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

From: Glen M. Sizemore (gmsizemore2_at_yahoo.com)
Date: 07/30/04 

Date: Fri, 30 Jul 2004 11:26:04 -0400

>
> 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: In my way of looking at things, it is exactly the opposite. Much of
cognitive science of today is too much tied to philosophical and
conceptual analysis, more than I think is reasonable.

GS: You seem not to understand the difference between conceptual and
theoretical analyses. It is true that there is a philosophy that underlies
cognitive psychology, but its fundamental concepts are not examined, and
they never consider alternatives.

SN: That's why I often talk about "experimental cognitive science", instead
of the "philosophical cognitive science".

GS: "Experimental cognitive science" is rife with philosophical errors.
Hell, you have a "science" that measures and manipulates behavior and the
environment, but claims it is really measuring and manipulating the mind.

>
> 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: Your Newtonian example of distance causation applies very well to the
idea of STM and other concepts entertained by modern cognitive science.
The behavior linked to STM (for instance, better response time during
lexical decision of recently read words) will one day be mapped to
physiological explanations (part of this work is completed as we
speak). But even in this day, it is interesting to have an abstract
model in the middle (the idea of a short-term temporary
store of information) that helps us to think about the sequence of
causal events that follow from each stimuli.

GS: No, it doesn't apply at all. What you are calling an "abstract model in
the middle" is the same as the "button-and-hook" models of gravity. They're
premature, stupid, and based on a 3000 year old philosophy.

SN: This is the very same
line of reasoning that an electronic engineer uses when designing a
circuit with resistors, capacitors and transistors. It is a mental
helper, a technique used by scientists at large (at least those who
don't collude with behaviorists).

GS: Yeah, I've heard the "See we are just like physicists with our big
scientific penises" before, and have commented on it before.

>
> 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: I'm in a hurry right now, but I can provide you with an extensive
list of reference articles. But in order to demonstrate my point,
these are the ones I have handy:

Gathercole, Susan (1999) The neuroanatomy of short-term and working memory.
Trends in Cognitive Science.

Miller, Earl K.; Desimone, Robert (1994) Parallel Neuronal Mechanisms
for Short-Term Memory. Science 263, issue 5146 (Jan, 28 1994).

GS: Well, don't let me keep you. By the way, I'm familiar of what claims are
out there - they strike me as horse***. First of all, I disagree with the
notion of STM as a temporary storage and/or workbench where copies of the
environment are held/manipulated. Thus, it is hard to believe that there is
a reasonable neurophysiological treatment of short-term memory (which is
probably a couple of different processes) given how utterly stupid the
notion of copies-in-the-head is. Now, there is no question that there are a
few things known about the effects of damage to various brain areas on
behavior said to require "STM," but to say that this somehow validates the
notion that the representations of environmental events penetrate the head
and are stored and manipulated is a bunch of fertilizer.

>
> 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.
>

SN: This seems pretty merry-go-round for me.

GS: But I have explained my position, and you have largely ignored it. You
are free to say that cognitive science "does things" like other sciences
because they make up hypotheses and test them. And I have said that that is
not all there is to science, and that cognitive psychology lacks useful
analysis of their concepts. Further, they mistake their assumptions for
hypotheses. There is, for example, not one shred of evidence that anything
is "stored" - that is assumption - yet cognitive "scientists" routinely
suggest that this has been "shown." Again, it was not ever a hypothesis and,
thus, it is never supported by experiment in the usual sense.

>
> 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: The metaphor of "cognitive maps" are, in my rationale, the same
simplification as the one of considering the elliptical trajectory of
the electron in the "d" orbital of an atom. We cannot "see" neither
measure these orbitals. We can only abstractly conjecture them and devise
experiments to test the applicability of this abstraction.

GS: And what is my argument? I have made it about eight times now.

>
>
> 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: Although I agree that abstract models posed mindlessly may be confusing
and
inconvenient, I see that their complete absence is crippling. That's my
point, if we can come up with lots of abstract models, then we should
at least make these models testable, so the "trimming" science is so good
at can take its course.

GS: You have simply ignored what I have said, in order to reiterate your
position.

> >
> > 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: Perhaps you are considering that referencing someone else's work in
an article of a respected journal is also an argument ad hominem.

GS: No. That is not what I said. If one would write that a particular
position must be "correct" because it is in an influential journal, that
would be ad hominem. Simply referencing a paper is not the equivalent of
what saying it must be correct because the journal is influential.

SN: We must stand on someone else's shoulders, or else we will always start
all over
again from the beginning.

GS: But this is a euphemism. We "stand" on what they have said. Again, to
say that a particular position is "correct" because it comes from a
particular person, or because it was expressed in a prestigious publication,
is a form of ad hominem. No?

>
> 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: I use "store" in the same way one can say that DNA "stores" the fact
that
we all have two eyes, one nose and one mouth in the configuration that
we know as a face.

GS: But this is not, then, analogous to the notion that it is the
environmental contingencies (either the contingencies that define what is
fit, or reinforcement contingencies) that are somehow stored.

SN: All I'm telling is that the DNA of an offspring has
in it a good part of the specification of phenotypic organization of
the animal, just as if it was "stored" there. It is a simplification
that allows us to think.

GS: Even in the sense that you mean it, this view is misleading. But you
have, as I just pointed out, expressed something that is not analogous to
the notion that a representation of the selective environment is somehow
"stored." Whatever selection contingencies produced two eyes, a nose with
two nostrils, and one mouth, are not, in any sense "stored in the DNA. But
cognitive "scientists talk about features of the environment as being
stored. When we read a list of words, we are said to store them (and to
operate on them in "working memory" all while we are "pulling things in"
from LTM - lest how could we get Roediger and McDermott-style "memory
illusions? etc. etc. ) and, later, to retrieve them. No? Have I
misrepresented your position or that of cognitive psychology?

> >
> > > 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.
>

SN: I'm glad there are people such as you. I would be worried if everybody
thought the same way, because that would certainly impair the development
of science. You may be surprised with what I'll say, but I find it important
that you and Longley always insist on the vision propelled by behaviorism.
I think, however, that both of you are too radical, but nevertheless it is
important to be reminded that we should not be biased by the "mermaid sing"
of the easily concocted mentalistic fantasies. I'm aware of that, but
I'm also aware that progress in such difficult areas such as brain
research require that we think in abstract ways. Human thought is productive
because of well constructed abstract models, without them we wouldn't be
able to build a bridge, let alone understand how that thing inside our
skull works.

GS: Progress in "brain research" (you really mean "behavioral neuroscience"
or <retch> "cognitive neuroscience) will certainly require "models," but I'm
not too sure of your use of "abstract" here. If I construct a neural net, is
that an "abstract model?" One would have to say "yes," I think, but it is
one that is roughly based on the nervous system. Compare this with semantic
nets, STM, schema, cognitive maps, etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc.

"Sergio Navega" <snavega@intelliwise.com> wrote in message
news:4107b36d_6@news.athenanews.com...
> "Glen M. Sizemore" <gmsizemore2@yahoo.com> escreveu na mensagem

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