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.
