Chomsky on Empiricism, The World, and Problems with Cognitive Science

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_tvPkSveevA&list=LLml9jcp4pNd3vTbJu2_yb8A&index=79

Described Principles and Perameters: tension between descriptive and explanatory adequacy might be resolved. It’s fair to call it the first genuine proposal as to what a theory of language might be. Offered liberating perspective and opened problems and the study of language acquisition. Concept of the initial conditions of experience of internal language. Reason to believe the study of language has gotten to the point where it’s feasible to pursue the Galilean intuition that nature is somehow perfect. Ask not only what properties of language are but why language has these properties but not others. Minimalism Program.

Interface conditions. If language is usable at all it must satisfy interface conditions. The language has to be accessible to other parts of the language including sensory motor and conceptual systems.

Restate initial problem of what a language has the properties it does. Insofar as the Properties of an “I” language can be accounted for in terms of interface conditions and general principles of computational efficiency. Will have verified Galilean purpose.

The task is to examine every device, principle, idea, technique employed in characterizing languages and try to determine to what extent it can be eliminated in terms of a principled account in terms of general conditions of computational efficiency, interface conditions, and ability to function at all.

The diversity in languages are related to slight differences in the way the uninterpretable features are externalized. It’s as if the mind computes in a fixed way with varying effects in the mouth and the ear.

“The faculty of language is not a distinct entity, a box in the human brain with a single location or function, the faculty of language surely recruits processes, capacities, physiological mechanisms that it evolved quite independently. It could turn out that there’s nothing in the faculty of language that’s specific to language. That the faculty is just a specific form of organization of elements that are recruited to constitute this organ of the body.”

If the minimalist approach has real prospects of success we would expect to find that language crucially involves interface conditions and computational processes. Some of these may have homologous structures in other primates. Study involve these elements and how these are organized.

Rules of visual intelligence used to create what we see. Don’t discount insect evolution.

Classical problems of theory of mind remain as obscure as ever. (Newton, Descartes)

Guiding intuition of minimalist program: insofar as this program success we’ll be able to conclude that principles of the kind that one finds for formations of polyhedral cells or possible optimal wiring of neural systems because of physical and mathematical laws may also hold for an organ that’s a recent product of evolution. Crucial part of being human.

The problem of intentionality: how does language (biological entity) relate to the world. One is unification problem: how do accounts of the brain in computational systems relate to accounts relating to the cells. How computations eventuate an action.

Two aspects: how does sensory system use the instructions provided by the language to carry out gestures. How does system of thought use these instructions to talk about a book or a river or the crisis in Argentina?

Phoenetic information of each expression is encoded in a single object (phonetic form).

We all agree any lexical item has a sound. Sounds are robust and familiar notions. We can tell sound of a book vs a sound of a river. Internally generated representation of book gives a sound. Say this idea holds between the object and the sound.

You identify what I’m saying is that p denotes a very similar thing to my idea of p.

No determinate object picked out by the phoenetic representation as its sound. It provides information accessed by other systems to yield or interpret mind external entites in a variety of ways that depend on expectations and circumstances in a myriad of ways. No one would consider studying it because it’s too intricate with too many variables. Inquiry relates to highly idealized examples.

We all recognize the “book” has a meaning an internal semantic representation that incorporates all information about its meaning that’s determined by the language. Just as the internal phonetic representation incorporates all information about sound.

We can argue about if you and I took Darwin’s Descent of Man it means two books were taken we can settle it however we want. If you say books are abstract and concrete with a host of odd properties when you look closely we can answer robustly that “that’s what books are.” The problem of book is a problems of metaphysics and not semantics and not cognitive science.

Referring is highly intricate action. It’s specific to circumstances, it has normative aspects (ideal standard) the action of referring succeeds or fails in ways that depend on a wide variety of conditions. I can refer to India without using any word or having any thought. If fundamental properties are ignored you may be studying something but it’s not the problem of intentionality or aboutness.

In other cases we have to idealize in order to gain some grasp of reality. Abstract away from a welter of complexity to focus on properties of core notions. It has to be justified by showing how the idealization yields some insight and explanatory power. And doesn’t merely reformulate the original dilemmas in misleading ways. That is theft rather than honest toil.

How do we approach to problem of what’s happening when we talk about the world? It’s possible the study of sound provides clues. In that inquiry there isn’t any reference like relation between an element of phonetic representation and a mind-external entity.

The speaker hearer employs the systems of language use to access the phoenetic representation the internal object so as to produce and interpret organism external events.

Smith succeeds in communicating with Jones to the extent that Jones attends to related parts of the world. Jones’ ability to perceive what Smith is uttering is his ability to map the noises to his own internal language. These are matters of more or less, not yes or no.

As I later learned, it has earlier antecedents. 18th century critique of the theory of ideas based on observation that phrase “he has an idea” should not be understood on the model of “he has a diamond” invoking a reference-like relation between term idea and an extramental entity. (Not a proper step in the case of diamond). The phrase “he has an idea” means something like “he thinks” Gilbert Ryle calls a “systematically misleading expression.” Same conclusion holds for belief, desire, terms of folk psychology as expressed in English language version (far from universal) rather idiosyncratic.

The basic insights generalize to the whole vocabulary and even more dramatically to more complex expressions. If this is anything like correct, most of the work in philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, theoretical cognitive science is totally off track.

Aristotle asked us “what’s the nature of a house?” He concluded “we can define a house as stones, bricks, and timbers in terms of its material composition. Or in terms of a receptacle to shelter cattle’s and living beings.

I could think the place I live is home, I could be wrong, it could really be a library in which some odd people spend much of their time. The answer depends on perspective. If it’s a library when I’m gone then perhaps it is a library. There is no mind-independent truth of the matter.

Hume, “the identity with which we ascribe to things is only a fictitious one established by the mind not a peculiar nature belonging to what you’re talking about.” The books don’t have strange and intricate properties by virtue of a mind-independent existence.

Semantic properties of expressions are used to think and talk about the world in terms of perspectives that are made available by the resources of the mind rather in the way the sounds of language seem to function. Supported by descriptive observations of British empiricism “tree, water” all far more intricate that originally supposed so much so that they must come from the original hand of nature (Hume’s phrase) and hence must be fundamentally the same for all languages. Topic addressed by Julius Moravcsik.

One hopes notions like “black hole, oxygen, electromagnetic field” pick out something in the extramental world.

The use of human language to refer is totally different from animal communication. Human language might not have any denotational semantics. Just an intricate form of pragmatics along with very rich internal syntax that includes semantics (which should be syntax). The parts we can most hope to understand are the internal syntax (called semantics).

A theory of human action that would bear in a revealing way on the act of referring is far more remote than theories on simpler organisms.

Language appears to be isolated from other cognitive capacities. Language is a good topic for inquiry into the mind is it's centrality in human affairs but its isolation.

Our moral nature is much harder to isolate components for separate study. To abstract them from reflective thought. Painful choices test our faculties and may tell us something about their nature.

This can be counter posed to relativism (extreme form) apart from basic structure, humans have no nature, only history. Thought and behavior can be modified without limit. Richard Rorty, “history and anthropology show humans have extraordinary flexibility and malleability. We think of ourselves as the self-shaping animal rather than having certain instincts.” Rorty: keep to manipulating circumstances.

James Harris: Unlike animals and machines leading principle of man is multiform, originally uninstructed, pliant, and docile.

Chomsky: the idea weakness of instinct leads to extreme variability has had a long an inglorious history every since. With no metric and little understanding its had to know what to make of the judgements. Whatever merit they have they cannot offer an alternative to the notions we’ve mentioned. No one doubts that a persons’ understanding and judgement and values and goals reflect acquired cultures, norms, conventions. They’re not acquired by taking a pill they’re constructed by the mind on the basis of scattered experience. Applied in circumstances that are novel and complex.

Hume: “number of our duties is in a manner infinite therefore just as in other parts of our study of nature, we must seek a few general principles upon which all our notions of morals are founded. Principles of human nature that are original instincts of the human mind that are enhanced by perception but are steadfast and immutable.”

Hume is articulating the basic idea of generative grammar in a different cognitive domain and centuries earlier. It was reconstructed in a Darwinian framework 100 years ago by Peter Kropotkin in what should be taken as founding work of what’s called evolutionary psychology.

Little reason to suppose the variety of cultural outcomes reflects significant variety of genetic endowment. So we’re back to situation we face in the study of language or visual system.

Account for richness and specificity of outcome on the basis of shared intrinsic nature tolerating variation but within a highly-structured range as throughout the biological world.

Recently: recognition our innate capacities are only latent, they must be triggered by experience to be manifested and then are manifested in ways determined by our nature. As susceptibility to disease is innate but requires external trigger (analogy suggested by Descartes discussing innate ideas, one of the reasons Locke’s famous critique is beside the point).

Another: Phenomena in the world around us do not constitute experience. They become experience as they are constructed by our modes of cognition. They must conform to these modes of cognition. Modes are a distinctive property of our nature differing for different organisms. Conrad Lorenz: biological a priori (discussed by Chomsky 35 years ago). Mental construction of experience and interpretation of culture and convention is based on common genetic constitution which must be rich to the extent that outcomes are highly structured and constrained in ways that do not reflect the environment (Hume’s observation).

It’s seems unavoidable that the relativistic approaches must be profoundly innatist when they address the issues of nature, acquisition and use of attained systems (Hume’s questions). Hard to see why relativistic approaches differ from highly innatist views.

Import of any tentative conclusion: important conclusion based on what’s right and wrong. Every approach to how human relations should be arranged is based on some assumption of human nature. If it has any claim to moral standing its advanced with the claim that it’s beneficial to humans because of their intrinsic nature (one crucial quality).

We should face honestly the fact of our ignorance which is profound but recognize we have no choice but to process on tentative assumptions.

We should remember Hume’s conclusion about nature’s ultimate secrets and the obscurity in which they ever did and ever will remain (matters to easily forgotten).

One of the most profound insights into language and mind, I think, was Descartes’s recognition of what we may call “the creative aspect of language use”: the ordinary use of language is typically innovative without bounds, appropriate to circumstances but not caused by them – a crucial distinction – and can engender thoughts in others that they recognize they could have expressed themselves.

Interacting through direct contact with no mysterious forces relating them. The doctrine held that the entire world is similar: it could in principle be constructed by a skilled artisan, and was in fact created by a super-skilled artisan. The doctrine was intended to replace the resort to “occult properties” on the part of the neoscholastics:

Nevertheless, he continued, he was “convinced by the judicious Mr. Newton’s incomparable book, that it is too bold a presumption to limit God’s power, in this point, by my narrow conceptions.” Though gravitation of matter to matter is “inconceivable to me,” nevertheless, as Newton demonstrated, we must recognize that it is within God’s power “to put into bodies, powers and ways of operations, above what can be derived from our idea of body, or can be explained by what we know of matter.” And thanks to Newton’s work, we know that God “has done so.”

Hume describes Newton as “the greatest and rarest genius that ever arose for the ornament and instruction of the species.” His most spectacular achievement was that while he “seemed to draw the veil from some of the mysteries of nature, he shewed at the same time the imperfections of the mechanical philosophy; and thereby restored [Nature’s] ultimate secrets to that obscurity, in which they ever did and ever will remain.”

The goals of scientific inquiry were implicitly restricted: from the kind of conceivability that was a criterion for true understanding in early modern science from Galileo through Newton and beyond, to something much more limited: intelligibility of theories about the world. This seems to me a step of considerable significance in the history of human thought and inquiry, more so than is generally recognized, though it has been understood by historians of science.

We have “so accustomed ourselves to the abstract notion of forces, or rather to a notion hovering in a mystic obscurity between abstraction and concrete comprehension, that we no longer find any difficulty in making one particle of matter act upon another without immediate contact,…through void space without any material link. From such ideas the great mathematicians and physicists of the seventeenth century were far removed. They were all in so far genuine Materialists in the sense of ancient Materialism that they made immediate contact a condition of influence.”

Alexander Koyré observed that Newton demonstrated that “a purely materialistic pattern of nature is utterly impossible (and a purely materialistic or mechanistic physics, such as that of Lucretius or of Descartes, is utterly impossible, too)”; his mathematical physics required the “admission into the body of science of incomprehensible and inexplicable `facts’ imposed up on us by empiricism,” by what is observed and our conclusions from these observations

Restating the fairly common understanding of the time, Charles Darwin, in his early notebooks, wrote that there is no need to regard thought, “a secretion of the brain,” as “more wonderful than gravity, a property of matter” – all inconceivable to us, but that is not a fact about the external world; rather, about our cognitive limitations.

Nobel laureate Francis Crick, famous for the discovery of DNA, formulated what he called the “astonishing hypothesis” that our mental and emotional states are “in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.”

“the Decade of the Brain.” In introducing a collection of essays reviewing its results, neuroscientist Vernon Mountcastle formulated the guiding theme of the volume as the thesis of the new biology that “Things mental, indeed minds, are emergent properties of brains, [though] these emergences are…produced by principles that… we do not yet understand” – again reiterating eighteenth century insights in virtually the same words.

The common slogan that study of mind is neuroscience at an abstract level might turn out to be just as misleading as comparable statements about chemistry and physics ninety years ago. Unification may take place, but that might require radical rethinking of the neurosciences, perhaps guided by computational theories of cognitive processes, as Gallistel and King suggest.

Dalton’s “astonishingly successful weight-quantification of chemical units,” Thackray continues, shifting “the whole area of philosophical debate among chemists from that of chemical mechanisms (the why? of reaction) to that of chemical units (the what? and how much?),”

Adopting contemporary terminology, we might say that Dalton disregarded the “explanatory gap” between chemistry and physics by ignoring the underlying physics, much as post-Newtonian physicists disregarded the explanatory gap between Newtonian dynamics and the mechanical philosophy by rejecting the latter, and thereby tacitly lowering the goals of science in a highly significant way, as I mentioned.

while nevertheless recognizing that as often in the past, unification may not be reduction, but rather revision of what is regarded as the “fundamental discipline,” the reduction basis, the brain sciences in this case.

Locke and Hume, and many less-remembered figures of the day, understood that much of the nature of the world is “inconceivable” to us. There were actually two different kinds of reasons for this. For Locke and Hume, the reasons were primarily epistemological. Hume in particular developed the idea that we can only be confident of immediate impressions, of “appearances.” Everything else is a mental construction.

In particular, and of crucial significance, that is true of identity through time, problems that trace back to the pre-Socratics: the identity of a river or a tree or most importantly a person as they change through time. These are mental constructions; we cannot know whether they are properties of the world, a metaphysical reality.

It is the imagination that leads us to believe that we experience external continuing objects, including a mind or self. The imagination, furthermore, is “a kind of magical faculty in the soul, which…is inexplicable by the utmost efforts of human understanding,” so Hume argued.

The imagination, furthermore, is “a kind of magical faculty in the soul, which…is inexplicable by the utmost efforts of human understanding,” so Hume argued.

For accuracy, we should qualify the concept of “mysteries” by relativizing it to organisms. Thus what is a mystery for rats might not be a mystery for humans, and what is a mystery for humans is instinctive for ants and bees.

Far from bewailing the existence of mysteries-for-humans, we should be extremely grateful for it. With no limits to growth and development, our cognitive capacities would also have no scope. Similarly, if the genetic endowment imposed no constraints on growth and development of an organism it could become only a shapeless amoeboid creature, reflecting accidents of an unanalyzed environment, each quite unlike the next. Classical aesthetic theory recognized the same relation between scope and limits. Without rules, there can be no genuinely creative activity, even when creative work challenges and revises prevailing rules.

We are left with a serious and challenging scientific inquiry: to determine the innate components of our cognitive nature in language, perception, concept formation, reflection, inference, theory construction, artistic creation, and all other domains of life, including the most ordinary ones. By pursuing this task we may hope to determine the scope and limits of human understanding, while recognizing that some differently structured intelligence might regard human mysteries as simple problems and wonder that we cannot find the answers, much as we can observe the inability of rats to run prime number mazes because of the very design of their cognitive nature.

it is also hard to escape the force of Descartes’s conviction that free will is “the noblest thing” we have, that “there is nothing we comprehend more evidently and more perfectly” and that “it would be absurd” to doubt something that “we comprehend intimately, and experience within ourselves” merely because it is “by its nature incomprehensible to us,” if indeed we do not “have intelligence enough” to understand the workings of mind, as he speculated.