The story so far. Skinner advanced a theory (or a research program, or something) about how human language is simply "verbal behavior," a structure of stimulation and response subject to operant conditioning, like the movements of a rodent through a maze.
Chomsky objected, on grounds of method, vocabulary, and grammar.
In 1970, Kenneth MacCorquodale replied on Skinner's behalf, and seems to have done a better job on the issues of method and vocabulary than on the issue of grammar, which many had seen from the start as the heart of Chomsky's critique (and is certainly the heart of his own professional work as a linguist). Grammars consist of very complex structures, and in his view our ability as humans to acquire this structure can not be explained as the result of a process of generalization. For example: Children who already know the sentence "The man who is tall is in the room" easily learn that the way to turn that into a question is this: "Is the man who is tall in the room?"
If behavioralism is right, Chomsky thinks, children would at least sometimes make the mistake of asking, "Is the man who tall is in the room?" It is often the case that when turning a statement into a question, we transfer the occurrence of the word "is" to the start of the corresponding question. "The tall man is here" becomes "Is the tall man here" and so forth. Following that practice mechanically, simply generalizing it, could produce mistakes like the italicized sentence above. "Children make many mistakes in language learning," Chomsky says, but never that one.
So our story comes to 1990, when Nathan Stemmer wrote his own reply to Chomsky.
Stemmer replies that behavioralists don't have to expect children to treat the word "is" in isolation and generalize its moves in such a way. Children, rather, likely learn the active sentence pattern first "X is Y," and latter generalize it over time to learn substructures, so that "X" might include the word "is" internally.
Consider, then, "The man who is tall is in the room." The phrase "The man who is tall" is X in the old "X is Y" pattern. The second appearance of the word "is" then becomes the copula -- the one that connects X with the Y of "in the room." Generalization, then, Stemmer says, "does not simply transform certain word sequences into other word sequences but rather certain structures into other structures," and does so without importing a Chomskian machine-shop into the brain. Is [the man who is tall] in the room. Voila.
So (you might ask after all of this) what is my view? As a curious amateur, on-looker, and stand-up philosopher I have to say I think both sides are wrong. I do think that the Skinnerians are right to distrust the presumption of human uniqueness that runs through Chomsky's work. And I side with them (and the whole empirical tradition) against innate ideas, even grammatical ones. Stemmer's contention that we don't need innate ideas to understand how statements can be transformed into questions within a natural language seems to me sound. On the other hand, the Skinnerians' materialistic, reductive philosophy is repugnant on its own account.
William James used to refer to himself as squeezed between the "upper and the lower dogmatisms," between the positivists and the Hegelians of his day. It is always thus. Closer to our time, Skinner has revived the role of W.K. Clifford and Chomsky is writing like one of those "priggish Hegelians" on the top side of the two dogmatisms.
Next weekend I hope to return to these issues from another angle.
Showing posts with label Noam Chomsky. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Noam Chomsky. Show all posts
13 December 2009
06 December 2009
Chomsky versus Skinner
Let's return to the subject of language. Last week we discussed Skinner's view that "bread, please" is a paradigmatic instance of "verbal behavior," learned through behavior modification, in the same way that rats learn the route through the maze that will get them to the corn.
Chomsky's famous 1959 review of the book, Verbal Behavior, is sometimes credited with at least slowing the triumphal march of behavioralism through the social sciences. [By the way, is it "behaviorism" or "behavioralism"? So far as I know, the two labels are interchangeable.] Chomsky focused not on such phrases as "bread please" but upon proper sentences, and accordingly upon grammar. He contended that natural-language sentences have a "deep structure" due to the "internal structure of the organism," -- i.e. to neurology.
As to method, Chomsky objected that Skinner used the prestige of laboratory research for conclusions that go far beyond anything they warrant. He creates "the illusion of a rigorous scientific theory with a very broad scope, although in fact the terms used in the description of real-life and of laboratory behavior may be mere homonyms, with at most a vague similarity of meaning." The word "stimulus," is he says an example. In the case of an actual loaf of bread on the table, that bread might be the stimulus to which one refers in the use of the word "bread." But a lot of proper nouns refer to people the speaker has never met, places to which he has never been, etc. A lot of people who have never been to Moscow use the word "Moscow" in sentences all the time, and use it correctly. Why? On Chomsky's view, this can happen because they are hard wired for language. They have the nerve connections they need for it. On Skinner's view (as Chomsky understands it) the proper use of "Moscow" by someone who has never been there requires a stretching of the simplistic ideas of "stimulus," a stretching perhaps to the point where "stimulus" becomes a homonym of itself.
Skinner was personally unimpressed by this critique. He never answered it formally, and in an interview he gave for the Saturday Review of Books in 1972 he sought to explain why. He said he saw a pre-publication draft, only read the first half-dozen pages, and then decided Chomsky had missed his point. Then he commented somewhat whimsically on the field, and on the rise of Chomskyism. "Linguists have always managed to make their discoveries earthshaking. In one decade everything seems to hinge on semantics, one another decade on analysis of the phoneme. In the Sixties it was grammar and syntax, and Chomsky's review began to be widely cited and reprinted and became, in fact, much better known than my book."
As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, other behaviorists have stepped forward to defend Verbal Behavior from Chomsky's attack. One of the best-known examples of this is Kenneth MacCorquodale, who wrote a review of the famous review for the JOURNAL OF THE EXPERIMENTAL ANALYSIS OF BEHAVIOR in 1970.
You can access that here: www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1333660/?tool=pmcentrez
MacCorquodale quotes the "mere homonyms" passage, in particular, and expresses surprise at the implicit idea that "real-life" behavior could have different basic principles from laboratory behavior. In MacCorq's eyes, Skinner set out a hypothesis, and a research program, which of course is unproven because any research program deals of necessity with the as-yet unproven.
As to "Moscow," MacCorq tells us that the stimulus-response paradigm of behaviorism does not require that we stick to just one stimulus for every one response. Skinner's book itself "repeatedly and clearly insists that a verbal response may be controlled by different stimuli on different occasions." And one occasion for the response "Moscow" may well be the presence of the city of Moscow. What do the flight attendants say when your plane touches down there?
That is a point about scientific method, and about vocabulary. MacCorq for the most part leaves Chomsky's point about the grammar of the sentences of natural language untouched. Others of his school have addressed that, though, so we will have material for continuing this series.
Chomsky's famous 1959 review of the book, Verbal Behavior, is sometimes credited with at least slowing the triumphal march of behavioralism through the social sciences. [By the way, is it "behaviorism" or "behavioralism"? So far as I know, the two labels are interchangeable.] Chomsky focused not on such phrases as "bread please" but upon proper sentences, and accordingly upon grammar. He contended that natural-language sentences have a "deep structure" due to the "internal structure of the organism," -- i.e. to neurology.
As to method, Chomsky objected that Skinner used the prestige of laboratory research for conclusions that go far beyond anything they warrant. He creates "the illusion of a rigorous scientific theory with a very broad scope, although in fact the terms used in the description of real-life and of laboratory behavior may be mere homonyms, with at most a vague similarity of meaning." The word "stimulus," is he says an example. In the case of an actual loaf of bread on the table, that bread might be the stimulus to which one refers in the use of the word "bread." But a lot of proper nouns refer to people the speaker has never met, places to which he has never been, etc. A lot of people who have never been to Moscow use the word "Moscow" in sentences all the time, and use it correctly. Why? On Chomsky's view, this can happen because they are hard wired for language. They have the nerve connections they need for it. On Skinner's view (as Chomsky understands it) the proper use of "Moscow" by someone who has never been there requires a stretching of the simplistic ideas of "stimulus," a stretching perhaps to the point where "stimulus" becomes a homonym of itself.
Skinner was personally unimpressed by this critique. He never answered it formally, and in an interview he gave for the Saturday Review of Books in 1972 he sought to explain why. He said he saw a pre-publication draft, only read the first half-dozen pages, and then decided Chomsky had missed his point. Then he commented somewhat whimsically on the field, and on the rise of Chomskyism. "Linguists have always managed to make their discoveries earthshaking. In one decade everything seems to hinge on semantics, one another decade on analysis of the phoneme. In the Sixties it was grammar and syntax, and Chomsky's review began to be widely cited and reprinted and became, in fact, much better known than my book."
As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, other behaviorists have stepped forward to defend Verbal Behavior from Chomsky's attack. One of the best-known examples of this is Kenneth MacCorquodale, who wrote a review of the famous review for the JOURNAL OF THE EXPERIMENTAL ANALYSIS OF BEHAVIOR in 1970.
You can access that here: www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1333660/?tool=pmcentrez
MacCorquodale quotes the "mere homonyms" passage, in particular, and expresses surprise at the implicit idea that "real-life" behavior could have different basic principles from laboratory behavior. In MacCorq's eyes, Skinner set out a hypothesis, and a research program, which of course is unproven because any research program deals of necessity with the as-yet unproven.
As to "Moscow," MacCorq tells us that the stimulus-response paradigm of behaviorism does not require that we stick to just one stimulus for every one response. Skinner's book itself "repeatedly and clearly insists that a verbal response may be controlled by different stimuli on different occasions." And one occasion for the response "Moscow" may well be the presence of the city of Moscow. What do the flight attendants say when your plane touches down there?
That is a point about scientific method, and about vocabulary. MacCorq for the most part leaves Chomsky's point about the grammar of the sentences of natural language untouched. Others of his school have addressed that, though, so we will have material for continuing this series.
29 November 2009
"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.
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.
22 November 2009
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.
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.
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