"Bread, Please" as Conditioned Response

I'd like to pursue the ideas to which I alluded here a week ago.

B.F. Skinner's book, Verbal Behavior (1957), grew out of a series of lectures he gave at Harvard in 1947-48. It naturally draws my attention that these were the William James Lectures, sponsored jointly by Harvard's Departments of Psychology and Philosophy. This is a series of lectures that began in 1930 and continued until the 1980s, and that hosted some of the most illustrious thinkers of that period within the interchange of those two disciplines. Just for example, not to elevate those above the others: Arthur Lovejoy gave the WJ lectures in 1932-33; Karl Popper in 1949-50; Gabriel Marcel in 1961-62.

The fact that Skinner gave his lectures on "verbal behavior" ten years before the publication of the book of that name would seem to suggest a considerable modification between the one format and the other.

Anyway, the book may be found here.

He defines "verbal behavior" in the first instance as "behavior shaped and maintained by mediated consequences," i.e. that has its desired effect through the actions of a listener. The desired effect of "bread please" is to persuade someone else at the table to move an object around, where physical constraints or social convention prevent the speaker from obtaining the bread for himself. Skinner later refines that definition a bit, but that remains a key to his approach.

"Bread please" seems a behavior generated by operant conditioning in a rather straightforward way. For a youngter, saying "bread" will suffice to get the bread. Indeed, one's parents (the conditioners) will likely be delighted that their child can form the word, so they will happily reinforce that speech by handing over a piece of bread. Later, though, "bread" earns only frowns unless modified by "please," so the growing child is brought within the scope of social convention.
More elaborate usages of language are only very complicated instances of the operation of much the same mechanism whence comes the phrase "bread please." That, at any rate, is Skinner's view. One of its advantages in his eyes is that it gets rid of the idea that words have meaning in the sense in which "meaning" might be something inside the brain and hidden from science. Words only "mean," for Skinner, because they get listeners to do things, and the doing is "as observable as any part of physics."

That is enough for today. I will say more soon about why Chomsky objected to the study of language in these terms, how later Skinnerians reacted to Chomsky, and how the dispute feeds into the question of the differentia of the human species.

A Story and a Joke

Thursday night, I mentioned the gist of the following story to one of my companions at the feast. I've fleshed it out a bit since.

Many years ago, my best beloved, a brave group of harried and godly folk became tired of the game known in the old world as "football."

William Bradford said, "This is a stupid game. Let us travel to a distant place, where we can invent a better game and call IT 'football' instead."

And Captain Standish said, "I will lead the way."

Then said John Alden. "When we get there, we can assign a new lame-sounding name to the game we have rejected -- but I fear I am not the right person to invent the adequate nomenclature."

Priscilla. "Don't be so timid John. I'm sure you can come up with a good idea. Speak for yourself!"

John, emboldened, said: "Ah, then, let us call it 'soccer'! And let us never play it again!"

And they all said "Amen" as they walked aboard the Mayflower.

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And as the holiday drew to a close, I watched a DVD of one of Jerry Seinfeld's old standup routines.

In the funniest bit, he talked about how sky-divers wear helmets. This seems odd to him, since in the event the 'chute doesn't open, the helmet won't save you.

"If the chute doesn't open, you're there as a cushion for the helmet. Later, all the helmets will get together and this one will tell his buddies the story. 'Yes, it was a close call. I would have been smashed up pretty awful if I hadn't had a human strapped beneath me.'"

Egypt: A random bit of history

From an article entitled "Arab Government Responses to Islamic Finance: The Cases of Egypt and Saudi Arabia," by Rodney Wilson, published in Autumn 2002 in the journal Mediterranean Politics.

Ali Sabri became Vice President of Egypt under Sadat, but he was dismissed from his post in May 1971, as Sadat alleged that he had been planning a coup. With the demise of Ali Sabri, al Najjar wasted no time in making a second attempt to start an Islamic bank in Egypt. This time the government was more receptive to his ideas, and the Nasser Social Bank was established under a special statute, Law 66 of 1971, which meant that it did not have to register with the Central Bank or be regulated by it....The first general manager of the bank was Dr Abd al-Aziz Hijazi, a former Egyptian Prime Minister who knew little about Islamic banking, but who was a trusted establishment figure.

Question: why was the government, prior to Ali Sabri's dismissal, hostile to the idea of an Islamic Bank?

My personal view is that Sadat was at first riding the post-Nasser wave of Arab nationalism. Arab nationalist ideology is a very different thing from Islamicist ideology, of course (as the generally secular orientation of leaders such as Nasser and Sadat serves to illustrate. The creation of a bank with specifically Islamic features may have seemed a dangerous concession to Sadat in his first year in office. After the abortive coup (real or imagined) of Ali Sabri, though, Sadat may have been more interested in finding domestic allies, and might have thought this a necessary concession, after all.

Notice that the creation of an institutioin for Islamic finance came with a symbolically important caveat -- a name that included Nassar's, and that gave no indication that there was anything specifically Islamic about this institution. That, and the leadership of Abd al-Aziz Hijazi, whom Sadat clearly considered safe.

I'm just guessing, though. If you know beter, feel free to correct me.

Thanksgiving Day

With all due respect to the Pilgrims, to the traditional sentiments of harvest time, and to expressions of gratitude, both cosmic and local, Thanksgiving Day is among its other functions the day that traditional rivalries play out on football fields -- the fields of both high schools and colleges.

I can't speak to today's games because I'm not writing this today. I wrote this last weekend for posting today. (Ain't I clever? Ain't technology wonderful?) But I will take this opportunity to express my regret at the end of the old Fermi-Enfield rivalry. This year's game between the two public schools of the town of Enfield, Conecticut will be the last in a string that goes back to 1972. Enfield will join the Pequot Conference as a full member next season, and the rules of that conference prohibit games outside said conference.

While I'm in this mood of nostalgia and regret, allow me to note (not that you have any choice) that there were several traditional Thanksgiving Day rivalries of recent decades in northcentral Connecticut that are no more, mostly because one of the other of the high schools involved has disappeared. New Britain would play Pulaski; Penney would play East Hartford; Middletown would play Woodrow Wilson High. But one of the schools in each of those pairings is no more.

Ah, but now I need to cheer myself up. What about that UConn/Notre Dame double-overtime game this past weekend? Was that amazing? Congrats to coach Edsall. This was the best possible recruiting poster for him as he builds a program fit for the national stage, doing what Calhoun managed to do for the same school's basketball program years ago.

Yeaaaah Huskies.

Animal language

If language is just "verbal behavior," as Skinner said (1957), then there is nothing special about human language to separate itself from the singing of birds or the barking of dogs. It is on exactly this point that Chomsky (1959) picked his famous fight with Skinner, and insisted that human language is something special.

Although Skinner himself never responded to Chomsky's critique, others have done so on his behalf in the intervening half century. Here is an example from
1990.

Personally, I have long been fascinated by experiments into "animal language" in a rather specialized sense of the term -- not "animal verbal behavior" in a sense that would involve barks or tweets especially. The implicit, and often the explicit, view of many who study the language of whales, or who teach sign language to primates, is that language in a specifically human sense has non-human application. Maybe language in the narrower sense of the term, though rare, is not entirely unique to our species.

Just some plankton for thought.

In the House of Representatives

The House Financial Services Committee voted 43 to 26 Thursday in favor of a measure sponsored by Ron Paul (R-TX) that would expand Congressional oversight authority vis-a-vis the Federal Reserve.

As the Wall Street Journal rightly noted yesterday in a front page story, this vote was part of a general backlash of "populist anger that Wall Street was bailed out while the public was not." Actually, I think (and hope) that there was more to it than that, but I approve of the backlash, however defined, and so I'm inclined to be happy about this vote.

The problem with central banking isn't the opacity of the bank's operations vis-a-vis politicians or their constituents. The problem with central banking is ... central banking. As an institution, it is inherently misguided. Even if Paul's bill should pass, it will amount to little more than some additional work for the GAO in auditing the Fed. Still, one has to approve of the sentiment.

Greed is not always good, greed does not always work. And the way to limit the dysfunctional consequences of greed is through keeping money real.

Separately, the House this week has amended a bill under consideration designed to reduce the systemic risk that accompanies the failure of large financial institutions. Like, just for instance, Lehman Brothers. The bill at issue is the Financial Stability Improvement Act (FSIA or HR 3996). One of the themes of the bill is the creation of a sort of polluter-pays system for the unwinding of large banks. The cost of the orderly unwind is supposed to fall upon the shareholders and unsecured creditors of the bank, not the taxpayers.

The amendment adopted Wednesday, sponsored by Representatives Miller and Moore (Democrats from North Carolina and Kansas, respectively) is designed to ensure that even the secured creditors of such institutions take a hit. If you follow that link you'll find that this amendment takes up only a page and a half, so it would be easy enough to read through if it were not written in legalistic jargon. The gist of it is that secured creditors of a bank that fails and ends up in receivership will take a haircut, in that in the discretion of the Receiver up to 20% of the secureds claim could be turned into an unsecured claim "as necessary to satisfy any amounts owed to the United States or to the [polluter-pays Fund]."

An intense quarrel has broken out over this amendment in the financial blogosphere. Felix Salmon, for example, weighs in here.

A Point of Etymology

I have concerned myself in earlier blog entries here with various plagiarism scandals. Here for example.

There now appears to be a plagiarism scandal underway in the southern hemisphere. Isn't the web wonderful? How else would I ever have encountered a New Zealand newspaper story? Anyway, it appears that a novel written by Witi Ihimaera, an English Professor at Auckland University, is replete with stolen goods. So much so that he is buying back copies of his book, presumably to re-write those passages and issue a theft-free edition.

The simple and obvious question is: does Ihimaera flunk out those of his students who do stuff like this? Thank God for hypocrisy. Or, at least, for the sake of the education of the affected youngsters, I HOPE he's a hypocrite.

So let us take this occasion to be explicit about the etymology of the word "plagiarism." It comes from the Latin word plagiarius, which means: kidnapper. That seems a straightforward adaptation of meaning.

Plagiarus in turn came ultimately from the root PLAK, meaning "to weave." As one would weave a net as a snare or a trap. For kidnapping.

None of this tells us anything new about the offense, but then etymology like philosophy leaves the world as they each find it.