tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9192597712746432631.post1666114812817316273..comments2024-03-09T09:06:35.288+00:00Comments on Notes from Two Scientific Psychologists: From Specification to Convention (A Purple Peril)Andrewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16732977871048876430noreply@blogger.comBlogger5125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9192597712746432631.post-45555418959349578632015-08-25T19:23:29.117+01:002015-08-25T19:23:29.117+01:00Andrew and Sabrina -
Through the period of develo...Andrew and Sabrina -<br /><br />Through the period of development of these ideas I've often responded with (hopefully constructive) criticisms, but I'm pleased to say that I now concur with essentially all of this post and Sabrina's referenced paper. <br /><br />I think of a simple response to sensory input as implemented in what I call a "context-dependent behavioral disposition", conceptually a neural structure that in essence matches a pattern (or member of a set of patterns) of neural activity with an action. The structure is learned from experience whether the information in the pattern is specifying or conventional. In that sense, I do see a convention as implicitly "stored" in an animal (although unbeknownst to it) notwithstanding that I agree that the syntactic and semantic features of the relevant language need not be explicitly stored. Although if one accepts Wittgenstein's "meaning is use" and assumes that in general an utterance is used in order to provoke an action, then it seems that the semantics are also implicitly stored (again, unbeknownst to the animal).Charles T. Wolvertonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12309746685166449683noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9192597712746432631.post-41246347677496438972015-08-24T10:13:00.177+01:002015-08-24T10:13:00.177+01:00Hi Ed,
Sabrina here on Andrew's account (can&#...Hi Ed,<br />Sabrina here on Andrew's account (can't sign out for some reason!). Anyway, I don't think that conventionality is what makes information less reliable, I think it's the nature of the constraint governing a particular instance of conventional information. It just so happens that many constraints (experimenter goals, situational co-occurrence) are less reliable than ecological laws. But, I would advocate a task-specific analysis of the nature of the constraint before drawing any conclusions about what consequences reliability would have for the organism using the information. Andrewhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16732977871048876430noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9192597712746432631.post-88931812774703154802015-08-24T09:56:01.176+01:002015-08-24T09:56:01.176+01:00How do you get from the word heard to the property...<i>How do you get from the word heard to the property in the world that the word is about? Can you make this more explicit, in a way that shows that this relies on something that's *in* the sound pattern, and is not just in the behaviour of the person hearing the sound? Or do you in fact deny that any such mapping exists (as I'm inclined to do)?</i><br />I ruled out the idea that the mapping is 'in' the sound pattern in the post. The conventional mapping lives in how the pattern is used, and the fact that when I use the pattern 'dog' to refer to a dog, I get away with it when I'm speaking to other English users.<br /><br />This whole thing is nicely embodied, actually. The convention isn't stored in me anywhere, it lives in my activity. <br /><br />A useful point: both 'specification' and 'convention' are third person analysis labels. They are important distinctions for the analysis to make, but they are *not* important distinctions for the organism. I think conflating these levels is a fundamental part of modern psychology and separating it back out is one of the most useful and important things we got from Louise Barrett's book. Funnily enough, it took me a long time to realise why she was going on about this for so much of the book, that's how under the radar and in the workings of our science this mistake is. William James knew about it, of course, but then, he knew all our mistakes :)Andrewhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16732977871048876430noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9192597712746432631.post-85036748170868546202015-08-24T09:48:37.170+01:002015-08-24T09:48:37.170+01:00I'm not convinced you've shown that the fa...<i>I'm not convinced you've shown that the fallibility is a consequence of the way the information itself is structured.<br />...<br />this doesn't necessarily imply that the information involved in speech is itself structured in a different way from specifying information</i><br />Right. So the information, the structure in energy arrays, the thing my perceptual systems are in contact with, isn't 'structured differently' when conventional vs specification. First, all structure in energy arrays is specific to the dynamics that created it, because all structure in energy arrays is a projection of those dynamics governed by the laws of ecological optics. So there is <i>no difference in kind</i> at the level of the pattern in the energy array.<br /><br />The difference only comes up when an organism tries to use that structure as information, ie when it tries to organise a behaviour with respect to it. <br /><br />1. Using a variable as information for the local dynamics can be extremely stable when the mapping from dynamics to variable is 1:1 because that 1:1ness constrains the variability that is possible. <br />2. Using a variable as information for something related to the local dynamics by a convention is less stable because the lack of 1:1ness means there's less to constrain the possible variation. <br /><br />So in all cases the information variable is simply a pattern in an energy array and is the same kind of thing across the board. The difference only shows up in the use of the variable. Andrewhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16732977871048876430noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9192597712746432631.post-33584314328775110222015-08-22T12:11:33.947+01:002015-08-22T12:11:33.947+01:00I like that you (both) make a distinction between ...I like that you (both) make a distinction between the third-person description and the first-person control of the behaviour, and that you're clear that the former is irrelevant from the perspective of the latter.<br /><br />You claim that there are consequences of the difference between specifying and conventional information: the latter is a more fallible and uncertain guide to behaviour. I'd like to press on that a bit more. I'm not convinced you've shown that the fallibility is a consequence of the way the information itself is structured.<br /><br />There does seems to be a bit of slippage here between (1) talking about conventions as formal links (constraints) between bits of sound structure and classes of objects and events, as in situation semantics, and (2) talking about conventions as implicit agreements between different speakers as to what those links are. The fact that speaking is fallible may just be a consequence of differences between speakers (2), i.e. it's a consequence of the way the world is structured; this doesn't necessarily imply that the information involved in speech is itself structured in a different way from specifying information (1).<br /><br />What's not clear, in the specification-convention analogy, is what's being proposed as an alternative to the symmetry principle. Ok, you don't want conventions to have the 1:1:1 mapping. But you're still assuming that there *is* a mapping, I think (at least, from the sound "dog" to the dog-shaped object). What is that mapping, exactly? How do you get from the word heard to the property in the world that the word is about? Can you make this more explicit, in a way that shows that this relies on something that's *in* the sound pattern, and is not just in the behaviour of the person hearing the sound? Or do you in fact deny that any such mapping exists (as I'm inclined to do)?Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com