The Significance of Free Will: Wrapping It Up

Let us go through Kane's book one more time, with appropriate links:

I bought the book because I had heard that Kane brought up to date the incompatibilist tradition of James and Isaiah Berlin.

Kane structures his own work in two parts: an ascent (showing why we have and value these strong intuitions about moral philosophy that are incompatible with determinism) and a descent (showing that indeterminism of the necessary sort may well be part of the natural physical world.)

Martin Luther was free even when, as he said, he could “do nothing else” than what he was doing. But this just means that his inability to do anything else at a given mature moment is the consequence of a long life of diverging paths at many points of which he could have done otherwise.

The issue of whether freedom and moral responsibility in strong sense of the terms are compatible with determinism necessarily brings us through some discussion of ordinary language, seeking help from that quarter. This has some interest, but is not dispositive.

The problem is brought to something of a head by B.F. Skinner’s portrayal of Walden Two, and its covert non-constraining controls on its happy campers.

We get to the top of our ascent, we understand the incompatibility of certain deep intuitions with determinism, when we come to understand our own development as individuals, from infancy onward, as ever-more-sophisticated attempts to accommodate a primordial desire.

But now, how do we get back down the mountain and find a place for this primordial desire in the real world? Consider certain critical willings as the subjective manifestation of genuine neurological uncertainties all the way down to the electron level. These are our self-forming willings (SFWs). I have presented my reasons for believing that Kane is overly elaborate  in his descriptions of the different types of SFW: that, following a cue from William James, we might better reduce them all to a single form, the sustaining of attention.

In his conclusion, Kane comes back to the writings of B.F. Skinner as a negative example, and argues that a belief in free will as a metaphysical and psychological matter may help contribute to a society that is free in the political sense.

The Significance of Free Will: Exegesis VIII

Kane’s chapter 10 is called “Objections and Replies.” The objections that he surveys here are from “astute and persistent critics of my view” as expressed in earlier publications, “to whom I am indebted for waking me from many a dogmatic slumber.”

I won’t go through the objections and his replies for you. They expand but marginally on the argument I’ve already presented. I will note, though, that one of the objections forces Kane to expand upon the quantum-theoretical gist of his own argument on the way "down the mountain." Could there be two people with exactly the same history, biochemistry, etc., whose deliberations on exactly the same point come to contrary conclusions? In a footnote, he explains:

“A natural objection here would be that the quantum-wave functions of the brains of the two persons would be exactly the same … combinations of the wave functions of their component particles. But these wave functions are abstract descriptions of the real brains that do not tell us what the exact positions and momenta of the component particles are. Rather they yield various probabilities that the particles will have such-and-such positions and momenta.” So, yes, so far as we know, this is possible. Just as it’s possible that in one context Schrodinger’s cat is dead and in another exactly identical context the cat is still alive when the lid is opened.

In his conclusion, chapter 11, Kane seeks to “situate the debates about free will … within broader intellectual currents of the late twentieth century and of the modern era in philosophy generally.”

Kane returns here to Walden Two, the B.F. Skinner utopia that many readers (Kane amongst them) see as an unintended dystopia. In the story, a philosopher named Castle asks some skeptical questions of the utopia’s leader, Frazier. Frazer says that scientists now know what the good life is, so it would be wrong to refuse to condition people into leading it. Castle asks, then: what is the good life?

Skinner/Frazier answers: It is a lengthy answer, beginning at p. 146 of the book and continuing into page 149. There are five points to the good life: physical and psychological health, a minimum of unpleasant labor, opportunities to exercise talents, satisfying personal contacts, and necessary opportunities for relaxation. There need be no philosophical explanation behind this list, in fact (Frazier says) efforts to get behind it philosophically are misguided, like “a centipede trying to decide how to walk,” when the thing to do is just walk.

“This response by Frazier temporarily silences poor Castle,” as Kane observers. But Kane comes to Castle’s aid. Castle's question is unanswered, and is unanswered for a reason that even the most practical of caterpillars should not ignore. The good life, including each of those five attractive things, might for all we know be satisfied in any of several or an “indefinite number” of different ways. Further, those different ways might well conflict with one another as Isaiah Berlin suggested in his writing about “value pluralism.” We might lose one way of satisfying these requirements for the good life as we grasp for another.

The idea of free will as Kane has expounded it, though, is inherently a “value experimental” idea. It suggests that we can and do remake ourselves, in ways that determine which values, in a world of competing value/projects, we will pursue. It is a justified rebuke to Skinner’s value monism.   

With that rebuke we may fittingly and freely end.

The Significance of Free Will: Exegesis IV

Last week we had reached the point of Kane's argument at which he had decided that the issue of the presence of alternative possibilities (AP) is not sufficient in explaining incompatibilism. He needed to invoke another intuition: that of ultimate responsibility (UR).

In what sense, if any, is the willer of an act the one ultimately responsible for that act?

As to moral responsibility, a classical statement of what amounts to a compatibilist position comes from the philosopher Harry Frankfurt, and Kane plays against Frankfurt through much of Kane's chapter 5. Frankfurt, in a 1971 essay, observed that compulsive behavior is a threat to some accounts of free will. If I am addicted to nicotine it certainly doesn't seem to me that my reaching for a cigarette is a free act.

Such reflections led Frankfurt to distinguish between first-order and second-order desires. My first-order desire is to get a quick smoke, to satisfy my immediate need for a fix. Beyond that, I may reflect about such compulsions, and I may be either content with my first-order desires or in rebellion against them. An addict who is unhappy about the situation doesn't "have the will he wants to have."

From this, we get a certain conception of freedom. A person will be said to "act freely" in the sense pertinent to moral responsibility, when that person's second-order volitions -- and third or fourth oreder if you like -- are all in accord with the first-order desires and the actual actions based thereon.

Kane's words here: "Though Frankfurt is reluctant to call himself a compatibilist or incompatibilist, it is clear that one of his motives was to offer a demystified account of freedom of will that would not commit one to the excesses of traditional libertarian views....As a consequence, theories of hierarchical motivation like his have been developed by ... others to defend compatibilist views of freedom and autonomy."

Yet Kane finds such arguments for compatibilism unsatisfactory. There is plenty of room, he says, for covert non-constraining controls (CNC) that would leave the objects of control in the full confidence that their whole hierarchy of wills or volitions was lined up properly -- yet which would leave ultimate responsibility in the hands of the controller, like a cult leader, or the psychologists in charge of Walden Two.

"At the very highest level of sophistication one might imagine God doing the controlling, since the problems posed by [subtle] control have their theological counterparts in problems of devine predestnation or foreordination."

We have ultimate responsibility for our own actions, he concludes, if and only if we have, at least now and then, self-creating or self-forming actions.

So, are we at the top of incompatibilist mountain yet, and can we start downward, worrying about how this self-formation actually happens, if it does? No ... there is one more point to cover before we get to the summit. I'll hold this off until tomorrow.

The Significance of Free Will

I've recently purchased The Significance of Free Will, by Robert Kane (1998).

I had heard that Kane is one of the few remaining free-willist/incompatibilists among contemporary academic philosophers. As to his academic credentials: he is a professor of philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin, and editor of a widely respected collection of essays on the broad subject, The Oxford Handbook of Free Will.

Compatibilism in philosophy is the view that freedom in any important sense of the word is perfectly compatible with the deterministic character of human thoughts, will, and actions. This is, of late, the view for example of Daniel Dennett.

Those who reject that, then, are incompatibilists. Among incompatibilists, there are those who say that since the ideas of freedom and determinism are incompatible -- since determinism is true -- we'll have to learn to live without outdated notions of freedom. That seems to be B.F. Skinner's view in Walden Two for example. On the other hand, there are incompatibilists who agree that the two are incompatible but contend that it is determinism we have to learn to live without.

Regular readers will know that I am of the view that William James got these matters more-or-less right.

James was a compatibilist in one sense. He did believe that determinism is compatible with notions of moral worth or blame: "instinct and utility between them can safely be entrusted to carry on the social business of punishment and praise" in any event, he wrote.

But he was an incompatibilist in another, and to him a more important, sense. He believed determinism incompatible with a deep human desire for a world with a plurality of forces, and one in which novelties come about through the relations and contentions of those forces.  Furthermore, his reaction to that incompatibility was the free-willist one: we aren't so determined, after all.

"The indeterminism with its maggots, if you please to speak so about it, offends only the native absolutism of my intellect, -- an absolutism which, after all, perhaps, deserves to be snubbed and kept in check. But the determinsim with its necessary carrion, to continue the figure of speech, and with no possible maggots to eat the latter up, violates my sense of moral reality through and through."

Isaiah Berlin adopted a position much like James' in his Four Essays on Liberty (1969). Indeed, Berlin was if anything a more thorough incompatibilist than James. He wrote that if he were convinced that acts of human choice "were themselves wholly determined by factors not within the individual's control ... I should certainly not regard him as morally praiseworthy or blameworthy. In such circumstances the concept of worth and desert, as these terms are now used, would become empty for me."  

Most philosophers who have written about the subject recently take a compatibilist stance. The dissenters adopt the determinist sort of incompatibilism. Free-willist incompatibilists -- outside the ranks of those working from a specific theological/ecclesiological program -- are quite few.  So I was happy to discover that Robert Kane exists.  I will have to see if the particulars of his argument warrant my happiness.

Apple Stock Price and Dividends

Apple this week announced that it will be paying dividends. This has set off, or re-invigorated, some fascinating debates, at places such as Felix Salmon's wonderful blog, about the connection between dividends and stock prices.

Neither in theory not empirically is the relationship obvious. Yes, as Felix says, "if cash leaves the company and goes right into shareholders' pockets, the value of what's left behind goes down, not up."  If you treat the payment of a dividend as a one-time event, it necessarily reduces the asset side of the balance sheet, thus also reducing the equity side.

Confirming that conclusion through evidence of actual stock price moves is tricky, though, simply because there are always a number of possible explanations for any given price move. But in 1986 the  "Journal of Financial Economics" ran a study that looked at the value of options for stocks that pay dividends, and movements in the prices of those options around the announcement of a coming dividend. It found that a  decline in the value of the underlying stock is implicit in options prices.

Dividend policy over time is another matter. It is intuitively plausible that a track record of paying dividends makes companies attractive, serving as a signal of their health and rewarding ownership with cash.

Apple hardly needs to signal that it is healthy these days. This leaves us with the question of the "reward" value of a cash payment. Without dividends, my reward for owning Apple is supposed to be the higher price, and my right to sell some of my shares to get the cash. Getting dividends is an easier sort of reward. It is as if a pigeon in a Skinner box no longer has to press the lever to get the pellet of grain -- the experimenter hands the pigeon the pellet. I suppose you'd get lazier pigeons, but over time that would become the more popular box, for pigeons with a choice.

Here's a link to a somewhat more sophisticated discussion of the economics of it.

Stemmer Weighs in on Grammar

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.

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.

"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.

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.