Jane O’Grady – Open Democracy – 2009 – May 25
This is a fairly good treatment of the philosophical conundrums of psychology, even if it’s a gloss. Because O’Grady’s article doesn’t grind an axe as do the contestants in the academic field, (or, shall I say, ‘out in the field?’) her summary escapes the special quality of much meta-psychology: being spectacularly ironic.
This irony is easy to get at, and I’ll launch it from this paragraph of O’Grady:
The most irritating (to us lay people) aspect of philosophical and scientific attempts to reduce the mental to the neural, and to squash down human beings into being on all fours with other physical things, is that their proponents nearly always say that actually they are just putting the truth about consciousness more clearly and taking nothing away from our experience. Like politicians deviously withdrawing privileges, they expect us to be quite happy about this. Some developments of identity theory, however, are more upfront. They force consciousness into equivalence with lightning and water by impugning the ignorance of us ordinary people. The way we talk about sensations, memories and beliefs is, say eliminative materialists, hopelessly antiquated, a form of ‘folk psychology’ as hidebound and superstition-laden as talk about witches, or about epileptics being possessed by devils. ‘Folk psychology’ is a theory about how humans function, they say, that is pathetically inadequate in both describing and predicting. In time, a more scientifically sophisticated vocabulary will replace it.
Even if a more scientifically sophisticated vocabulary does replace it. it will fuel only the discussion of those for whom such superior terms are germane. The irony is that the lowest level of folk psychology is the one everybody deploys automatically to negotiate the minds–including their own–and all the other ‘objects’ found in their world.
I’ll bet even philosophers of psychology muddle about using half-baked heuristics. (And, like, they should know better!) From this, one area of investigation addresses the query: why is everyday psychological behavior, based as it is in the brain, so unsophisticated?
As I see it, the next level of folk psychology is: understanding in a pragmatic sense how people use their unsophisticated evolutionary, reflexive and acculturated, minds to conduct their lives. These investigations are in the purview of many disciplines, including those in psychology, anthropology and sociology, etc..
What strikes me as ironic is the sense that breakthroughs handed down from the level of meta-psychology will eventually cause the lower level practical processes of everyday human consciousness to, in effect, come around. I will go farther to wonder out loud whether a lack of psychological sophistication is advantageous in the evolutionary sense.
The various investigations at this 2nd level come to be pressured by the 3rd level, the level at which justifications for the assumptions underpinning the instrumental suppositions, (ie.intentionality,) come under direct pressure. The over-arching question here is: what justifies thinking the mind works in these, various ways? Of course implicit in any investigation of behavior’s instrumentality and of intentional behavior is some theoretical answer about how the mind works.
This lands, quickly, on the territory covered by the philosophy of psychology, philosophy of mind, and travels down the many contested roads.
To what extent is the commonsense belief/desire framework correct? The “status” issue has turned on this question: To what extent will science vindicate (in some relevant sense) commonsense psychology? The question of scientific vindication arises when commonsense psychology is understood as folk psychology (2). On one side are intentional realists like Fodor (1987) and Dretske (1987), who argue that science will vindicate the conceptual framework of commonsense psychology. On the other side are proponents of ELIMINATIVE MATERIALISM like Churchland (1981) and Stich (1983), who argue that as an empirical theory, commonsense psychology is susceptible to replacement by a better theory with radically different conceptual resources (but see Stich 1996 for a revised view). Just as other folk theories (e.g., FOLK BIOLOGY) have been overthrown by scientific theories, we should be prepared for the overthrow of folk psychology by a scientific theory—scientific psychology or neuroscience. Eliminative materialists make the empirical prediction that science very probably will not vindicate the framework of commonsense psychology.
The question of scientific vindication, however, does not by itself decide the “status” issue. To see this, consider an argument for eliminative materialism (EM): a. Folk psychology will not be vindicated by a physicalistic theory (scientific psychology or neuroscience). b. Folk psychology is correct if and only if it is vindicated (in some relevant sense) by a physicalistic theory.
So, c. Folk psychology is incorrect. Premise (b), which plays an essential role in the argument, has largely been neglected (but see Baker 1995; Horgan and Graham 1991). If premise (b) refers to folk psychology (2), then premise (b) is plausible; but then the conclusion would establish only that commonsense psychology interpreted as a theory is incorrect. However, if premise (b) refers to folk psychology (1), then premise (b) is very probably false. If folk psychology is not a putative scientific theory in the first place, then there is no reason to think that a physicalistic theory will reveal it to be incorrect. (Similarly, if cooking, say, is not a scientific theory in the first place, then we need not fear that chemistry will reveal that you cannot really bake a cake.) Lynne Baker, The MIT Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science publications
I can’t think of any single road here that–eventually and practically–easily offers practical methods for improving self-development, relationships, group relations, and all the sundry modes for everyday consciousness and behavior.
Yet, it is more than just a prejudice of mine to think to myself that if the mind and cognition largely works representationally, should I know this for certain, my experience would remain similar to what it was prior to such a flash of light.
(Incidentally, from the perspective of the psychology of learning, the presumed pressures funded in meta-psychology exist on another planet.)
My own main interest resides at the low end of level 2 where the investigations of lay persons promise a slight increase in sophistication but not so much so that one has to publish or perish.
At higher levels the professional expert may have to make a commitment. Jerry A. Fodor diagrams possible commitments in folk psychology this way, (from a fine compendium, The Future of Folk Psychology. Intentionality and Cognitive Science. John D. Greenwood, editor.)
click for large version
In that volume is also a chapter by John Heil, Being Indiscrete. In addition, his paper (pdf): Levels of Reality
More good, basic stuff:
Kristin Andrews, The Functions of Folk Psychology (pdf)
Peter Godfrey-Smith, Folk Psychology As a Model (pdf)
This paper will present a different option. I argue that folk psychology should be seen as something like a model, in a specific sense of this term. This idea will be presented initially as a modification of the theory-theory, a modification that draws on ideas from recent philosophy of science. But once the main ideas are on the table, we will also see the possibility of a new kind of “mixed” view, with theory-like and simulationist elements in natural combination.
Yup, why not?
Jonathan A. waskan, Folk Psychology and the Gauntlet of Irrealism (pdf)
Finally, wandering a bit far afield, here is the ripping (of Murphy,):
Jerry A. Fodor, Is It A BIrd?
will soon be implemented to drive sophisticated technologies that in turn are going to
be enhanced by quantum computing advances and things that will be made possible
like spintronics for other than storage capabilities. Long in the realm of science fiction,
which has morphed into speculative fiction, the “deck”, a device that encompasses most
human knowledge complete with expert assistants and intelligent agents, is ever so
much closer to becoming a reality.
On a more mundane note:
http://www.recombinantrecords.net/docs/2009-05-Amusing-Ourselves-to-Death.html
I’m thinking blindfolded men and an elephant.
Your comment really interests me, especially after searching on google on:
“quantum computing” / spintronics / “intelligent agent”
Searching on “the deck” / “human knowledge” / “artificial intelligence”
along with a few permutations, was not as fruitful.
I’ve posted some of my findings and some comments, ‘up top.’
Although you are much the mystery to me, Frank, and I have no idea how to satisfy my wish for more Frank grain, this is a packed comment.
My own inchoate sense is that the storage problem is harder than the processing problem. This sense comes from wondering about the quantity of actual data given by a single human intelligent agent in their daily life.
“On the mundane note, I’d weigh in on the side of Huxley.”
Ah hoon, it wasn’t a choice unless I was making the essay points. My comment was:
“I’m thinking blindfolded men and an elephant.”
We are offered two societal views from a previous generation that do not go far enough considering the amount of observations, knowledge and analysis available today.
Words like fusion, synergy and co-operation are the vectors of operant modification in the future. I’ve maintained in the past that, the information age ended while it was being coined as a new buzz/catch-phrase, the age of communication steamrolled over it like a tsunami raging over low lying land towards the foothills.
1) 29.11.06
Huddled together these fragments – flung through time
coalesce to form – the spine of a withering frown
a look of sadness – drops
like trembling rain – beading the glass
before the unveiling – eye
http://cleavepoetry.wordpress.com/tag/synergy/
“Except, this would be moderated by a prejudice of mine: job number one is only to mix up your DNA with somebody else’s and protect one’s offspring.”
I dunno, I don’t think mixing is the imperative so much as propagation which doesn’t necessarily need to lead to long term costs, like providing shelter and protection.
Mixing is the mechanical aspect of the process. Combining for effect however is moving ever forward from the straight up, get the “bad boy” genes, past marrying into a good family – replete with mores and ethic – to being able to choose which genetic traits will be expressed.
Protecting the offspring has, at least in my mind, carried the connotation of controlling property -chattel, land, power- past your limited mortality. This is the hobby of kings.
“My own inchoate sense is that the storage problem is harder than the processing problem. This sense comes from wondering about the quantity of actual data given by a single human intelligent agent in their daily life.”
Storage/retrieval is a really big issue. No sense in having knowledge carved into the stones of history if it is not accessible by other than extensive searching through the efforts of dedicated savants. So, maybe the issue is indexing, the system of indexing or more properly the searching of the system of indexing.
To make it simple, imagine the library of congress. The postulated savant will actually be a team, a team that encompasses practical concerns like associating political inference to the appropriate information as well as a librarian to order and collate and a filterer that weeds and prunes down to the abstract summary level for assessment by you the requester. This describes what is now staff which is attached to any office/function/official. More powerful people have chief’s of staff to move the most important parts of that information in a form readily accessible to the top of the decision making/action end of the barrel. Of course there are dedicated staffs to then massage that package into something that combines with/defeats/defuses/implements/effects another facet of the process.
The computational part is down to the sophistication of the programmers as actual processing power and speed accelerates.
What I wished to describe is what in the future will be available to the individual who is not a budgeted operation with an official function. Expert systems, smart agents and sophisticated artificial intelligence routines based on or running inference engines are coming. It’s not about limiting queries or overwhelming what a person can reasonably absorb but about answering the “question” posed. Your “deck”, a very compact, connected, high powered implement the size of an ipod nano which carries whatever databases you can afford/hack/steal/pirate and runs whatever agents again under the same above criteria and allows you to access the datasphere of the future and with heads up display/neural interface allows you to enter virtual spaces. For the unsophisticated player, ie. most of the population, both Huxley and Orwell are on the money, as the layers of state control will in full bloom blossom to farther reaches than they had the scope to envision. I’m not saying that a benign dictatorship on that level would be bad for the human condition but man being man the abuses will be so much more undetectable when the kid who didn’t get enough hugs or opportunities to ring the bell on the bus achieves power and begins to get even.
I don’t want to try for specifics of the system because the future is busy taking care of itself and we are simply rushing headlong into it because acceleration and convergence are carrying us forward faster than olden days systems can absorb and explain.
Gravity’s Rainbow by Vernor Vinge would be a good primer I think, unless you want to go back to the Hermes generated Neuromancer by William Gibson, the guy who invented cyberpunk.
but because, like religion, it cannot be proved correct or incorrect, it has little ‘academic’ use for me. and eventually, in a discussion f2f which is where i might be _motivated_ to discuss these things by a pointy stick, i will no doubt reach the stage of ’so what’ and shrug my shoulders, allowing you to continue to explain things in ways which are of no use to my academic pursuits… but not useless to my folk theorising self….
why so defensive? there are obviously territories out there needing defence. i am not presently near their borders and so the skirmishes seem distant.
but fodor and searle lie on the margins of what seems relevant to my academic pursuits – when i want to be precise, i will not turn to them. otoh, when i wish to simply and easily characterise experiential phenomena, their ideas have the ring of “common sense”. but, again, common sense is often not thought through very well.
hence we have the explanation of the black box.
indeed, for a long time, chomsky’s LAD was accepted as ’scientific’, because it satisfied most people’s thinkings – it filled a gap and provided a simple explanation.
even after bateson had debunked this way of thinking about phenomena of the brain and mind….
we systemicists occasionally lament the prevalence of folk-psychological explanations of language, and wonder how to prevail over simplistic and no doubt satisfying explanations of human language behaviour & evolution such as we witness when watching pinker in action on a tv program. in this case, though, he is claiming to be scientifically ‘correct’ – this is where i get frustrated – but not with folk-psychological explanations in general.
I will write later to clarify some issues raised in your interesting response. Ooh, and raise some more issues.
I’m not in, nor favor being in, a position at which I need to defend what is an interest. As somebody told me recently, “You’re just yapping from the sidelines.” True enough.
If you keep in mind the multiple levels of folk psychology, ranging from the everyday applications everybody employs to the controversies inherent in minds wondering about the workings of the mind, I am curious to understand the former and mostly bemused to look over the latter.
In short, a person does not have to secure a commitment to some version of ontology to go out and then make commonsense mistakes. There is a paradox hidden in this. Yet, both general examples constitute phenomena of mind.
***
Okay, I’ll will hint at the ironic overlap given by our, your and my, searching for some way to describe a borderline from the two opposite sides. It is: ecosemiosis/linguistics is a higher order of human mental functioning; is a subset of psychology.
Maybe not? It could be demarcated without any factor contingent to mental phenomena? Wait…the demarcation itself follows from mental acts realizing conceptualization of boundaries. (’Meta’ logical types?)
On February 22, you posted, tenor variables and dimensions. Its gross conceptual classes:
contact/familiarity,
status/power,
axiology/value system.
I try me to imagine, using this example, how those descriptive concepts could be divorced from folk psychology, (even if only in the notional sense of folk psychology,) via which any communicative act is implicate to the order of a subject’s intentionality.
This is especially so with respect to what ‘value system’ signifies. I understand ahead of time this is not where your own focus is trained. However, this is what is evoked for me in seeing these kinds of “begging the question of intentionalities” classes, and–informally–wondering about the odd turn in ecosemiolinguistics away from psychology–to the extent that the following claim is offered:
What a funny offset. ‘Social theorist’ is, what would you say, a term of art? Any relations in your theorizing to social psychology, anthropology, sociology?
I will attend to the offset between ’scientist’ and ‘psychologist’ in a main posting, soon enough.
But, are you a scientist in the naturalistic-materialistic methodological narrow sense, or are you a more liberated version of positivist, or post-positivist?
but i have you on the labels here!
[oh - i.e. i'm not wedded to being this or that, it was a throwaway line to say why wrt the issue of brain function v experience of individual trajectory, i'm more interested in the former in an academic way. the latter doesnt seem academic. it's folk-psychology, so i'll chat about it with a slight head inclination. i'm not 'hooked' by that, if you will..... and here, i craft my response to you in terms folk-psychological - and mainly because i want to communicate in your language, not really because it is my native tongue] [although, now that i write this, i'm guessing that you may take me to task on that]
OK, so there are several questions in there. this makes it difficult to try to clarify. where to begin?
first, the last bit:
the short answer is ‘no’.
and yet, what we do in general seems to have a lot in common with sociology of some brands. think bourdieu and bernstein (basil).
also, when i search on matters of group identity and studies thereof, i find some overlap with work done under the banner of social psychology – but they come with a different set of goals, and so i can use their findings to underwrite some of the conclusions i draw from my own studies done with a different starting point – see work (and articles linked here) by semin for example.
anthropology… ah, well, we have a sort of ‘history’ with anthropologists, especially linguistic anthropologists, which means that we don’t have much to do with each other. we may be interested in similar phenomena in many ways, but the lens they use is distorted for our purposes – let’s say.
and now:
again, i have to say this was only a way of relativising my own concerns.
see this for example:
http://www78.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=linguist
and onto:
hmmm, first let me say that i am about to try to set this out in a chapter in a book, or a free-standing paper, or maybe have to change the whole thing in concert with colleagues working on a similar area…. not much work has been done to date, and for similar reasons as you poke at with a stick maybe.
we’ve had this discussion before on the list, too. i keep saying, well, this is linguistics, and unless you undertsand what our brand of linguistics thinks and aims to do, then it will be difficult to ken… even if you look at the wolfram site above, you will not find much in the way of SFL-style linguistics mentioned for example….
then, we have linguistics as a study of language per se, and this is what theoretical linguists are interested in – the trio syntax, pragmatics, semantics. how to characterise them. most linguists focus on one of those areas. SFLers see them as part of the same phenomena, which means that we are seen as soft scientists if we can even use the term…
and then we have applied linguistics – which is what people do with frameworks and approaches – use these as a tool to get at various phenomena of language use – usually in language teaching, but also in many other areas such as looking at the discourses of law, schooling, casual interaction, business meetings, internet communication, counselling, and so on.
so, when i propose a set of dimensions for the construal of tenor in language, this is located at the level of the discourse semantic, which is afforded by the level ‘above’ – that is, the social situation, in turn afforded by the level above that, the (grossly-speaking) cultural constraints/enablements that pertain in any social situation within any (sub)culture. otoh, we have levels ‘below’ the discourse semantic: the lexicogrammatical…. but even as i write this i am reminded that this is cross-cut by a cline of instantiation which may see other arrangements of ‘levels’ as being more pertinent – depending on whether one is more interested in accounting for a ‘reading’ of a text, or the meaning potential of the collection of clauses of texts in general produced in any given social situation and cultural group…
for us, it is enough to shrug our shoulders and say, yes, there may be folk-psychological ways of talking about the same phenomena, and we will do so amongst ourselves at times, but for research purposes, we try to ‘ignore’ them if you will, and certainly, the ‘intention’ of the writer, while acknowledged as perhaps motivating the text’s potential meanings, is not at issue. once we say, yep, there was a writer/speaker with some intention, and maybe we can get at that in the reading of the text, but we will actually never know what that was. we cannot look into the mind of the writer. but we can account for the meaning potential of a (set of) texts by reference to the grammar and/or social situation and/or culture (e.g. genre)…we try to explain how texts ‘mean’, how they function in any social situation. and, our explanations will not be the end-all explanation, not THE reading – merely some analysis (not synthesis) of the way that lexis and grammar function in context(s).
in order to do this, we fashion frameworks whereby we can talk about the function of various moves and linguistic gestures in texts, to show how they fit together and ‘mean’ in context.
my set of dimensions are produced as a way of talking about how ways of interacting act to set up relationships between interlocutors, and some of those relationships imply social roles (e.g. mother-daughter, teacher-student, policeman-civilian, doctor-patient, etc), or status through knowledge or skill or other acknowledged distinction, or contact/familiarity/affiliation through shared meanings, assumed background, or reference to some value system – and this does not matter whether it IS shared or not, the focus is on what is implied or referred to in the text…. perhaps not at all. depends on the text, depends on the situation, genre, interlocutors….
http://books.google.com/books?id=YGKNqoX1Jp4C&dq=Michael+Alexander+Kirkwood+Halliday&printsec=frontcover&source=an&hl=en&ei=-UU-SsOJH5iQkAW6qZnIDg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=6
if the URL i’ve pasted in above does not work, try google search for mak halliday, and go for the book “on language and linguistics” on google books. the preface is easy to read and might shed more light on “where i’m coming from”….
Those dependencies, eh? I’d like to see the full list.
Great response. Halliday; I have just the most superficial comprehension of but a surface.
Yet I get–roughly–the picture of distinctions you draw for me.
My poking stance, on the other hand, is entirely informal. So it is, that what counts as a description of any scholar’s understanding of what each is concerned with differs in accordance with who is asking. Of course this could be said about description in response to asking in many contexts.
All I do is draw different pictures given by my informal position. I can’t put any formal pressure on anything.
Still, if there is a broadly conceivable system of social scientific systems, then, from an–as in my–idiosyncratic perspective, what is given to psychology are all phenomena for which a mental function is required as factor or as primary generative instance. ‘mind affording agency’ within a bio-social ecology yap yap.
So it would be that ‘the social’ and ‘language’ are subsets of this. And, no doubt, most such subsets become very clear through their conceptualization, atomization, formalization, in the direction of good ol’ ratio-deductive explanation, and, whatever else makes demonstrable sense. To mangle Aristotle: “to the degree provided.”
For what it is worth, my globalizing (to embodied mind,) turn here simply enough derives from tracking homo sapiens back to before there was any self-understanding at all. Before, ‘acquisition.’
Mentioning Halliday, for me, brings up the ’socio’ turn in linguistics, and from there, it is but a matter of various hops and skips and leaps to applications.
Although within the purview of the philosophy of psychology there are problems given to Folk PSychology, by the time dialogical therapeutic regimes are given trials in psychotherapeutic environs, these regimes are no longer encumbered. Language behavior is, obviously, crucial in the talking cure.
This is true for the field I work in, organizational behavior. There is a common contradiction too: much attention is given to practical conceptions, but, the nature of language is merely a given and isn’t really taken very seriously; isn’t granted its actual underlying features. This, in part, has to do with the long standing gulf between academic researchers and practitioners, and, with the difference in purpose between research and organizational purposes.
From this, my filter is biased toward the practical and pragmatic and commonsense usefulness of (what would be) instrumental deployments. I’ve already done a little digging about ‘applied’ SFL. I don’t know anything about how linguistics can be applied to everyday problems.
My experience in listening to people express what is that they are on about and what they wish to promote and accomplish, and, maybe too, what people describe as their motivations, don’t beg knotty ‘metaphysical’ questions as much as these (communicative acts) reveal the awesome subjectiveness of the subject! This is one reason why folk psychology is central for me, and, why also the social features are prominent too.
It is interesting that there can be generalizations about either corpus or communication, whereas there is almost zero ability to predict what someone will say or write next.