Re: R&M's "memory illusions" and functional verbal response classes

From: Glen M. Sizemore (gmsizemore2_at_yahoo.com)
Date: 07/25/04 

Date: Sun, 25 Jul 2004 09:37:17 -0400

>
> GS: But what I have argued is that that is NOT the case. There is more
> to successful science than Testing Hypotheses. There is also an
> analysis of the concepts, but it is not an experimental analysis
> because the concepts underlying the science are assumptions. They are
> not "tested" by any experiment, or series of experiments, and their
> worth is decided by the success or failure of the whole endeavor. As I
> have said repeatedly, the hypothetico-deductive method is very, very
> useful when applied correctly, and part of "correctly" is "when the
> concepts aren't freakin' retarded."

SN: When you come up with a better specification of how to evaluate
good hypothesised concepts, I'll be all ears. Your current definition
("when the concepts aren't freakin' retarded.") is kind of
subjective, don't you think?

GS: But I didn't promise to instruct you in how to perform conceptual
analysis, I just pointed out that the simplistic notion of science
perpetrated by mainstream psychology is stupid, and it is stupid because it
has no place for conceptual analysis. It has no place for conceptual
analysis because of its institutionalized fear of philosophy, and because it
was able to bastardize the notion of operational definition in the '40s.

>
> SN: I'm having a hard time trying to figure out what you mean by STM.
> Surely it is not short-term memory, because this is not a "learned
> behavior",[]
>
> GS: What else would I mean by STM? As to it not being "learned
> behavior," obviously, I disagree. This is clearer in non-humans
> because one can observe increases in accuracy during exposure to
> delayed match-to-sample (DMTS) procedures. That is, the animal must
> learn to do something during the "retention interval." And this
> behavior, hard to specify as it is, can be brought under stimulus
> control. Consider the following pigeon experiment: pigeons are exposed
> to conditions in which they must peck one of two keys in order for
> brief access to food, and conditions in which no peck is required, and
> food is simply presented. When a key-peck is required, the "correct"
> key depends on stimuli previously presented and whether or not it does
> depend on the stimuli is "signaled" by some other stimulus. So, the
> left key might be correct when a blue light was presented 6.0 s ago
> (as long as a 2000 Hz tone is on) and the right key is correct if a
> red light was presented (as long as a 2000 Hz tone is on).
> Alternatively, there are trials where the red or blue stimulus is
> presented, but the tone is not on, and food is simply delivered at the
> end of the "retention interval." Now, it is very interesting that,
> when one presents the choice stimuli even though the tone was not on,
> accuracy falls to 50 percent. The tone must control some behavior that
> "bridges the temporal gap," and when the tone is not present, such
> behavior does not occur. Now, it is not necessarily antithetical to
> cognitive psychology that STM be "active," after all, this sort of
> active aspect is apparent in the move to "working memory."
>

SN: If you don't pose any abstract model for what's happening inside
the pidgeon's brain, how do you expect to link it with the processes
that happen in that brain?

GS: Newtonian mechanics could only advance when Newton was willing to accept
causation at a spatial distance. Similarly, behavior analysis has been
successful because it could accept causation at a temporal distance. What
behavioral processes are involved in producing the behavior that mainstream
psychologists call "STM?" What sorts of histories are necessary to produce
it? When we have better experimental control over the development of the
complex behavioral repertoire that mainstream psychology refers to as STM,
we will begin to form some idea about how such behavior is mediated by
physiology. The secret of how physiology mediates complex behavioral
function will be had when we understand some of the physiology of operant
behavior.

SN: Cognitive neuroscience does this, and it is obtaining confirmations for
such ideas as WM and STM.

GS: No, it doesn't, and no it isn't.

> SN: []it is a characteristic of several cognitive architectures,
> which, by the way, already has proposed neural correlates. Again,
> cogsci is proposing abstract models that have putative neurobiological
> equivalents.
>
> GS: Oooooh. "Abstract models that have putative neurobiological
> equivalents." Oooooh, you're just like a big strong, scientific
> physicist. Except that "putative" entities are supposed to be forced
> upon you by data, and not by some pre-scientific conception of
> behavior handed down from animism to theism to mentalism.

SN: The way experimental cognitive science comes up with its concepts
is the same way most of the natural sciences do. So if cognitive
science is to be criticized for using methods like the ones used
in the remainder of the scientific community, I guess we're
in good company (which is the same to say that you, behaviorists,
are the "odd kids in the block").

GS: I disagree. The source of the concepts for mainstream psychology are
ancient, pre-scientific conceptions of behavior (animism, theism). The
origin of insipid nonsense like "cognitive maps" and "semantic networks" is
not the same as that of "atoms," genes," receptors," etc. Every science has
its major features that determine the character of the science. Behavior is
a unique subject matter in certain ways; it is highly visible, and it may be
controlled by arranging the environment in which it occurs. This has led
behavior analysis to systematically explore the relation between behavior
and its current and past environments. The endeavor has been largely
inductive but, for better or worse, has become increasingly mathematical
hypothesis testing. But that is a more natural progression than mainstream
psychology (which seems not to progress at all) which insisted on jumping in
to the testing of hypotheses as an effort to ape physics.

>
> SN: Experimental cognitive science handles facts, creates concepts
> and develops theories. It would be an acceptable science, according
> to your requirements.
>
> GS: No. Successful science contains thoughtful philosophical analysis
> of its concepts, not the mindless generation of stupid metaphor that
> characterizes mainstream psychology.
>

SN: So besides handling facts, creating concepts and developing theories,
a "good" science must also contain thoughtful philosophical analysis
of these concepts. This is more than you have told before, but ok
let's go for it. I claim that modern experimental cognitive science
does this "thoughtful philosophical analysis" in a way that is
indistinguishable from all other natural sciences.

GS: And I argue that it does not.

>
> > I argue the concepts are f---ed up.
>
> SN: How can we assess this claim? What are the criteria you use for
> this judgment? How can we compare what you think is right with
> what others think correct?
>
> GS: Via philosophical argument. This is the only way since the
> concepts underlying a science are not what is "tested." What is tested
> are theories and hypotheses composed of the underlying concepts.
>

SN: Do you have available an objective methodology to "philosophically
evaluating arguments", don't you? Care to explain it to us all?
(notice: it must be an *objective* way, otherwise you're just
reinventing a different kind of "psychoanalysis").

GS: Let's see - do you mean "objective" in the sense of experimental test?
If so, my answer is "You're not listening." But I will explain some. There
has to be some reasonable statement about how the concept can be understood
literally. For example, "cognitive maps" are clearly metaphors, and it is
not at all clear how they can be made into anything else. How does one read
a map in the brain? We know what it means to read a real map, but this
requires a map, and eyes, etc. As soon as we begin to inquire after the
literal nature of a cognitive map, and how it could be seen without eyes, we
see that there is no substance to be had. The ploy of cognitive "science" is
to simply say that the map is "in the physiology" and then to point to any
brain activity that seems correlated with the behavioral observations as
proof of their assertions. With a real map, we can read it wrong, but still
wind up at the right place. Can this happen with a cognitive map? How would
we find this out if the nature of the map is simply inferred from the
behavior? A host of daunting questions like these are easy to come up with.
As far as I can see, cognitive psychology simply ignores them. Oh, right,
these are heuristics, necessary to guide research. But the implication is
that the concepts are continually undergoing test, but this is simply false.
They are assumed from the beginning, and whatever data is obtained is simply
forced into this framework.

SN: If you propose
that your way of doing science is better than cognitive science,
then you should clearly specify how one can arrives at that
same conclusion. Specify it objectively, independently of your
own subjective inclinations.

GS: There are rules of thumb that could probably be distilled from Machado
et al's "Facts, theories and concepts: the shape of psychology's epistemic
triangle." Some of them can be seen in my brief critique of "cognitive maps"
(Does something have a chance of being more than metaphor? Is there any
observability of the "thing" independent of the phenomena it is said to
explain? Do one's concepts consist of metaphor after metaphor after
metaphor? Does your "science" even ask such questions?) But, in general,
what needs to change in mainstream psychology is the attitude towards
conceptual analysis, and there needs to be the recognition that science does
not automatically get progressively closer to "truth" by following some
mindless loop of hypothesis->test->keep/reject/modify->hypothesis. In
mainstream psychology, this has produced a mound of data that are of no use
once the quirky, wildly premature theory has been rejected. As Murray Sidman
once said, "Good data are notoriously fickle." This is because good data are
of immediate importance (in the EAB, this usually means that they
immediately extend our control of the subject matter) and will remain so, no
matter what philosophy is adopted by a given community. Incidentally, there
are some good data in cognitive psychology.

>
> SN: If you think that BBS is not to be trusted as one of the leading
> edge journals of the world, then you must be from another planet,
> or else you have many other journals to suggest as being better.
> If the latter, please let me know. If I tell someone (with a
> minimum of knowledge of science) that a paper was published in
> the journal Nature, would this information be comparable to
> an article published in "San Francisco Haute Couture"?
>
> GS: Just because something appears in BBS does not make it correct,
> especially when we're talking about psychology. My opinion is that
> most of mainstream psychology is crap. You don't share that opinion
> and so you consider "cutting edge" stuff that I consider to be ***.
> But just because a bunch of mentalistic jerks think something is
> important, don't expect me to go all turgid. And, BTW, there have been
> a number of important papers in BBS.

SN: Of course published stuff in BBS may be wrong. In fact, there's no
way to assess the validity of ideas other than by referring to
experimental evidences and intense social discussion of them.
However, BBS is certainly one of the most important point of
references. If you take a look at the things that get published
there, you'll se that cognitive science rules.

GS: I never disagreed. I simply pointed that that is a version of ad hominem
argument. Cognitive psychology is wildly popular (suspiciously so), but that
doesn't make it "right" or useful.

>
> > SN: Any mathematician will have no difficulty thinking about
> > multidimensional spaces where the distance between words is
> > altered as the context changes. But in order to think about
> > that, one must have an open mind and also be accustomed to
> > make mathematical models, just like physicists, chemists,
> > biologists, geologists, astrophysicists, etc.
> >
> > GS: But spreading activation takes place in regular 4-d. How do
> > "similar words" come to be located in similar places? If spreading
> > activation is what forms semantic networks, how do "the words come to
> > be located near each other" so that spreading activation can "unite"
> > them?
>
> SN: I suspect you have some misunderstandings about what spreading
> activation really means. Spreading activation is a process, a proposed
> explanation for the way previous information influence future
> performance of an organism. This process has been demonstrated
> not only in relation to words, but also with figures (images),
> visual characteristics (position of stimuli), phonological
> features, etc.
>
> GS: But when you talked about it you mentioned some sort of
> propagation in neural tissue, no?
>

SN: Yes, and that propagation of oscillations in populations of neurons is
the neural substrate that is being proposed to explain how spreading
activation works.

GS: OK - only a slight misunderstanding - I thought that the propagation of
oscillations WAS the spreading activation. Anyway, I think my criticism of
your use of this phenomenon to explain "semantic networks" or the general
phenomena of "spreading activation" ("grouping" in recall, for example)
stands.

SN: Importantly, the idea of spreading activation is
at least 4 decades old, and only now it is receiving possible support
mechanisms. That's one way of doing science: one proposes an
abstract model of how something works (but, of course, this model
*must* be coherent with current evidences) and later researchers go
after the details of how it is implemented physically. This is not
new, this is the way science is being done for centuries.

GS: I'm not going to bother to respond to this assertion anymore except,
perhaps, with more derision. I have suggested that this view is hopelessly
naïve, and have suggested why, historically, it has arisen, and what can be
done about it.

> >
> > GS: The stuff talked about by cognitivists is not hypothetical - it is
> > assumption. *We* don't do experiments to decide whether or not, for
> > example, "storage and retrieval" make sense, *we* simply interpret
> > data in terms of storage and retrieval.
>
> SN: And you stop at that.
>
> GS: No, you misunderstand my use of the "*" by *we* I mean cognitive
> psychologists - behavior analysts have little use for the metaphors of
> storage and retrieval.

SN: That's too bad, because this abstract construct supports quite
a lot of interesting and productive models. Additionally, these concepts
will sooner or later be mapped to neurobiological explanations.
Or do you doubt that our brains someway are altered by perceived
stimuli? Isn't that a "storage" of something?

GS: No, it isn't. Only in the bizarro world of cognitive "science" is
"change" a synonym of "store." Cognitive psychology must continually alter
the meaning of terms to accommodate its arcane view of behavior as caused by
indwelling spirits. The analogy is to natural selection and DNA; DNA does
not store the history that shaped a species - we do not peer into DNA and
see the selection history, we see the effects of that selection history
which is not, in any way, stored. The same holds for behavior and the brain.
The brain is changed when animals are exposed to certain sorts of histories
and as a consequence, the animal behaves differently.

>
> SN: Behaviorists don't seem concerned in describing
> potential mechanisms to further understand what's going on.
>
> GS: They are interested in behavioral mechanisms, and argue that the
> investigation of physiological mechanisms should be left to
> physiologists. They also argue that the metaphors comprising cognitive
> psychology have no chance of being anything but metaphors. Juliet may
> affect Romeo like light, but she is not light.

SN: You forgot to say that what we call light is also not that
thing the Sun emits, this is just a metaphor, because we have
electromagnetic waves (and photons, in some interpretations).
Metaphors are essential conduits for scientific thought. Take
off metaphors from all scientific reasoning, and Kepler wouldn't
have concocted the laws of planetary motion. Without metaphors,
Louis Pasteur would have difficulties with his theory of germ
disease. Molecular biology, evolutionary genetics, ecology, etc.
all use metaphors. We may even think that without using metaphors
we wouldn't be here.

GS: But cognitive psychology goes one step further - it raises the metaphor
to Holy status. There is no question that metaphor is important in science,
but it is a double-edged sword and it is the second edge that cognitive
psychology ignores and which other sciences did not. The bottom line is
this: there is nothing inherently good about metaphor, just as there is
nothing inherently good about "non-observability." In other words the "See!
We do things just like those big strong physicists with their big science
penises" is a bunch of crap. Mainstream psychology mimics physics, but there
are vast differences, as Feynman pointed out.

>
> SN: In case
> you haven't noticed, almost all sciences nowadays use computer
> simulations in order to test models and help the creation of new
> testable hypotheses.
>
> GS: This has nothing to do with anything I have said. I have said
> nothing against mathematical models, or hypothetical constructs. What
> I have said is that in the hands of mainstream psychology, the
> hypothetico-deductive model, combined with mainstream psychology's
> built-in aversion to philosophy, has produced a nearly worthless
> endeavor where lame hypotheses and lame theories are in endless
> supply.

SN: But these "lame hypotheses" are coherent and can be falsified.
It doesn't seem important the origin of hypotheses and models.
A dog barking in morse code may be the origin of one hypothesis.
What is important is its coherence and resilience to the evidences
and also its ability to compare well with competing models. By saying
that this is not enough, you suggest that anything that stems on purely
conceptual (or even metaphorical) grounds is, by definition, worthless.
Well, that excludes, among a bunch of things, all philosophy and the
majority of mathematics.

GS: I have said nothing of the kind. I said that mainstream psychology lacks
diligence in weeding out stupid concepts, and all but rules out a serious
consideration of them (after all, if I throw enough bad theories at it, the
automatic "truth-seeking-by-elimination-of-the-false" kicks in and gets us
out of the jam, right?). Nor did I say that all metaphor is to be rejected.

> >
> > SN: I guess you feel jealous that cognitive scientists have a way
> > of supporting their models with neuroscientific facts, while
> > "functionally defined intraverbals" don't.
> >
> > GS: No, I feel superior in that I don't simply make up a thing that
> > "explains" function (but is otherwise unobservable) and then call
> > observations of the nervous system that "thing" and proceed to peddle
> > it as an observation of the made-up, unobservable thing.
>
> SN: How unobservable do you consider to be the registration of
> activations
> of populations of neurons when a monkey observes an illusion?
>
> GS: But what is observed is not the illusion - that is a category
> error. The ascription of "illusion" is based on an observation of the
> stimulus conditions and the animal's behavior - this is the only way
> that you know it is "seeing an illusion" in the first place. But then
> you want to say that any physiology related to the behavioral
> phenomena is, what, the "thing" that the animal is "really seeing?"
> Animals apparently "see illusions" and we may observe physiology
> correlated with this behavior and also correlated with what happens
> when the animal is seeing something that is not an illusion (i.e. real
> contours instead of illusory) but this does justify your lame
> mentalistic fictions. Perception is behavior and physiology mediates
> behavioral function, that's what we know so far, and the revamped
> animism peddled by cognitive psychology is not helping.

SN: Cognitive neuroscience of today binds four things together: the
stimuli, the behavioral responses, the physiological effects on the
brain and an abstract model of what's happening (often a computational
method or specification). When a monkey is "seeing" an illusion,
cognitive scientists can justifiably say it is really seeing it,
because the same pattern of activation of neurons also appears when
the animal is observing the real thing (such as, for instance, the
Kanizsa triangle compared to a white triangle).

GS: No, one cannot say that. This is another example of a widespread
category error. The term "seeing" is a label for behavior, despite what else
scientists or laypeople say. Physiology mediates the behavior we call
seeing, but we do not "see our brains" when we behave in ways called
"seeing." Sheesh!

> Have you not
> ever thought how odd it is that 3000 year old mentalistic entities are
> miraculously finding neurophysiological instantiation?

SN: I may find it interesting that some ideas of a long time ago receive
support today. But then I remember there's a lot of other old ideas
that have been completely disproved. That's the way science goes.

GS: In other sciences, maybe. We think it cute and arcane that "physicists"
used to talk about the jubilation felt by a stone falling back to Earth, but
in the realm of behavior such arcane description is mainstream. Somehow the
notion that a copy of the world gets inside our heads and is what we see and
remember must have been one heck of a good idea. Or, perhaps, as Skinner
suggested, it simply didn't contain the seeds of anything truly effective.

>
> SN: What used to be the realm of pure speculation (in the last 20
> years)
> has been progressively demonstrated by cognitive neuroscience.
> One has only two options: to shut one's eyes to these discoveries
> (living eternally in the past) or to embrace these findings
> looking for more comprehensive models.
>
> GS: No, what used to be the mentalistic philosophies of pre-scientific
> cultures have survived because of a tragic quirk and now when we find
> any regularity in physiology and behavior we say that we're really
> observing the mentalistic entities we hold so dear.

SN: Quite the contrary, modern cognitive neuroscience is banning the
"ghosts" of the past. Descartes' dualism is definitely buried.

GS: Utter nonsense. All that has been done is that the term "mind" has
become "brain" in an effort to avoid the embarrassment of dualistic
ontology. But the epistemology was always the issue, and this has not
changed.

SN: But we still have a computational problem to resolve: how the
brain processes information? That's where thoughtful methods must
come to the rescue.

GS: Yeah but don't bother to inquire after the utility of "processing
information," and where and when the term might be useful.

>
> > Stimulus
> > control is a real phenomenon of considerable reliability and
> > generality, and it is mediated in unknown ways by physiology. That is
> > the place to start.
> >
>
> SN: Agreed. But that's not the place to stop. Without posing models
> and testable theoretical constructs, behaviorism will remain the same
> for the next 100 years. At that time, robots will probably be around,
> in a demonstration that one can indeed think the way experimental
> cognitive science does.
>
> GS: Behavior can, and must, be studied at its own level before we can
> begin to figure out how to "reduce it to physiology." Mainstream
> psychology has not done a good job of this and, instead of probing,
> they have forced the phenomena into their ancient philosophies in
> which the world penetrated the person and was acted upon by an inner
> man. This is essentially where mainstream psychology is today.
>

SN: I guess that we should be talking of different things. It is not
possible to consider modern experimental cognitive science as committing
the same sins of the psychology of the past. I really think you don't
know what's being done today in this area, and this is perhaps why
you don't share my excitement with it.

GS: Really, Sergio? How would you compare your knowledge of behaviorism and
behavior analysis with my knowledge of cognitive psychology? It is true,
that I don't keep up like someone who publishes in human cognitive
psychology, but I keep an eye on it. I work in a freakin' psychology dept.
for chrissake. The fact is, your position has been drummed into me and every
other behaviorist since we were children. It is just that we have alternate
training as well.

"Sergio Navega" <snavega@intelliwise.com> wrote in message
news:410264d0_6@news.athenanews.com...
> "Glen M. Sizemore" <gmsizemore2@yahoo.com> escreveu na mensagem

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