I don't have too much of interest to say about the bulk of your last CQ. One has to
decide who one wants to spend their time talking to and about, and I long ago gave up
on Rorty, his supporters, and his explicit critics. I also don't think that it pays to
do "scientific epistemology" separately from just doing science. Why bother laying out
the principles inherent in current scientific reasoning about the mind/brain? Whose
work are you contributing to?
Scientists do just fine doing their "epistemology" by the seat of their pants, as
part of their theoretical activity. In fact, I think that the "hard" scientists in
psychology--thirty years ago, the animal associative learning theorists--did exactly
this with regard to methodological behaviorism, well before "cognitive scientists" were
paying attention to Chomsky's criticism of Skinner's Verbal Behavior, or any of the
other developments hailed nowadays as parade cases by philosophers of psychology and
theoretically interested cognitive psychologists--who, by the way, are not read by the
"bench scientists" that still make up the bulk of practicing scientific psychologists.
The real "revolutionaries" of the "cognitivist revolution" among work-a-day scientists
in academic psychology were people like Leon Kamin, Robert Rescorla, Alan
Wagner--people that philosophers and cognitive scientists that do most of the
interacting in groups like the SPP don't read. These people, back in the late 1960s,
uncovered experimentally the weaknesses of methodological behaviorism right in its
explanatory forte: animal associative learning theory. They didn't pay any attention to
linguistics and conceptual problem solving. They were too busy doing real science. By
the early 1970s, Rescorla and Wagner had worked out precise mathematical models of
"cognitive" foundations for associative learning, all the way down to the level of
Pavlovian conditioning. It is results like this that caught the attention of work-a-day
psychological scientists--not the high-faluting, "philosophical" ventings of linguists
and cognition theorists. Thus the understanding of the cognitivist revolution" in
psychology among the SPP folk is seriously myopic. It slants the emphasis toward the
"philosophical," "theoretical" focus of a few vocal people in what were at the time
peripheral disciplines in real scientific psychology.
I make this point in some detail in my Phil Psych paper from 1995, Psychoneural
reduction of the genuinely cognitive," although it is somewhat tangential to the main
point of that paper. I go into a bit more detail in Chapter Five of my book,
Psychoneural Reduction: The New Wave--which apparently just came out from MIT, because
I got my complimentary copies last week. Missing it, which virtually all philosophers
and cognitive psychologists do, leads to mistaken views about the importance of
"scientific epistemology" projects independent of just doing science, and also mistaken
conclusions the possibility of reduction of the genuinely cognitive to neuroscience.
****
Reply by WTR:
Those of you who are not familiar with John's work might assume from the above post
that he is an dataphilic experimentalist with no interest in philosophy. In fact, he is
one of the most perceptive philosophers I know, whose recent book, "Psychoneural
Reduction" is best describable, in my opinion, as scientific epistemology that lays out
principles inherent in current scientific reasoning about the mind/brain. Why then does
he claim that this is a subject not worth bothering with? I am told that Aquinas had an
epiphany when he was very old, which prompted him to conclude that his lifelong goal of
justifying faith with reasons was a waste of time. Perhaps John has had a similar
epiphany about scientific epistemology, and is now a born-again experimentalist. If so,
I intend to try to talk him back into the philosophical fold, because I want to study
his book in future CQ posts, and would not expect him to enjoy answering my questions
if he sees his epistemology as the impulsive meanderings of a misspent youth.{ comment
by Gary Schouberg: The quote I've always heard was that he said his life's work was
like straw. However, my understanding was this was a mystical, not an intellectual,
epiphany. In that case, it was more like a gynecologist discovering actual sex, which
is more enjoyable but does not render gynecology a waste of time. Gary}
If my fanciful description of John's intellectual progress has any truth to it at
all, then despite his criticisms of Rorty, he actually not only agrees with Rorty about
what philosophers ought to do in this day and age, but backs up that agreement with
actions. Rorty believes that there are two possible alternatives for modern
philosophers 1) to abandon philosophy as a separate discipline and become scientists
and 2) to abandon science and become a kind of dilettante literary critic. Judging from
John's CQ post, and the recent experimental work he is involved with, John seems to
have chosen alternative 1). (So, to some degree, have the Churchlands, Pat more
obviously so than Paul.) I think that one of the reason that John views Rorty with
disdain is that Rorty has chosen alternative 2), which prompts him to use methods and
styles that are antithetical to the science that John sees as his primary exemplar of
excellence.
My own view about philosophy's place in the knowledge enterprise is different from
either of these alternatives, and is most similar, I think, to Dennett's. I am most
interested in philosophy that maintains at least a vague sense of being different from
science, but is still involved in the scientific enterprise. I think it is important
for scientists to recognize that the scientific specialties, for all of their many
virtues, cannot ever be the whole story, and that philosophers are needed to show how
the sciences fit together and with the rest of human experience. Someone needs to
consider the question of just how scientific we can be about each of the subject
matters that concern us, and to walk the line between what is scientific and what isn't
as carefully as possible. This may involves questioning science's presuppositions, or
speculating about it's future, but it will almost always involve keeping one's eye on
the whole, and reinterpreting the context in which specialized knowledge is usually
seen. For this reason I am strongly committed to denying John's claim that "Scientists
do just fine doing their 'epistemology' by the seat of their pants, as part of their
theoretical activity." (This strongly parallels Rorty's claim that "truth is not the
sort of thing that one should expect to have an interesting theory about" (1982 p.
xiii)). I think that scientists can do epistemology by the seat of their pants most of
the time i.e. under those Kuhnian normal conditions where the tools of science are
experienced as being ready-to-hand. But whenever there is a pre revolutionary crisis of
some sort, something very much like philosophizing needs to be done to figure out some
way to get things back to normal again.
I do agree with you, John, that there is no compelling necessity for scientists to
rely on philosophers to do this kind of work. There is, as Sellars says, no difference
between the philosopher and the persistently reflective specialist. Anything that
philosophers could do for science the scientists could do for themselves, at least in
principle. But I think this is merely a reflection of the fact that knowledge does not
divide up into separate specialties that correspond to carvable joints in reality, and
therefore divisions of labor in science are more a matter of social convenience than
anything else. I don't think this is that much truer for philosophers than for any
other specialists. For some scientific research, it is helpful to know both physics and
chemistry, and the physicist involved in that research can either read up on chemistry,
or collaborate with a chemist. A scientist who gets stuck with conceptual problems can
either reason them out herself, or she can collaborate with a philosopher.
The one significant difference for philosophers in this analogy is that other
specialties have a domain of facts they can call their own, even if the borders of that
domain are blurry. But one of the main things that define the borders of a domain are
its conceptual presuppositions, and these are what get questioned during a scientific
revolution. The idea that philosophers can actively collaborate with scientists in
this process of redefining presuppositions is a relatively new one, so it is not
surprising that philosophers haven't done much so far. But it seems a natural job for
philosophers to do, and I think some of us have done some good work since it occurred
to us to try. ( We also shouldn't forget philosophers who also did important work in
science, such as Aristotle, Descartes, Kant, James, Dewey, etc. The idea that
philosophy could be separated from other specialties and/or tossed aside is a
relatively new one. )
Your claim that "Scientists do just fine doing their 'epistemology' by the seat of
their pants" is both broad and empirical, so it can be weakened, but not destroyed by a
single factual error. Consequently, I don't want to make too much of your mistaken
claim that animal associative learning theorists overthrew methodological behaviorism
"well before 'cognitive scientists' were paying attention to Chomsky's criticism of
Skinner's 'Verbal Behavior'". The first animal association article that you cite in
your 1995 paper was Leon Kamin's, written in 1968. The Chomsky review of "Verbal
Behavior" was written in 1959. Nine years is a long time for an idea to be around in a
relatively small community, linked by modern communications and frequent reshuffling of
professorships. And the theoretical paper you cite at greatest length (Rescorla 1988)
was written well after cognitive psychology had become the dominant paradigm.
You also mention that the animal associationists do not hold up the big names in
cognitive science as heroes (although you admit that they do cite them occasionally). I
think this is an important thing for historians of science to know, but I don't think
that proves there was no influence, merely that the influence was more subliminal than
explicit. The idea that there is something wrong with using words like "intention" and
"representation" was a strongly held conviction that permeated psychology throughout
the fifties, and it seems likely that if it weren't for the influence of outsiders like
Chomsky, the "meme" of representationalism would simply not have been available and/or
acceptable in Kamin's and Rescorla's conceptual space. Tolman's Cognitive Behaviorism
was considered to be fringey and eccentric during his lifetime, and he left relatively
few disciples. (He died, ironically, the year Chomsky's review of 'Verbal Behavior' was
published). And George Miller says about American psychology in the 50's "those of us
who wanted to be scientific psychologists couldn't really oppose {behaviorism}. You
just wouldn't get a job." (Baars 1988 p.202).
In an atmosphere like that, the work-a-day "bench psychologists" of whom you speak
would (and did) spend most of their time trying to squeeze evidence into behaviorist
molds (see Baars 1988 pp. 237-253), and Rescorla would have risked his job if he had
used the word "representation". But once he saw some of the numerous post-Chomsky
psychology papers that used words like "information" and "representation" without fear
or apology, he would be much more likely to consider using that concept in his own work
. And he wouldn't have needed to know that Chomsky and others were responsible for
these new concepts in order to take advantage of them. This kind of ripple effect is
the main way that anyone's work contributes to the scientific enterprise, whether it's
a single experiment done with a gerbil hippocampus or an analysis of the different
kinds of scientific reduction. Footnotes are a way of attempting to tag those ripples,
but they can't measure everything.
As for your claim that the SPP ignores the important work that was done by the
animal associationists: My reply to that may sound a bit silly, but I think there is a
great deal of truth to it. Your paper on this subject was presented to both the SPP
and the Southern SPP, and was very well attended. ( I was there myself). And it would
be hard to describe you as a fringe member of SPP, seeing as you are the organization's
treasurer. I'm also a member of SPP and thanks to you have actively discussed the
philosophical significance of the animal associationists in the above paragraphs. (And
I intend to think about them some more. I think their work has even more signicance
than you have discovered so far, although I'm not sure what yet.) So your claim that
the SPP ignores these issues is a little bit like that of the customer of the Monty
Python argument parlor who is arguing over whether or not he is having an argument.
The serious point here is that you and I have disagreed about the philosophical
significance of these facts, and about what sort of maxims these imply for good
scientific method. You have cited certain facts from the history of science, I have
cited others, and in the process I think some clarity has been achieved that could
contribute to a better understanding of the nature of good science. Perhaps you can
marshal other facts which show that laboratory scientists don't need people who
specialize in theorizing. But the fact that there is genuine controversy between us on
this issue shows that the facts do not speak for themselves, and therefore there is a
need for separate effort to understand their philosophical significance. It therefore
seems reasonable to assume that there should be people who specialize in understanding
that significance, just as there are people in physics who never do experiments of
their own, and specialize in understanding the significance of other people's
experiments.
References
Baars, B. (1988) the Cognitive Revolution in Psychology Cambridge University Press
Bickle, J. (1995) "Psychoneural Reductions of the Genuinely Cognitive: some
accomplished facts" in Philosphical Psychology
Rorty, R. (1982) Consequences of Pragmatism Unniversity of Minnesota Press
** ** ** ** ** ** ** ** ** *
MARKATE DALY underlined certain passages of my Rorty post and commented on them.
Here is what she underlined, her comments, and my replies. Shifts between her
statements and mine are marked by (***). My replies to her, written for this post, are
in brackets { }.
MD: Reading this took me back to the early 80's when Rorty and all of his ideas
were being given a sound thrashing. The only thing that interested me during all of
that was the discomfort of the epistemologists. How I loved to see them squirm. I
though Rorty was right in general - that analytic epistemology should be buried.
Remember justified true belief and all of the drivel that was written after Gettier to
save the theory - causal theories, representational theories, etc. I have considered
epistemolgy to be a dead field for the present, because no new theories have been
allowed for consideration. Perhaps as a prelude to advancing a new epistemology you
really do need to take on that tired old tiger - Rorty. But I think you should
acknowldege that Rorty's Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature in our present cog sci
culture, an historical work. (***)
WTR:{The fact that something less than twenty years old can be considered an
historical work may be one of the few things that Rock and Roll and Analytic Philosophy
have in common. But my critique is mainly aimed at the idea that because there are
certain answers to epistemological questions that are bad, we should therefore throw
out the questions. Also at the closely related idea that because a subject's questions
are badly phrased, we should stop thinking about the subject, I think those are both
bad inferences.} (***) (Snip)
MD: Is there anyone who really believes that they can conduct an information
discovery program and not have an epistemology? Do you really need to beat that horse
so hard? (***)
WTR:{If I interpret him correctly, Rorty still believes this, and it appears that
John Bickle might, too. More importantly, thanks to Rorty, a lot of people are
beginning to think Dewey and James believed this. Susan Haack has done a lot of very
good scholarship on the difference between Rorty's pragmatism and Classical American
pragmatism. I've also discovered another important difference. The Pragmatists did not
believe that metaphysics and epistemology should be abandoned, Only that it should be
evaluated by it's pragmatic effects. Some metaphysical claims make no difference
pragmatically, others have a tremendous impact. We should ignore the former, and think
carefully about the possible pragmatic effects of the latter. I think I can find quotes
from all of the big three to back that up}. (***)
WTR: I will try to not only show contradictions in Rorty's ideas, but also give
specific examples from the history of science and my own experience which show how
those flaws are creating real problems for specific human activities. (***)
MD: Do you mean real activities or descriptions of them? (***)
WTR: {I mean real activities, including the real activity of describing other
activities} (***)
WTR: Analytical Philosophers in the cognitive science community seem to have a sense
that . . . the kind of analysis that had been applied to ordinary language could be
done every bit as effectively on scientific language. (***)
MD: This is an accurate picture of what analytic philosophers do. But later on, you
have them doing speculative theorizing and then high level scientific theorizing, not
just clarifying concepts. If they're doing this, they aren't analytic philosophers
anymore. This may be your own aim, but it seem a far cry from analytic philosophy. I
think you are collapsing a couple of decades. By the way, this statement might irk
some of your more adventurous scientists. (***)
WTR: {Here's a question that sounds like a joke with no punch line: What do you call
an analytic philosopher who doesn't believe in the analytic-synthetic distinction? Once
you throw that distinction out, it doesn't seem possible to distinguish conceptual
analysis from speculative theorizing. Hopefully my reply to Bickle above makes it clear
that I am not marking off speculative turf for philosophers that adventurous scientists
are not allowed to enter.}
(***)
MD: What contrasts with neutral observation language is an analysis of concepts to
show that they can't be operationalized without remainder and to discuss foundational
concepts that can't be operationalized at all. Instead of "philosophical speculations
- perhaps a philosophical discussion of the ambiguities inherent in all concepts. (***)
WTR:{That is pretty much what I'm getting at in my third paragraph of my Bickle
comments above. }
PAUL ZISMAN writes
Your conclusion surely identifies an element of Dewey's thought, the holism or
reflective equilibrium, that always seems to transcend" the dualities at a perspective
once-removed from them, and to see them in some sort of holistic interplay. It is not
a holism that is organically neat--it embraces tension which gives it its capacity for
growth and change. Rorty seems to do the reverse--in his attempt to strip things of
their metaphysics he reduces them to situational problems. I'm thinking of his call to
eliminate philosophy from public debates--his ironic poet. So wouldn't Rorty have the
opposite problem to what he accuses Dewey of? They (Dewey and James) cannot escape
idealism (isn't this is ultimate objection to their epistemological fixation)--at some
refined level; but he cannot escape a kind of naive realism--things are simply givens,
or can be treated as such, without regard for their cognitive situatedness, Rorty seems
to claim. Rorty, then, naively hold that one can escape the constrains of one's
cognitions. This is another way of saying what you say about Rorty's claim to have
stopped theorizing.
{I prefer to call Rorty's position "idealism in denial". The fact that he thinks
that all texts are really only about other texts, and that the world is "well lost" in
his system (1982 p. 3), make it hard to call him a realist. Rorty is also very critical
of the myth of the given, but Zisman is right to say his attempt to escape metaphysics
does force him to see the world of objects as a kind of inexplicable given, no matter
how much he claims otherwise. Zisman thus shows us another way that Rorty's so called
pragmatism blurs into positivism.--WTR.}
RUTH MILLIKAN said " I'm not a bit fond of Rorty myself, despite his supposed use
of Sellars." But she did send me some selections from a paper she's working on for her
Romanell Lecture, saying that what she had to say on holism might be relevant. In this
paper, she appears to be trying to curb some of the excesses of holism by making a
distinction between the epistemology of concepts with the epistemology of judgment.
This strategy is somewhat out of sync with what I was trying to do in my Rorty post,
where I was criticizing Rorty for subconsciously clinging to a distinction rather than
ignoring one. But I think that her distinction may be useful for explaining the
relationship between experience and concepts in my next CQ. I won't say anything more
until I've read it more thoroughly.
The following selections from GARY SCHOUBORG's post I present without comment,
because I basically agree with them.
If you were a psychotherapist, would you consider yourself to be on a sinking ship
because you did not bring to clients clarity that broke new ground in the history of
ideas, but merely clarity that met their needs? There's plenty of conceptual confusion
in the world that philosophers can, like therapists, help alleviate.
Seems to me what follows from Rorty is that philosophy is no longer acceptable as a
discipline that tells other disciplines what to do. Rather, it is now a specialty
within particular disciplines, a specialty of theory construction (here, philosophy can
break new ground) and critique (conceptual therapy). The philosopher can no longer do
useful work independently of other human specialties, but must get her feet wet at
least as much as theoretical physicists do with experimental physics. In the JCS
community{Journal of Consciousness Studies-TR}, philosophers work increasingly hand in
hand with the various disciplines to sort out all the conceptual confusion surrounding
consciousness. Like psychotherapists, the less skilled contribute more than they'd like
to the confusion, but the overall net effect is hopefully positive.
Baars' repy to Bickle:
There is something to the idea that scientist manufacture their own epistemology on
the spot, but John Bickle's claim that animal psychologists were solving scientific
problems in the "cognitive revolution" while everyone else was dithering, is vastly
overstated. I wrote a book with about a dozen interviews with such people as Skinner,
Chomsky, GA Miller, HA Simon, etc., and the story is told by them in great detail (B.
Baars, The Cognitive Revolution in Psychology, 1986). Psychologists worried endlessly
about philosophy of science, probably much too much. But that was because they were in
thrall initially to a philosophy of science that excluded most of the natural topics of
psychology ! Even Skinner called behaviorism a philosophy of psychology, rather than
"the science of human behavior itself." That makes Skinner a philosopher, by his own
definition.
The problem, in my view, is that psychology has an impoverished theoretical
tradition, unlike the physical sciences or even biology. We are even now in the process
of working out the first generation of reasonable theory. I consider my own work to be
part of that emerging discipline. Rescorla and Wagner, Miller, Simon and Chomsky,
Rumelhart and McClelland, have all made contributions to it.
. Good theorists are as pragmatic as good experimentalists. It was Newton who said
"non fingo hypothesi," in response to philosophical critiques of action at a distance.
You have to say things like that to stay focused on empirical problems. But theory
gives you a breadth of understanding that the typical experimentalist lacks. I've often
thought that philosophers, with their skills, should consider becoming good
psychological theorists, and I notice that some, like Chalmers and Bickle, are moving
in that direction.
We may have a poor example of the usefulness of philosophy in the case of
psychology, because most philosophical debates come down to mind-body questions, which
are rife with paradox and are simply never resolved. Thus philosophy of psychology
provides no stable platform to think about the pragmatic theoretical questions of
research. Under these circumstances it does indeed make sense for working scientists to
ignore the snares and seductions of philosophy. But I'm hopeful that with the emerging
scientific approach to consciousness (see my chapter in the new Block et al volume from
MIT), scientists will have the bit in their teeth. We are getting a great handle on the
phenomena by "treating consciousness as a variable." Philosophers will follow when they
see the breakthroughs emerging from that, and perhaps in the process they will also
release some of their unproductive death-grip on mind- body paradoxes. There are many
more productive philosophical questions to work on in philosophy of mind. Many of them
have an empirical aspect, a fact that would not have surprised Aristotle and Descartes,
as you point out