better explains the wayward claims confidently asserted than having read it and so misconstrued it. As I have addressed C&C’s second hand criticisms more than (ahem) once, I will allow the curious to scan the archives for relevant critical evisceration.[1]

Ok, the two main claims: It is a truism that language encountered “in the wild” is the product of many interacting parts. This observation was first made in the modern period in Syntactic Structures. In other words, a long time ago.[2] In other words, the observation is old, venerable and, by now, commonplace. In fact, the distinction between ‘grammatical’ and ‘acceptable’ first made over 60 years ago relies on the fact that a speaker’s phenomenology wrt utterances is not exclusively a function of an uttered sentence’s grammatical (G) status. Other things matter, a lot. In the early days of GG, factors such as memory load, attention, pragmatic suitability, semantic sensibility (among other factors) were highlighted in addition to grammaticality. So, it was understood early on that many many factors went into an acceptability judgment, with grammaticality being just one relevant feature. Indeed, this observation is what lies behind the competence/performance distinction (a point that C&C seems not to appreciate (see p. 3), the distinction aiming to isolate the grammatical factors behind acceptability, thereby, among other things, leaving room for other factors to play a role.[3]

And this was not just hand waving or theory protecting talk (again contra C&C, boy is its discussion DUMB!!). A good deal of work was conducted early on trying to understand how grammatical structure could interact with these other factors to burden memory load and increase perceived unacceptability (just think of the non-trivial distinction between center and self embedding and its implications for memory architecture).[4] This kind of work proceeds apace even today, with grammaticality understood to be one of the many factors that go into making judgments gradiently acceptable.[5] Indeed, there is no grammatically informed psycho-linguistic work done today (or before) that doesn’t understand that G/UG capacities are but one factor among others needed to explain real time acquisition, parsing, production, etc. UG is one factor in accounting for G acquisition (as Jeff Lidz, Charles Yang, Lila Gleitman etc. have endlessly emphasized) and language particular Gs are just one factor in explaining parsability (which is, in turn, one factor in underlying acceptability) (as Colin Phillips, Rick Lewis, Shravan Vasishth, Janet Fodor, Bob Berwick, Lyn Frazier, Jon Sprouse, etc. etc. etc. have endlessly noted). Nobody denies the C&C truism that language use involves multiple interacting variables. Nobody is that stupid!

So, C&C is correct in noting that if one’s interest is in figuring out how language is deployed/acquired/produced/parsed/etc. then much more than a competence theory will be required. This is not news. This is not even an insight. The question is not if this is so, but how it is so. Given this, the relevant question is: what tree is C&C barking up by suggesting that this is contentious?

I have two hypotheses. Here they are.

1.     C&C doesn’t take G features to be at all relevant to acceptability.

2.     C&C favors a holistic rather than an analytic approach to explaining interaction effects in language.

Let’s discuss each in turn.

C&C is skeptical that grammaticality is a real feature of natural language expressions. In other words, C&C's beef with the traditional GG conception in which G/UG properties are one factor among many lies with assigning G/UG any role at all. This is not as original as it might sound. In fact, it is quite a traditional view, one that Associationists and Structuralists held about 70 years ago. It is the view that GG defenestrated, but apparently, did not manage to kill (next time from a higher floor please). The view amounts to the idea that G regularities (C&C is very skeptical that UG properties exist at all, I return to this presently) are just probabilistic generalizations over available linguistic inputs. This is the view embodied in Structuralist discovery procedures (and suggested in current Deep Learning approaches) wherein levels were simple generalizations over induced structures of a previous lower level. Thus, all there is to grammar is successively more abstract categories built up inductively from lower level less abstract categories. On this view, grammatical categories are classes of words, which are definable as classes of morphemes, which are definable as classes of phonemes, which are definable as classes of phones. The higher levels are, in effect, simple inductive generalizations over lower level entities. The basic thought is that higher-level categories are entirely reducible to lower level distributional patterns. Importantly, in this sort of analysis, there are no (and can be no) interesting theoretical entities, in the sense of real abstract constructs that have empirical consequences but are not reducible or definable in purely observational terms. In other words, on this view, syntax is an illusion and the idea that it makes an autonomous contribution to acceptability is a conceptual error.

Now, I am not sure whether C&C actually endorses this view, but it does make noises in that direction. For example, it endorses a particular conception of constructions and puts it “at the heart” of its “alternative framework” (4). The virtues of C&C constructions is that they are built up from smaller parts in a probabilistically guided manner. Here is C&C (4):

At the heart of this emerging alternative framework are constructions , which are  learned pairings of form and meaning ranging from meaningful parts of words (such as word endings, for example, ‘-s’, ‘-ing’) and words themselves (for example, ‘penguin’) to multiword sequences (for example, ‘cup of tea’) to lexical patterns and schemas (such as, ‘the X-er, the Y-er’, for example, ‘the bigger, the better’). The quasi-regular nature of such construction grammars allows them to capture both the rule-like patterns as well as the myriad of exceptions that often are excluded by fiat from the old view built on abstract rules. From this point of view, learning a language is learning the skill of using constructions to understand and produce language. So, whereas the traditional perspective viewed the child as a mini-linguist with the daunting task of deducing a formal grammar from limited input, the construction-based framework sees the child as a developing language-user, gradually honing her language-processing skills. This requires no putative universal grammar but, instead, sensitivity to multiple sources of probabilistic information available in the linguistic input: from the sound of words to their co-occurrence patterns to information from semantic and pragmatic contexts.

This quote does not preclude a distinctive Gish contribution to acceptability, but its dismissal of any UG contribution to the process suggests that it is endorsing a very strong rejection of the autonomy of syntax thesis.[6] Let me repeat, a commitment to the centrality of constructions does not require this. However, the C&C version seems to endorse it. If this is correct, then C&C sees the central problem with modern GG is its commitment to the idea that syntactic structure is not reducible to either statistical distributional properties or semantic or pragmatic or phonological or phonetic properties of utterances. In other words, C&C rejects the GG idea that grammatical structure is real and makes any contribution to the observables we track through acceptability.

This view is indeed radical, and virtually certain to be incorrect.[7] If there is one thing that all linguists agree on (including constructionists like Jackendoff and Culicover) it’s that syntax is real. It is not reducible to other factors. And if this is so, then G structure exists independently of other factors. I also think that virtually all linguists believe that syntax is not the sum of statistical regularity in the PLD.[8] And there is good reason for this; it is morally certain that many of the grammatical factors that linguists have identified over the last 60 years have linguistically proprietary roots and leave few footmarks in the PLD. To argue that this standard picture is false requires a lot of work, none of which C&C does or points to. Of course, C&C cannot be held responsible for this failing, for C&C has no idea what this work argues because C&C’s authors appear never to have never read any of it (or, if it has been read, it has not been understood, see above). But were C&C informed by any of this work, it would immediately appreciate that it is nuts to think that it is possible to eliminate G features as one factor in acceptability.[9]

In sum, one possible reading of C&C is that it endorses the old Structuralist idea of discovery procedures, denies the autonomy of syntax thesis (i.e. the thesis that syntax is “real”) and believes in the (yes I got to say it) the old Empiricist/Associationist trope that language capacity is nothing but a reflection of tracked statistical regularities. It’s back folks. No idea ever really dies, no matter how unfounded and implausible and how many times it has been stabbed through the heart with sharp arguments.

Before going on to the second point, let me add a small digression concerning constructions. Look, anyone who works on the G of a particular language endorses some form of constructionism (see here for some discussion). Everyone assumes that morphemes have specific requirements, with specific selection restrictions. These are largely diacritical and part of the lexical entry of the morpheme. Gs are often conceived as checking these features in the course of a derivation and one of the aims of a theory of Gs (UG) is to specify the structural/derivational conditions that regulate this feature checking. Thus, everyone’s favorite language specific G has some kinds of constructions that encode information that is not reducible to FL or UG principles (or not so reducible as far as we can tell). 

Moreover, it is entirely consistent with this view that units larger than morphemes code this kind of information. The diacritics can be syncategorematic and might grace structures that are pretty large (though given something like an X’ syntax with heads or a G with feature percolation the locus of the diacritical information can often be localized on a “listable” linguistic object on the lexicon). So, the idea that C&C grabs with both hands and takes to be new and revolutionary is actually old hat. What distinguishes the kind of constructionism one finds in C&C from the more standard variety found in standard work is the idea central to GG that constructions are not “arbitrary.” Rather, constructions have a substructure regulated by more abstract principles of grammar (and UG). C&C seems to think that anything can be a construction. But we know that this is false.[10] Constructions obey standard principles of Grammar (e.g. no mirror image constructions, no constructions that violate the ECP or binding theory, etc.). So though there can be many kinds of constructions that compile all sorts of diverse information there are some pretty hard constraints regulating what a possible construction is.

Why do I mention this? Because I could not stop myself! Constructions lie at the heart of C&C’s “alternative framework” and nonetheless C&C has no idea what they are, that they are standard fare in much of standard GG (even minimalist Gs are knee deep in such diacritical features) and that they are not the arbitrary pairings that C&C takes them to be. In other words, once again C&C is mind numbingly ignorant (or, misinformed).

So that’s one possibility. C&C denies G properties are real. There is a second possible assumption, one that does not preclude this one and is often found in tandem with it, but is nonetheless different. The second problem C&C sees with the standard view lies with its analytical bent. Let me explain.

The standard view of performance within linguistics is that it involves contributions of many factors. Coupled with this is a methodology: The right way to study these is to identify the factors involved, figure out their particular features and see how they combine in complex cases. One of the problems with studying such phenomena is that the interacting factors don’t always nicely add up. In other words, we cannot just add the contributions of each component together to get a nice well-behaved sum at the end. That’s what makes some problems so hard to solve analytically (think turbulence). But, that’s still the standard way to go about matters.  GG endorsed this view from the get-go. To understand how language works in the wild, figure out what factors go into making, say, an utterance, and see how these factors interact. Linguists focused on one factor (G and UG) but understood that other factors also played a role (e.g. memory, attention, semantic/pragmatic suitability etc.). The idea was that in analyzing (and understanding) any bit of linguistic performance, grammar would be one part of the total equation, with its own distinctive contribution.[11]

Two things are noteworthy about this. First, it is hard, very hard. It requires understanding how (at least) two “components” function as well as understanding how they interact.  As interactions need not be additive, this can be a real pain, even under ideal conditions where we really know a lot (that’s why engineers need to do more than simply apply the known physics/chemistry/biology). Moreover, interaction effects can be idiosyncratic and localized, working differently in different circumstances (just ask your favorite psycho/neuro linguist about task effects). So, this kind of work is both very demanding and subject to quirky destabilizing effects. Recall Fodor’s observation: the more modular a problem is, the more likely it is solvable at all. This reflects the problems that interaction effects generate.[12]

At any rate, this is the standard way science proceeds when approaching complex phenomena. It factors it into its parts and then puts these parts back together. It is often called atomism or reductionsism but it is really just analysis with synthesis and it has proven to be the only real game in town.[13] That said, many bridle at this approach and yearn for more holistic methods. Connectionsists used to sing the praises of holism: only the whole system computes! You cannot factor a problem into its parts without destroying it. Holists often urge simulation in place of analysis (let’s see how the whole thing runs). People like me find this to be little more than the promotion of obscurantism (and not only me, see here for a nice take down in the domain of face perception).

Why do I mention this here? Because, there is a sense in which C&C seems to object not only to the idea that Grammar is real, but also to the idea that the right way to approach these interaction effects is analytically. C&C doesn’t actually say this, but it suggests it in its claims that the secret to understanding language in the wild lies with how all kinds of information are integrated quickly in the here and now. The system as a whole gives rise to structure (which “may [note the weasel word here, btw, NH] explain why language structure and processing is highly local in the linguistic signal” (5))[14] and the interaction of the various factors eases the interpretation problem (though as Gleitman and Trusewell and friends have shown, having too much information is itself a real problem (see here, here and here.)). The prose in C&C suggests to me that only at the grain of the blooming buzzing interactive whole will linguistic structure emerge. If this is right, then the problem with the standard view is not merely that it endorses the reality of grammar, but that it takes the right approach to be analytic rather than holistic. Again, C&C does not expressly say this, but it does suggest it, and it makes sense of its dismissal of “fragmented” investigations of the complex phenomenon. In their view, we need to solve all the problems at once and together, rather than piecemeal and then fit them together. Of course, we all know that there is no “best” way to proceed in these complex matters; that sometimes a more focused view is better and sometimes a more expansive one. But the idea that an analytic approach is “doomed to fail” (1) surely bespeaks an antipathy towards the analytic approach to language.

An additional point: note that if one thinks that all there is to language is statistically piecing together of diverse kinds of information then one is really against the idea that language in the wild is the result of interacting distinct modules with their own powers and properties. This, again, is an old idea. Again you all know who believed this (hint, starts with an E). So, if one were looking for an overarching unifying theme in C&C, one that is not trotted out explicitly but holds the paper together, then one could do worse than look to Associationism/Empiricism. This is the glue that holds the various parts together, from the hostility to the very idea that grammars are real to the conviction that the analytic approach (standard in the sciences) is doomed to failure.

There is a lot of other stuff in this paper that is also not very good (or convincing). But, I leave it as an exercise to the reader to find these and dispose of them (take a look at the discussion of language and cultural evolution for a real good time (on p.6). I am not sure, but it struck me as verging on the incoherent and mixing up the problem of language change with the problem of the emergence of a facility for language). Suffice it to say that C&C adds another layer to the pile of junk written on language perpetrated on the innocent public by the prestige journals. Let me end with a small rant on this.

C&C appeared in Nature. This is reputed to be a fancy journal with standards (don’t believe it for a moment. It’s all show business now).[15] I doubt that Nature believes that it publishes junk. Maybe it takes it to be impossible to evaluate opinion or “comment” pieces. Maybe it thinks that taste cannot be adjudicated. Maybe. But I doubt it. Rather, what we are witnessing here is another case of Chomsky bashing, with GG as collateral damage. It is not only this, but it is some of this. The other factor is the rise of big data science. I will have something to say about this in a later post. For now, take a look at C&C. It’s the latest junk installment of a story that doesn’t get better with repetition. But in this case all the arguments are stale as well as being dumb. Maybe their shelf expiration date will come soon. One can only hope even if such hope is irrational given the evidence.

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[1] Type ‘Evans and Levinson’ (cited in C&C) or ‘Vyvyan Evans’ or ‘Everett’ in the search section for a bevy of replies to the old tired incorrect claims that C&C throws out like confetti at a victory parade.

[2] Actually, I assume that Chomsky’s observations are just another footnote to Plato or Aristotle, though I don’t know what text he might have been footnoting but, as you know the guy LOVES footnotes!

[3] The great sin of Generative Semantics was to conflate grammaticality and acceptability by, in effect, treating any hint of unacceptability as something demanding a grammatical remedy.

[4] I should add that the distinction between these two kinds of structures (center vs self embedding) is still often ignored or run together. At time, it makes one despair about whether there is any progress at all in the mental sciences.

[5] And which, among other things, led Chomsky to deny that there is a clean grammatical/ungrammatical distinction, insisting that there are degrees of grammaticality as well as the observed degrees of acceptability. Jon Sprouse is the contemporary go-to person on these issues.

[6] And recall, the autonomy of syntax thesis is a very weak claim. It states that syntactic structure is real and hence not reducible to observable features of the linguistic expression. So syntax is not just a reflex of meaning or sound or probabilistic distribution or pragmatic felicity or… Denying this weak claim is thus a very strong position.

[7] There is an excellent discussion of the autonomy of syntax and what it means and why it is important in the forthcoming anniversary volume on Syntactic Structures edited by Lasnik, Patel-Grosz, Yang et moi. It will make a great stocking stuffer for the holidays so shop early and often.

[8] Certainly Jackendoff, the daddy of constructionism has written as much.

[9] Here is a good place to repeat sotto voce and reverentially: ‘Colorless green ideas sleep furiously’ and contrast it with ‘Furiously sleep ideas green colorless.’

[10] Indeed, if I am right about the Associationist/Empiricist subtext in C&C then C&C does not actually believe that there are inherent limits on possible constructions. On this reading of C&C the absence of mirror image constructions is actually just a fact about their absence in the relevant linguistic environment. They are fine potential constructions. They just happen not to occur.  One gets a feeling that this is indeed what C&C thinks by noting how impressed it is with “the awe-inspiring diversity of the world’s languages” (6). Clearly C&C favors theories that aim for flexibility to cover this diversity. Linguists, in contrast, often focus on “negative facts,” possible data that is regularly absent. These have proven to be reliable indicators of underlying universal principles/operations. The fact that C&C does not mention this kind of datum is, IMO, a pretty good indicator that it doesn’t take it seriously. Gaps in the data are accidents, a position that any Associationist/Empiricist would naturally gravitate towards. In fact, if you want a reliable indicator of A/E tendencies look for a discussion of negative data. If it does not occur, I would give better than even odds that you are reading the prose of a card carrying A/Eer.

[11] Linguists do differ on whether this is a viable project in general (i.e. likely to be successful). But this is a matter of taste, not argument. There is no way to know without trying.

[12] For example, take a look at this recent piece on the decline of the bee population and the factors behind it. It ends with a nice discussion of the (often) inscrutable complexity of interaction effects:

Let's add deer to the list of culprits, then. And kudzu. It's getting to be a long list. It's also an indication of what a complex system these bees are part of. Make one change that you don't think has anything to do with them -- develop a new pesticide, enact a biofuels subsidy, invent the motorized lawnmower -- and the bees turn out to feel it.

[13] Actually, it used to be the only game in town. There are some urging that scientific inquiry give up the aim of understanding. I will be writing a post on this anon.

[14] This btw, is not even descriptively correct given the myriad different kinds of locality that linguists have identified. Indeed, so far as I know, there is no linear bound between interacting morphemes anywhere in syntax (e.g. agreement, binding, antecedence, etc.).

[15] It’s part of the ethos of the age. See here for the theme song.

The end of science yet again

While incommunicado, I read another article (here) declaring the end of science as an institution, or at least declaring that it is very corrupt, maybe irreparably so and that it is chock full of perverse incentives that it would be amazing if anything at all got done right. I confess that I am getting tired of these doom declarations and I suspect that they are largely BS, though reflecting an importantly wrong view of inquiry (see the end). Or, more accurately, I have no doubt that bad work gets done and that scientists share the same character traits as other mortals and so are influenced by the possibility of fame and fortune and that this influences how they carry on their work, but, what I don’t see is any indication that we now live in a fallen state and that once there was a golden age during which truth and beauty alone motivated scientific inquiry. In other words, I have no reason to think that the quality of work done today is any different than that done before. There is just a lot more of it. Oddly, I think that the above could be considered an idiosyncratic perspective.

The author of the linked to piece above, Jerome Ravetz, thinks otherwise. He sees corruption and malpractice everywhere. He identifies the problem as the rise of industrial science where “Gesellschaft” has replaced “Gemeischaft” (love those German words; just what you need to add some suggestion of depth) and quality control has disappeared. Couple this with a very real job squeeze for scientists and “pathologies inevitably ensue,” most particularly chasing “impact” displaces the “self-sacrificing quest for scientific rigour.” This leads to “shoddy” and “sleazy” science where standards have so “slipped” and basic skills so “atrohp[ied]” that most practitioners don't know that their work is “sub-standard.” Wow! The end of the scientific days! Sciencemageddon! What crap!!

Let me say why I can’t take this junk seriously anymore. Three reasons:

First, the empirical basis of these analyses is that lots of work in many domains don’t replicate. This is what John Ionnidis (see here) showed a while back. Much work in biomedicine, social psych, and neuroscience fails to replicate. Often the numbers cited are over 50% of this work. Ok, say that this is so. What I have never heard is whether this is a big failure rate, a low one or just par for the course. In other words, what should I expect the non-replication rate to be a priori? Should we expect science in general to run at an efficiency of better than 50%? Maybe a success rate of 10% is unbelievably good (especially in domains where we really don’t know much). I have heard that Ray Bradbury is reputed to have said that 90% of everything is junk. If so, a 50% replication rate would be amazing. So, absent specifying an expected base rate, these numbers really don’t mean much. They should serve to warn the uninitiated from taking every reported experiment at face value, but for any working scientist, this should not be news.

Second, I see no evidence that things have gotten worse in this regard. When I was a tot, I hazarded to read some of the earliest proceedings of the Royal Academy of Science. This was fun stuff. Many reports of odd creatures and other funny findings. In fact, aside from its entertainment value, most of this is, from our point of view, junk. Entertaining junk I grant you, but really not of current scientific value. My suspicion is that the ration of important science and, ahem, questionable stuff is always roughly as it was then, at least in many domains. The stuff that survives and we covet is the smallest good bit sitting on a huge pile of detritus. Maybe it takes lots of junk to make the good stuff (who knows). But, I have seen nothing credibly arguing that today we produce more garbage than yesteryear. But if the problem with science today is that it is science done today viz. big Gesselchaft science where impact rather than truth is the lure then we should expect that all that ails us once did not. Color me very very skeptical.

Third, I am pretty sure that lots of the shoddiness is localized in particular areas. The logic of the modern decline should extend to the successful sciences and not be limited to the aspirational domains. So, do we have evidence that current practice in physics is shoddier? Do physicists rush to publish shoddy work more now than they did? Does the regular experimental submission to the Physical Review only replicate at a rate of 50%? How about cell biology or molecular genetics or chemistry? These are surely subject to the very same pressures as any other domain of scientific inquiry and, moreover, we have ways of comparing what is done now with what they did before because these fields have a before that we can compare our decline with. I, at least, have not heard of these domains suffering a replicability crisis. But if they are not, then it is very unlikely that the generic incentives that the doomsayers like Ravetz like to point to are really behind the problems in domains like social psych, neuro-science or bio-medicine. Not that there isn’t a clear difference between the “real” sciences and the ones most often criticized. There is, and here it is: we know something in physics and chemistry and genetics and cell biology and we know much less in the “crises” riven areas. We have real theories in physics and genetics and cell biology, theories that tell us something about the basic underlying mechanisms. This is not true in much of what we call “science” today. The problem with the poorer performing areas is not that the practitioners are shoddy or corrupt or venal or less skilled than their predecessors. The problem is that we are still largely ignorant of the basic lay of the causal land in these domains, and this is because we lack ideas not methods.[1] All of this brings me to my familiar refrain.

What really bugs me about this “end of science” doomology is the presupposition that failure to gain insight must be due to failure to apply the methods of inquiry correctly. The assumption is that there is such a method and that the only reason that we are failing (if we are) is that we are not applying it correctly. Given that the method is presupposed to be clear and simple (as well as domain general) then the only reason that it is not being applied right must be due to the personal failings of the investigators. They whore after the wrong gods: fame, fortune, impact. But this presupposition is poddle poop. There is no method and no mechanical recipe for inquiry that guarantees success if only conscientiously applied. The idea that there could be one is one of the most baleful legacies of Empiricism.

Empiricism is dedicated to the idea that what there is largely reflects what you can see. It’s all there in front of view if only you look carefully. There are no hidden forces or mechanisms. Empiricism is built on a faith in shallow explanation reflecting a surfacy metaphysics.[2] In such a world, the idea that there exists a Scientific Method makes sense, as does the idea that failure to apply it must reflect some kind of pathology. If you think that science is hard because it involves trying to locate hidden structure that is only imperfectly reflected in what you can see (experimentally or otherwise) then a high failure rate is to be expected until you discover ways of thinking (theory) that tracks this underlying reality. Only then might you be able to avoid being misled by what you see.

Let me finish with one more observation. Part of the doomsaying has been prompted by scientific over reach (aka scientism). Scientists love to preen that they are just motivated by the facts and not swayed by vulgar conceptions the way regular folk are. Scientists are hard headed and deserve respect, kudos, reward and deference because science has a method to check itself and so when science speaks it’s not just opinion. In other words, when it suits us, we scientists often trumpet the Scientific Method to claim deference. It’s what makes us “experts” and expertise trumps mere opinion. But if there is no Scientific Method then there is no expertise in virtue of having been produced by such a method. There is expertise, but it must be harder won and it is very limited. If this is right, then there is a lot less science out there than is advertised, and a lot less expertise than generally claimed. And that suits me just fine. That’s a doomsday I can both live with and rejoice in. That, however, has nothing to do with the status of actual scientific inquiry. It’s doing no worse than before, muddling along and saddled with all the problems it has always had.

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[1] Though, this said, does anyone think that bio-medicine has made no progress? Would you rather give up modern methods for those from 1990, or 1950, or 1920? I am pretty sure that I wouldn’t. This would suggest that despite all the problems, at least in bio-medicine, we have learned something useful, even if many basic mechanisms are opaque.

[2] I stole “shallow explanation” from Chomsky who used this in another (related) context.

The return of behaviorism

There is a resurgence of vulgar Empiricism (E). It’s rampant now, but be patient, it will soon die out as the groundless extravagant claims made on its behalf will soon be seen to, yet again, prove sterile. But it is back and getting airing in the popular press.

Of the above, the only part that is likely difficult to understand is what I intend by ‘vulgar.’ I am not a big fan of the E-weltanschauung, but even within Empiricism there are more and less sophisticated versions. The least sophisticated in the mental sciences is some version of behaviorism (B). What marks it out as particularly vulgar? Its complete repudiation of mental representations (MR). Most of the famous E philosophers (Locke and Hume for example) were not averse to MRs. They had no problem believing that the world, through the senses, produces representations in the mind and that these representations are causally implicated in much of cognitive behavior. What differentiates classical E from classical Rationalism (R) is not MRs but the degree to which MRs are structured by experience alone. For E, the MR structure pretty closely tracks the structure of the environmental input as sampled by the senses. For R, the structure of MRs reflects innate properties of the mind in combination with what the senses provide of the environmental landscape. This is what the debate about blank/wax tablets is all about. Not whether the mind has MRs but whether the properties of the MRs we have reduce to sensory properties (statistical or otherwise) of the environment. Es say ‘yes,’ Rs ‘no.’

Actually this is a bit of a caricature. Everyone believes that the brain/mind brings something to the table. Thus, nobody thinks that the brain/mind is unstructured as such brains/minds cannot generalize and everyone believes that brains/minds that do not generalize cannot acquire/learn anything. The question then is really how structured is the brain/mind. For Es the mind/brain is largely a near perfect absorber of environmental information with some statistical smoothing techniques thrown in. For R extracting useful information from sensory input requires a whole lot of given/innate structure to support the inductions required. Thus, for Es the gap between what you perceive and what you acquire is pretty slim, while for Rs the gap is quite wide and bridging this gap requires a lot of pre-packaged knowledge. So everyone is a nativist. The debate is what kinds of native structure is imputed.

If this is right, the logical conclusion of E is B. In particular, in the limit, the mind brings nothing but the capacity to perfectly reflect environmental input to cognition. And if this is so, then all talk of MRs is just a convenient way of coding environmental input and its statistical regularities. And if so, MRs are actually dispensable and so we can (and should) dump reference to them. This was Skinner’s gambit. B takes all the E talk of MRs as theoretically nugatory given that all MRs do is recapitulate the structure of the environment as sampled by the senses. MRs, on this view, are just summaries of experience and are explanatorily eliminable. The logical conclusion, the one that B endorses, is to dump the representational middlemen (i.e. MRs) that stand between the environment and behavior. All the brain is, on this view, is a way of mapping between stimulus inputs and behavior, all the talk of MRs just being misleading ways of talking about the history of stimuli. Or, we don’t need this talk of minds and the MR talk it suggests, we can just think of the brain as a giant I/O device that “somehow” maps stimuli to behaviors.

Note, that without representations there is no real place for information processing and the computer picture of the mind. Indeed, this is exactly the point that critics of E and B have long made (e.g. Chomsky, Fodor, and Gallistel to name three of my favorites). But, of course the argument can be aimed in the reverse direction (as Jerry Fodor sagely noted someone’s modus ponens can be someone else’s modus tollens): ‘If B then the brain does not process information’ (i.e. the opposite of ‘If the brain processes info then not B’). And this is what I mean by the resurgence of vulgar E. B is back, and getting popular press.

 Aeon has a recent piece against the view of the brain as an information processing device (here). The author is Robert Epstein. The view is B through and through. The brain is just a vehicle for pairing inputs with behaviors based on reward (no, I am not kidding).  Here is the relevant quote (13) :

As we navigate through the world, we are changed by a variety of experiences. Of special note are experiences of three types: (1) we observe what is happening around us (other people behaving, sounds of music, instructions directed at us, words on pages, images on screens); (2) we are exposed to the pairing of unimportant stimuli (such as sirens) with important stimuli (such as the appearance of police cars); (3) we are punished or rewarded for behaving in certain ways.

No MRs mediate input and output. I/O is all there is. 

Misleading headlines notwithstanding, no one really has the slightest idea how the brain changes after we have learned to sing a song or recite a poem. But neither the song nor the poem has been ‘stored’ in it. The brain has simply changed in an orderly way that now allows us to sing the song or recite the poem under certain conditions. When called on to perform, neither the song nor the poem is in any sense ‘retrieved’ from anywhere in the brain, any more than my finger movements are ‘retrieved’ when I tap my finger on my desk. We simply sing or recite – no retrieval necessary (14).

No need for memory banks or MRs. All we need is “the brain to change in an orderly way as a result of our experiences” (17). So sensory inputs, rewards, behavioral outputs. And the brain? That organ that mediates this process. Skinner must be schepping nachas!

Let me end with a couple of references and observations.

First, there are several very good long detailed critiques of this Epstein piece out there (Thx to Bill Idsardi for sending them my way). Here and here are two useful ones. I take heart in these quick replies for it seems that this time around there are a large number of people who appreciate just how vulgar B conceptions of the brain are. Aeon, which published this piece, is, I have concluded, a serious source of scientific disinformation. Anything printed therein should be treated with the utmost care, and, if it is on cog-neuro topics, the presumption must be that it is junk. Recall that Vyvyan Evans found a home here too. And talk about junk!

Second, there is something logically pleasing about articles like Epstein’s; they do take an idea to its logical conclusion. B really is the natural endpoint of E. Intellectually, it’s vulgarity is a virtue for it displays what much E succeeds in hiding. Critics of E (especially Randy and Jerry) have noted its lack of fit with the leading ideas of computational approaches to neuro-cognition. In an odd way, the Epstein piece agrees with these critiques. It agrees that the logical terminus of E (i.e. B) is inimical with the information processing view of the brain. If this is right, the brain has no intrinsic structure. It is “empty,” a mere bit of meat serving as physiological venue for combining experience and reward with an eye towards behavior. Randy and Jerry and Noam (and moi!) could not agree more. On this behaviorist view of things the brain is empty and pretty simple. And that’s the problem with this view. The Epstein piece has the logic right, it just doesn’t recognize a reductio, no matter how glaring.

Third, the piece identifies B’s fellow travellers. So, not surprisingly embodied cognition makes an appearance and the piece is more than a bit redolent of connectionist obfuscation. In the old days, connectionists liked to make holistic pronouncements about the opacity of the inner workings of the neural nets. This gave it a nice anti-reductionist feel and legislated questions about how the innards of the system worked unaskable. It gave the whole theory a kind of new age, post-modern gloss with an Aquarian appeal. Well, the Epstein piece assembles the same cast of characters in roughly the same way.

Last observation: the critiques I linked to above both dwell on how misinformed this piece is. I agree. There is very little argumentation and what there is, is amazingly thin. I am not surprised, really. It is hard to make a good case for E in general and B in particular. Chomsky’s justly famous review of Skinner’s Verbal Behavior demonstrated this in detail. Nonetheless, E is back. If this be so, for my money, I prefer the vulgar forms, the ones that flaunt the basic flaws. And if you are looking for a good version of a really bad set of Eish ideas, the Epstein article is the one for you.