tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9192597712746432631.post1059406024019208029..comments2024-03-09T09:06:35.288+00:00Comments on Notes from Two Scientific Psychologists: Language isn't magical (but it is special)Andrewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16732977871048876430noreply@blogger.comBlogger40125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9192597712746432631.post-51415908823694696472012-05-26T21:04:28.684+01:002012-05-26T21:04:28.684+01:00"Interestingly, it actually seems that langua..."Interestingly, it actually seems that language users first ASSUME the truth of utterances and then try to figure out how they make sense"<br /><br />Upon further inspection, I appear to have misread you. I apologize. You actually said "how they make sense", and I replied as if you said "what they mean". Given your more broad wording, I agree with you. How a sentence "makes sense" could include implicatures, presuppositions, expressive content, etc. in addition to the "bare" truth conditions.<br /><br />Though I agree with you there, it leads to another "conflict" of theories, as to how you that extra information is derived. A representational approach to this would be something like Discourse Representation Theory (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/discourse-representation-theory/). Indeed, the discourse phenomena that are meant to be explained by DRT, like anaphora and presupposition, seem like very difficult things to explain without recourse to representation. Have you done/would you consider writing a post about discourse?Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9192597712746432631.post-35183600299325261652012-05-26T20:30:25.206+01:002012-05-26T20:30:25.206+01:00You didn't directly answer my question, but I ...You didn't directly answer my question, but I think the answer is "no". Your model doesn't need/include truth conditions. Do I read you properly?<br /><br />My original follow-up still stands: without them, how you understand what a sentence means? My claim was that understanding what a sentence means is knowing that sentence's truth conditions. Fill in the blank for your model now: A speaker understands the meaning of a sentence when ________________. (I don't mean to actually confine you to one sentence, I'm just trying to give you an idea of the answer I'm looking for.)<br /><br /><br />"The example of the vampire and his coffee is interesting with respect to the availability of this information. When presented out of a use context - that is, as an example in your argument - it seems obvious that it is false. However, I can easily imagine several normal scenarios where this utterance would be true. ... These are perfectly average examples of language use and they highlight a fundamental limitation of the truth condition idea, namely that meaning resides in words rather than in contexts."<br /><br />What you are highlighting here is hardly a challenge to truth conditional semantics, it's a well known issue to anyone who works on natural language meaning, and the general solution is taught in undergraduate courses. Do you seriously think that linguists would somehow miss this very obvious fact about their main object of study?<br /><br />Contextual variation is "hard-coded" into the formal denotations of words. The formal denotation of "vampire" is :<br /><br />[[vampire]]c,w = λx. x is a vampire in c in w. <br /><br />There are supposed to be some superscripts and subscripts in there, but I don't know how to do that on this blog. Read more informally, it says "the denotation of the word 'vampire' with respect to a context c and a world w is a function from entities to truth values which returns true for any entity x such that x is considered a vampire in c in w." So if the context is such that we're talking about that gang, then the above evaluates to true. (Well, not so simply. It doesn't evaluate "in place", it gets carried up the tree and becomes part of the truth conditions of the sentence. This is done through a few elementary operations explained in the link in my last post.)<br /><br />"they highlight a fundamental limitation of the truth condition idea, namely that meaning resides in words rather than in contexts.""<br /><br />I hope my sketch of the word "vampire" explains this a little more. Linguistic semantics allows for meaning to be derived both lexically and contextually.<br /><br /><br /><br />"Interestingly, it actually seems that language users first ASSUME the truth of utterances and then try to figure out how they make sense"<br /><br />"figuring out what it means" and "assuming it's true" are, for me, the very same thing. To know what something means is to know its truth conditions. If you are assuming it is true, then you already know what it means. I don't see how you can split this into two different processes.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9192597712746432631.post-84947258127116571532012-05-24T15:43:53.170+01:002012-05-24T15:43:53.170+01:00I don't see why the fact that you can "th...I don't see why the fact that you can "think of the word dog and then say to myself that this is an animal with four legs and fur" is a problem. You have learned to respond to a large variety of external, context-dependent stimuli by uttering sentences that use the word "dog". Ie, those responses are in essence latent (see note below) and awaiting an appropriate stimulus to cause execution. I think of thoughts as including covert execution of latent utterances (ie, saying them to oneself), possibly in response to stimuli that are partially or entirely internal. Your quoted statement began with the implicit assumption that the thought "dog" that initiated the internal description of a dog just popped up. But I think of the process as continuous, so that the thought "dog" also must have been a response to some stimulus.<br /><br />And you may have misinterpreted part of my comment. Just to be clear, I'm completely in the Wittgenstein-Davidson-et al camp in considering that only sentences have meaning. I'm assuming that at the early stages of development a child merely learns to associate aural and visual stimuli. Later, the child learns to mime the aural stimulus by uttering a replica of it. Even later, the child learns that certain utterances can cause entities in the environment (AKA, care givers) to behave so as to satisfy the child's desires. Only at that point do those utterances begin to acquire meaning (in the sense of intended responses by a hearer), and then only if interpreted as one word sentences, ie, commands.<br /><br />In this utterer-response (or more generally, actor-change) approach to meaning, "truth" has no role; even lies, or statements about nonexistent entities like vampires, have meaning. In fact, I wonder if "meaning" isn't another word that's more trouble than it's worth, at least in formal conversation. Couldn't we just directly address the change that an actor intends to effect?<br /><br />Note: <br /><br />Here "latent" is in the sense of "resonant neuron networks" as we discussed in an exchange last year. I didn't quite follow your exchange with afauno, but the numbered items in afauno's 5/21 20:19 comment seemed somewhat reminiscent of the network idea. The "corpus" in item 1 might correspond to the learned verbal stimulus-response pairs that comprise the network. The "semantic primitives" of item 5 might correspond to the "stored" stimulus-response pairs (analogs to filters matched to specific verbal stimuli and causing specific responses). I'm guessing (based mostly on a knee-jerk response to the word "vector") that one benefit of a "vector semantic analysis" is to provide a concept of distance. This is provided in the network paradigm by the curve of responses to stimuli that deviate from the stimulus to which the filter is matched. However, the two ideas diverge in that network paradigm <b>is</b> intended to suggest how language comprehension might work.Charles T. Wolvertonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12309746685166449683noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9192597712746432631.post-779096381002083962012-05-24T10:14:36.392+01:002012-05-24T10:14:36.392+01:00The idea that a language user must compute truth c...The idea that a language user must compute truth conditions is an assumption. For this to be an essential part of a theory of language use, supporters of this idea must establish that information exists for people to make these evaluations. If information does not exist to support this task, then it doesn't matter how intuitively appealing the idea is to some linguists, it cannot be part of human language use. The example of the vampire and his coffee is interesting with respect to the availability of this information. When presented out of a use context - that is, as an example in your argument - it seems obvious that it is false. However, I can easily imagine several normal scenarios where this utterance would be true. I could be referring to the Puerto Rican gang, the Vampires, I could be referring to people dressed as vampires (in the context of some type of convention where costumes are the norm), or I could be using vampires metaphorically (either as bloodsuckers, e.g., lawyers or creatures of the night, e.g., teenagers). These are perfectly average examples of language use and they highlight a fundamental limitation of the truth condition idea, namely that meaning resides in words rather than in contexts. <br /><br />Interestingly, it actually seems that language users first ASSUME the truth of utterances and then try to figure out how they make sense (it is one of Grice's conversational maxims that we assume things that are said to us to be true). This is useful or else people would have real difficulty with things that *could* be true or false but that we don't *know to be* true or false. <br /><br />Andrew is always eager to talk about the idea of Poverty of Stimulus and how that assumption has led cognitive psychology astray - I'm sure you can get him going on this!Sabrina Golonkahttps://www.blogger.com/profile/10484205507927422316noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9192597712746432631.post-8292182876545110412012-05-23T10:51:37.711+01:002012-05-23T10:51:37.711+01:00I'm glad you're enjoying the blog and I de...I'm glad you're enjoying the blog and I definitely appreciate different perspectives on this content. I have a lot of respect for NLP and the amazing amount of information available in the structure of language. I spent a few months last year working on a system that would tag POS, identify multiple word meanings, and create individual lexical neighbourhoods for each meaning. It is astonishing how far you can go with this approach (of course this is what Landauer and Dumais thought when they claimed that LSA was an analogue to language learning). I certainly keep this in mind when I think about what structures are available in language to be perceived and, therefore, to convey meaning. I also agree that language is an artefact and a tool (a la Daniel Everett) and I think this notion works well with the functionalist perspective I've adopted. <br /><br />I like the way you summed this up "...[language] has it's own structure because it's an artifact, and this massive scale structure itself is modeled after the embodied needs of its users". I do see where you're coming from in terms of representations in the external phase. Since "representation" is such a baggage-laden word in cognitive science I choose not to use the word at all.Sabrina Golonkahttps://www.blogger.com/profile/10484205507927422316noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9192597712746432631.post-84367845037800070332012-05-23T10:35:49.274+01:002012-05-23T10:35:49.274+01:00As always, Eric, I appreciate your thorough knowle...As always, Eric, I appreciate your thorough knowledge of history!Sabrina Golonkahttps://www.blogger.com/profile/10484205507927422316noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9192597712746432631.post-11153398236395073242012-05-23T10:34:47.491+01:002012-05-23T10:34:47.491+01:00Despite what I said earlier, I kind of like the id...Despite what I said earlier, I kind of like the idea of referring to information with a more neutral word or phrase. I think "structure in an energy array" is nice and straightforward. The thing that "information" brings is the assumption that the structure in the array is relevant to the task at hand (information for..) and potentially perceivable. There is lots of structure that doesn't meet these requirements.Sabrina Golonkahttps://www.blogger.com/profile/10484205507927422316noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9192597712746432631.post-53511140701339930392012-05-23T10:31:29.311+01:002012-05-23T10:31:29.311+01:00Hi Charles,
I agree that we might want to go prett...Hi Charles,<br />I agree that we might want to go pretty far down the road of construing linguistic meaning as action-based - we want something in the world to change, whether in the environment, in someone else, or in ourselves. The thing I'm trying to work out right now is how this construal accounts for our subjective experience of being able to reflect on words and consider their meanings (e.g., I can think of the word dog and then say to myself that this is an animal with four legs and fur). How can we use functionalist language to talk about these experiences? I don't doubt that it's possible, but I haven't come up with anything yet. I really like the tennis example you give. I think it does a good job of illustrating the trade-off between flexibility and stability that characterises word use, but does it in the context of action.<br /><br />I also agree that "information" is a bit problematic, but, like Andrew, I'm fine with it as long as we're disciplined about how we use the word. <br /><br />The "flexible according to culture" phrase reflects the fact that language isn't just giving voice to some universal human way of thinking about the world. One example can be seen in the post I wrote awhile back about the (non)universality of the mind (http://psychsciencenotes.blogspot.co.uk/2011/11/how-universal-is-mind.html). So, I stuck that phrase in their to remind myself that I need to think about languages besides English when developing these ideas.<br /><br />The Smith and Gasser quote is just to illustrate the distinction between perceptual information (specification relationship) and linguistic relationship (conventional relationship). The idea that a word becomes associated with a stimulus is quite a familiar one, but I don't think it holds up well. For one thing, I don't like the implication that you have two things - a word and a meaning - and that these two things have to become associated. The whole ecological idea is that with learning you get direct access to meaning via information, not access to a separate associated meaning. For another thing, the idea works best for concrete nouns that we have lots of direct experience with. But, we can easily talk about things that we've never seen (I've never been to New York, but I know how to use it in a sentence), about impossible things (unicorns), and about things that don't have clear perceptual referents (hope). This is well-worn terrain and much of cognitive linguistics has devoted itself to coming up with explanations for how we do these things given the assumption that basic word learning is grounded in associations with environmental stimuli. I think a function-based perspective that assumes that a trained language user has direct access to meaning can bypass these problems. In the next post I introduce the idea of perceptual-linguistic systems. I will argue that, for language, meaning resides at this system level rather than chiefly with individual words. Of course, I still need to figure out how to talk about our subjective experience that individual words have meaning...Sabrina Golonkahttps://www.blogger.com/profile/10484205507927422316noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9192597712746432631.post-45913502846523435882012-05-22T20:53:38.801+01:002012-05-22T20:53:38.801+01:00"But, I wonder what evidence you are drawing ..."But, I wonder what evidence you are drawing on that 1) humans actually do anything like computing truth and sincerity conditions (just these dimensions?)"<br /><br /><br />I think that truth conditions are central to explaining how meaning is derived in language. Knowing what a sentence means is knowing that sentence's truth conditions, in other words knowing what the world would have to be like in order for that sentence to be true. We know a sentence is true if its truth conditions hold in the actual world (and likewise we know a sentence is false when we know its truth conditions do not or cannot hold in the actual world).<br /><br />Simple example, you know what the completely novel sentence "Vampires usually get their coffee at 7-11" means, and you know that it's false, because you know what the world would have to look like for it to be true (vampires would need to be real, they'd would have to drink coffee, they would have to buy it more often at 7-11 than elsewhere) and you know that the world is not that way.<br /><br />Since natural languages are compositional (mostly), the meaning of a sentence is a function of the meaning of its parts and how they are put together. The semantics of a word is its contribution toward the truth conditions of the sentence. These truth conditions are computed from the semantics each word in the sentence using simple operations like function-argument application and lambda abstraction. (This is just basic linguistic semantics; for people unfamiliar here are some class notes I found through google: http://www.sfu.ca/~jeffpell/Ling324/fjpSlides5.pdf)<br /><br />You asked if I could "empirically" rule out any other approach. Before I can provide any evidence against another approach, I need to know how it handles truth conditions. Does your model of natural language meaning involve truth conditions, or not?<br /><br />If not, then what does it mean to understand the meaning of a sentence? How do we decide if a sentence is true or not?<br /><br />If so, then how are the truth conditions for a sentence arrived at? I'm claiming computation over abstract semantic units. I'm guessing you won't. ;)<br /><br />By the way, I found your site through the the somethingawful thread that adwkiwi has posted in (don't know if that's you). I'm user FoiledAgain. I have some questions for you about other topics in language too, especially your views of Poverty of the Stimulus. I'd be really happy to carry on the conversation over there too!Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9192597712746432631.post-21953963699653644542012-05-22T20:23:38.403+01:002012-05-22T20:23:38.403+01:00Neuroskeptic,
One way or another this is all growi...Neuroskeptic,<br />One way or another this is all growing out of pragmatism. In pragmatism (roughly speaking) any 'thing' is 'the consequences of the thing.' So, if we know the consequences of 'knowing the word dog', and we observe those consequences in a person, the that person 'knows the word dog'... and that's all there is to it. The remaining question is 'what are the consequences?' <br /><br />It is a difficult question to see through to the end, but we can get a start pretty easily.<br /><br />Surely when teaching someone the word 'dog' our main criterion for judging whether or not they 'know the word' is observing their use of the word and their response to our use of the word. <i>We never actually assess whether they have an image in their head</i>, so it would be <i>totally disingenuous</i> to claim that was the criterion. <br /><br />If this ever erupts into a full debate about linguistics, one problem will be people talking past each other for lack of understanding the very different underlying philosophies that are in play before we even get to the linguistic issue. This can be seen in debates about eco psych from the '70s and '80s, and people are only now beginning to understand what the real confusion was about.Eric Charleshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17412168482569793996noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9192597712746432631.post-31616084174543317902012-05-22T14:08:22.871+01:002012-05-22T14:08:22.871+01:00OK. What I think you're getting at (correct me...OK. What I think you're getting at (correct me if I'm wrong?) is something like this:<br /><br />"If someone can use the word 'dog' to usefully talk about dogs, then they can be said to know the word 'dog'. 'Dog' has no meaning that sits in the brain, a phantom picture of a dog. That would be a representation of a dog, and I claim it is nothing to do with being able to use the word 'dog'".<br /><br />?Neuroskeptichttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06647064768789308157noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9192597712746432631.post-23100156229658468612012-05-22T08:44:26.544+01:002012-05-22T08:44:26.544+01:00Hi,
I'm happy for people who believe in repre...Hi,<br /><br />I'm happy for people who believe in representations to also believe that function words have representations. You're correct in that there is not any necessary reason that they would not be represented (Dietrich & Markman would probably put them on the function end rather than content end of the spectrum). The point wasn't about representations, really. It was about our ability to use words correctly on the basis of their function rather than content. Evidence that we can do this quite well means that the fact that dog is more "content rich" than "promise" shouldn't influence how amenable these types of words are to an ecological explanation. <br /><br />I am familiar with Austin and I mention him in the next post. I like his idea of speech acts.<br /><br />In terms of whether representations are necessary, I encourage you to browse these posts for Andrew and my response to the idea (see below). But, I wonder what evidence you are drawing on that 1) humans actually do anything like computing truth and sincerity conditions (just these dimensions?) and that 2) these acts explicitly require representations (having ruled out other possibilities like dynamical systems empirically)<br /><br />http://psychsciencenotes.blogspot.co.uk/2011/11/robots-representation-dynamical-systems.html<br /><br />http://psychsciencenotes.blogspot.co.uk/2011/07/selection-of-problems-with.html<br /><br />http://psychsciencenotes.blogspot.co.uk/2011/03/chemero-2009-chapter-3-theories-of.htmlSabrina Golonkahttps://www.blogger.com/profile/10484205507927422316noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9192597712746432631.post-40437437329438985092012-05-22T08:30:41.930+01:002012-05-22T08:30:41.930+01:00Yes. The typical explanation is that concrete word...Yes. The typical explanation is that concrete words like "dog" have more perceptual properties linked to them that can be used to ground figurative uses. This is a fairly cognitive take on the issue. I don't know yet how I'd account for the difference in the proposed framework.Sabrina Golonkahttps://www.blogger.com/profile/10484205507927422316noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9192597712746432631.post-83509068833897062992012-05-22T07:25:52.425+01:002012-05-22T07:25:52.425+01:00isn't it likely to lead the unwary to think in...<i>isn't it likely to lead the unwary to think in terms of representation and computation - both perhaps required for third-person analysis and simulation but not necessarily for first-person implementation?</i><br />This is always a risk, and part of our job is to maintain discipline. Language isn't my area and I fall into essentially representational turns of phrase really easily as Sabrina and I have talked about these posts, so it's easy to do!<br /><br /><i>Why not something more neutral like your own "[dynamic] structure in an energy array"? </i><br />I'm working on a series of posts on specification and some recent work on why you might not need it for direct perception (Withagen, Chemero etc). One of the moves (<a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.humov.2009.09.003" rel="nofollow">Withagen & van der Kamp</a>) is to actually separate the term 'information' from the structure in an optic array, and only let structure become information when it is involved in a particular perception-action context by someone trying to do something in particular. It's entirely possible this might work, although I'm still reading and preparing on this one. Anyway, I just wanted to highlight that this is certainly an option floating around.Andrewhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16732977871048876430noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9192597712746432631.post-67859582628919467682012-05-22T04:42:09.837+01:002012-05-22T04:42:09.837+01:00In other words, I claim that cultural/conventional...<i>In other words, I claim that cultural/conventional phenomena in language have rules of their own. ... One of the properties of this social artifact is to classify the reality into shared categories.</i><br /><br />afauno -<br /><br />In case you don't already know, Donald Davidson has addresssed this idea at length, most notably <a href="http://kvond.wordpress.com/2008/10/08/davidsons-three-varieties-of-knowledge/" rel="nofollow">here</a>.Charles T. Wolvertonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12309746685166449683noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9192597712746432631.post-312822340308339492012-05-22T04:31:52.807+01:002012-05-22T04:31:52.807+01:00Nitpicking:
1. While I understand that the concep...Nitpicking:<br /><br />1. While I understand that the concept of stimuli having "information content" is central to eco-psych (or at least the version to which you and Andrew subscribe), "information" still strikes me as being one of those overloaded terms that may cause more trouble than it's worth. Eg, isn't it likely to lead the unwary to think in terms of representation and computation - both perhaps required for third-person analysis and simulation but not necessarily for first-person implementation? Why not something more neutral like your own "[dynamic] structure in an energy array"? <br /><br />2. Trying to distinguish law-driven stimuli and language by considering the latter to be a "medium" seems potentially confusing. In the post, transmission of language is said to be via "modalities", thereby leaving "medium" available for describing language itself. But I think most comm theory people would consider such a physical "modality" to be the communication "medium". In terms of layered comm protocols (which - intended or not - is the flavor of that part of the post), the physical layer is at the bottom of the protocol stack, and language arguably isn't even in the stack. Consistent with the protocol stack metaphor, one could indeed call language the "medium for meaning", but I see no benefit to doing so that would offset the possible consequent confusion.Charles T. Wolvertonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12309746685166449683noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9192597712746432631.post-56120405253912638842012-05-22T04:14:26.883+01:002012-05-22T04:14:26.883+01:00the questions is only how you come to use the word...<i>the questions is only how you come to use the word and how others come to respond</i><br /><br />I'm curious how far Eric, Sabrina, or anyone else is willing to go down this path. My inclination is to go pretty far (perhaps too far?) Hence, although being on-board with the claim that "the mechanism of learning this meaning is identical for both types of event" (those that unfold in accordance with natural laws and those that unfold in accordance - more or less - with social conventions, eg, language), I'd go even further.<br /><br />I take the meaning of a linguistic event to be the response (possibly latent) intended by the linguistic agent. So, the agent's objective is not to convey "information" <b>to</b> someone but to effect action <b>by</b> someone, immediately or subsequently. If the target of the event responds as intended, the meaning was "understood". That view seems to extend easily to the concept of the "meaning" of any stimulus caused by an agent, eg, perceiving a bouncing ball hit by a tennis opponent. And it can be extended to allow attribution of "meaning" to an agentless event by assuming perfect "understanding" on the part of the perceiver so that the virtual meaning of the event can be interpreted as being whatever response results.<br /><br />In developing tennis skills, one has to learn to produce a multitude of instances of a bouncing ball in an attempt to cause desired responses from an opponent - ie, to master the "meanings" (in the above sense) of produced bouncing tennis balls: those hit to/from the forehand/backhand, with/without top/back/side spin, long/short or high/low on fast/slow surfaces, etc, all in a multitude of complex and rapidly time-varying contexts. Is the process of learning how to play tennis at a given skill level really dramatically different from learning to play a similarly challenging language game with comparable skill, ie, to skillfully produce linguistic "bouncing balls"? In both cases the production clearly needs to be "flexible according to context [] and goals [,and] to be expandable according to changing needs". I'm less clear whether in either case they need to be "portable" in the sense of allowing a player to "access information about things that are not currently in the environment". The intentional idiom is convenient for those who insist on including mentalese in their vocabularies, and background knowledge of a tennis opponent's behavioral patterns can be an advantage. But is either necessary? Finally, I can't quite parse "flexible according to [] culture" and therefore have nothing to say about that proposed distinguishing feature of linguistic events. (All of this also applies, of course, to responding to stimuli.)<br /><br />I fail to appreciate the significance of the Smith and Gasser quote. While an utterance considered only as an abstract sound obviously conveys no information about its intended referent (if any), that seems quite irrelevant to meaning. At the basic level appropriate to consideration of "dog", if we insist on ascribing meaning to the stand-alone word, it is initially merely an association between simultaneous experiences of neural activity due to visual stimulation consequent to light reflected from a present dog-object and aural sensory stimulation due to utterance of the word. Only later does meaning in the more complex sense of tool use emerge. Why in either case would anyone expect a sound <i>per se</i> to be similar (using any measure) to an object? In any event, this evolution of skilled word usage seems to me to parallel closely the development of a skill at handling bouncing tennis balls.Charles T. Wolvertonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12309746685166449683noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9192597712746432631.post-68313611223720027452012-05-21T20:50:40.589+01:002012-05-21T20:50:40.589+01:00Well, one big difference between what you are tryi...Well, one big difference between what you are trying to do and what Skinner was trying to do is the organism of interest. Skinner called his book 'Verbal Behavior' because it was about the behavior of saying things (writing things, signing things, etc.). It was not a theory of language, but an extension of operant theory to explain why certain people say certain things in certain situations. Your theory, it seems will be focused on perception, i.e., on why listeners do certain things, including responding with more words. <br /><br />This should lead to a difference in perspective, but whether it leads to incompatibility is a separate issue. Also, even if it incompatible with Skinner's approach to verbal behavior, that doesn't mean it is incompatible with radical behaviorism. So far as I can tell, the first use of 'radical behaviorism' was by Mary Calkins in 1916, long before Skinner came on the scene. <br /><br />EricEric Charleshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17412168482569793996noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9192597712746432631.post-8770206867138634182012-05-21T20:45:05.157+01:002012-05-21T20:45:05.157+01:00Thanks for your answers... Sorry if I underestimat...Thanks for your answers... Sorry if I underestimated the importance of the cultural for you. I'll be happy to read your next post (yet I'm still convinced there's a dual embodied/disembodied nature of language...)afaunohttps://twitter.com/#!/afaunonoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9192597712746432631.post-50474075049578140102012-05-21T20:39:14.666+01:002012-05-21T20:39:14.666+01:00Just to emphasise; when I study the perceptual bas...Just to emphasise; when I study the perceptual basis of skilled action, I generally want to measure whether someone has perceived a variable using action. For example, while the rhythmic movement stuff that led to the <a href="http://psychsciencenotes.blogspot.com/2010/11/perceptionaction-model-of-coordination.html" rel="nofollow">model</a> does include <a href="http://psychsciencenotes.blogspot.com/2010/10/visual-perception-of-coordinated.html" rel="nofollow">judgment studies with no action component</a>, they were always intended to be replaced by <a href="http://psychsciencenotes.blogspot.co.uk/2010/11/establishing-role-of-perception-in.html" rel="nofollow">experiments where we have people move and measure how that changes in response to manipulations of information</a>. The measure of whether someone has perceived what I think they have perceived is therefore whether or not they acted as if they had perceived that information.<br /><br />Sabrina's move is to apply <i>exactly</i> this logic to language; not by analogy, but on the premise that the same logic holds for language.Andrewhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16732977871048876430noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9192597712746432631.post-17161133561496297852012-05-21T20:19:54.352+01:002012-05-21T20:19:54.352+01:00Thanks for your answers and my apologies for over-...Thanks for your answers and my apologies for over-simplifying your view about the role of the cultural.<br /><br />I admire that you stressed the importance of clear theoretical foundations. I'd feel totally unable to do that... But this endeavour is also important for your neighbors in linguistics. However a theory of perception is certainly not the only foundation linguistics can rely on.<br /><br />A lot can be done using corpus and corpus distributions, and considering language as a disembodied structure. And I don't mean Chomskiism, I mean the advances in computational linguistics... You said there's no theory to relate computational text mining approaches to comprehension processes? Granted, but there's an intuitive path throught several theories. Here is a part of it, as I see it in my non-scientific way:<br />1) corpus of texts is a form of externalized viewpoints, statements about the world through the prism of a shared vision [Foucault 1969]<br />2) NLP allows us to do observations on (1) pertaining to discourse and syntactic structure [text mining]<br />3) this in turns provides us with probabilistic word to word relations (unstable, I grant it)] [semantic graphs]<br />4) its structures are akin to the global semantic structure of word relations <br />5) data mining gives us clusters of emerging from (4), these clusters being related to semantic primitives (as per prototype theory, [Geeraerts 1987])<br />6) from clustering to dimensionality there's only a small step in terms of mathematical formalism<br /><br />You may say this relates vector semantic studies to language use, but not language comprehension... True! I'm just trying to supply you ideas from other fields...<br /> <br />Still it's an interesting fact that emerging dimensions in that kind of distributional semantics approaches revolve around the human actions and body (as do the sets of primitives à la Wierzbicka or central metaphors à la Lakoff) <br /><br />So in the end, my intuition is that the psychological stance (ego's embodied viewpoint, like an insect perceiving only heat and acting on it) goes throught a disembodied phase when it is ex-pressed (language as an artifact external to me, with representations I inherit from the community). But over the ages this structure must take the shape of it's original embodiment (language as a configuration of available lexical relations revolving around human-centered primitves) and comes back to embodiment (language use/comprehension as if words were another perception).... but it's difficult to formalize this connection/cut/reconnection process, sorry!<br /><br />In a nutshell not only has environment been neglected, but language has a dual (internal/environment) nature due to ways humans interact, and it has it's own structure because it's an artifact, and this massive scale structure itself is modeled after the embodied needs of its users. Regularities in the externalized phase, THAT's what I call 'representations'. It's not contradictory with your view at all, it's just an important addendum.<br />That said, it's great to have dedicated people like you work with such rigour on foundational aspects and I'm very happy that you do it in an internet kind of way. And happy to have found your excellent blog... I'll stay tuned to read your next posts.afaunohttps://twitter.com/#!/afaunonoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9192597712746432631.post-20347564364092076502012-05-21T20:01:16.668+01:002012-05-21T20:01:16.668+01:00I don't see why we wouldn't have represent...I don't see why we wouldn't have representations of "of", for exactly the reasons you listed. It is a real word, with a syntax and a semantics and conditions of use. It's a projection of a functional head in a syntax tree. Why would anyone who believes in representations suddenly just drop the ball on small words? <br /><br />Also, you should look up JL Austin and the concept of "speech acts" in linguistics, because it relates directly to this post and why the word "dog" is different form "promise". The pragmatics associated with speech acts like promising are quite different than with simple referring words. <br /><br />Lastly, I want to say that you don't representation for words like "promise" because they are abstract nouns, you need it because you have to be able to compute the truth conditions and sincerity conditions of the sentence, with respect to a particular context and a particular world of evaluation.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9192597712746432631.post-14833569054804106272012-05-21T19:19:41.581+01:002012-05-21T19:19:41.581+01:00Great - looking forward to it!Great - looking forward to it!Neuroskeptichttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06647064768789308157noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9192597712746432631.post-9228964416740019932012-05-21T18:35:39.207+01:002012-05-21T18:35:39.207+01:00I agree entirely that there are subjective, social...I agree entirely that there are subjective, social components of language use that can't be dismissed by focusing on "lower levels" alone. In the next post I talk about how many of the tasks for which language is useful can only work because of the types of animals we are (e.g., highly motivated to interact with one another, sensitive to hierarchies and rule-breaking, eager to please). I think that this level of analysis will be absolutely essential to understanding how language succeeds given that meaning is only related to speech events via convention rather than specification. <br /><br />My goal with this analysis is to start from the ground up. Too many attempts to understand language (e.g., Chomsky) have neglected to consider what information is available in the environment to support language comprehension. A successful theory of language must grow out of a successful theory of perception.Sabrina Golonkahttps://www.blogger.com/profile/10484205507927422316noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9192597712746432631.post-45495674752132943892012-05-21T18:29:06.083+01:002012-05-21T18:29:06.083+01:00I'll take this comment a bit at a time.
Firs...I'll take this comment a bit at a time. <br /><br />First, I am not dismissing cultural influences on language. I am a big fan of Wierzbicka and I did a degree in anthropology before I came to psychology. In fact, a background in cross cultural linguistics partially informed my perspective on language that I describe here. Particularly, our western, modern, english-speaking experience of language entails things like a familiarity with dictionaries that pushes psychologists with this background to think about language as consisting of elements with stable core meanings (an idea I dismiss in the next post). Culture is enormously important and is routinely ignored in psychology. <br /><br />My problem with the approach I mentioned wasn't that it involved culture. One of my issues was that it is impossible to use the idea of autoclitics to make predictions about what dimensions a word might have - you can only identify possible dimensions based on your own or someone else's experience with a language. The other problem is that there is no theoretical basis to think this is how we understand word meanings. Being able to describe a verb with a vector might be useful to psychologists or linguists, but there is no theory to suggest that this description has any resemblance to the actual process of language comprehension.Sabrina Golonkahttps://www.blogger.com/profile/10484205507927422316noreply@blogger.com