I want to thank you for picking up on this subject. I should be relieved that the Debate Board is as quiet as it is, for gainsaying Chomsky has been known to produce torrents of ill-feeling...Your remarks, however, are thoughtful and useful (as usual).
_______________ BS [Prior]: :
[Chomsky] criticizes the many things about capitalism that are conspicuously indefensible while avoiding the less popular task of proposing specific policies to amend indefensible current practices.
: What do you expect him to be - another Lenin?
I contest the imputation that anyone who proposes a specific plan to alter human behavior or governmental practices (same difference) is a 'Lenin' (mendacious dictator). Charles Fourier was not a Lenin, John A. Collins (Skaneatles Community) was not a Lenin, Robert Owens was not a Lenin, John Humphrey Noyes (Oneida) was not a Lenin, and (speaking in the present tense) Kat Kinkade (Twin Oaks) is not a Lenin (to name but some)...
These names represent people who went beyond the first step (criticizing the social and political order of the day). Recall these words of Los Horcones:
It is especially important to note that complaining about the social system does not necessarily involve ceasing to contribute to it. For example, a person may dislike a social system in which people are exploited to make others wealthy, but he or she may also help to maintain the system...We believe that those who work under inappropriate social conditions perpetuate those conditions by continuing to work, because work produces money, and money maintains the behavior of the exploiter.(1)
This is not to infer that criticism does not begin the process of change. However, proposals are a positive step whereas criticism is only a negative step. My problem with Chomsky on the whole is that he is a professional criticizer who rarely, if ever, advances any positive proposals; you could say that he makes a living off of the inequity without proposing any specific ways of changing it...
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BS [prior]: :
Consider Skinner's observation that 'it is probable that our enjoyment [of literature] comes in large measure from the fact that the literary work says what we, the reader, tend to say.'
: Certainly in the case of non-literature my views have undergone a considerable transformation in the past five years or so as a result of carefully re-reading material to which I formerly found considerable objection. To say that we 'enjoy' works that reinforce our self-conceptions may be true, but this is a rather narrow dimension of 'enjoy'.
Not at all. To work with your example (using a behavioristic analysis), when you read opposing ideological material, you were by (way of contrast) asserting or investigating your fealty to your current positions (maintained by your unique history of reinforcement and reinforcement contingencies). When your reinforcement or contingencies of reinforcement changed (new experience, either mediated or direct), your position changed---which lead to back to earlier material that 'resonated' more effectively when your reinforcement or contingencies of reinforcement changed. This is not to say that the material directly changed you. The material must be 'backed up' by actual contingencies to have meaning.*
Imagine that rule-governed behavior is to contingency-shaped behavior what credit is to currency. For example, the stock-market value of (nonfinancial) business in the U.S. is 70% more than the actual value of the underlying assets;(2) which means that $30 worth of production and ensuing sales can generate $100 worth of credit. A lot of money can be made even as sales are decreasing, but only so far. This same principle, I believe, applies to rule-governed behavior (axioms, advice, literature); it is ultimately derived from contingencies.
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BS [prior]
'Black box' critics of behaviorism may find it odd that behaviorism posits that all behavior originates with the individual, not with groups...
: Where I disagree with you (and apparently Skinner) is on this notion of a "black box" or some such mystical "a priori" notions about human biology.
Sorry, 'black box' (as I meant it) is simply the derogatory term critics of behaviorism use when they assert (erroneously) that Skinner considered all organisms devoid of feelings, interpretations, private experience, etc.
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: [W]hat is being discussed in relation to Chomsky, I assume, is his positing of a Language Acquisition Device [LAD]. Now while I have not gone into the studies of linguistics (and this is not really the forum), I have been persuaded by enough material that the facility with which youngsters can pick up grammar convince me that it cannot occur through mere iteration of every possible combination of possible sentences.
I am not so persuaded. I would not, however, claim that mere iteration (verbal drill) is how grammar is acquired. Grammar, I believe, is acquired through exposure to a verbal community that, employing successive approximations, 'teaches' children through discriminative reinforcement which usages are correct and which usages are not. This process can take many years, as Hanna Fenichel Pitkin so aptly described:
Each of us has at least one treasured example...Mine concerned the word 'nebbach,' a Yiddish word which had found its way into my parents' otherwise almost completely German vocabulary. 'Nebbach' in fact means something like 'unfortunately,' and functions as an interjection ('I saw George and, nebbach, he's looking terrible'). Somehow I developed the idea that it was connected with the German words 'neben' and 'nebenbei,' which mean 'next to' or 'beside,' and I concluded that 'nebbach' meant something like 'by the way,' 'by the bye' or 'incidentally' ('I saw George and, incidentally, he's looking terrible'). And I understood and used the word that way well into my adolescence, when one day I used it in a particularly incongruous context, on an occasion when my mother happened to have the time to listen and to question me. The, of course, she corrected me and I found out what 'nebbach' really means. The point is...that children can sometimes get along nicely for years with [an] incorrect understanding.(3)
__________: [T]here is No reason to suppose that such a language device ("black box") could not
have evolved through natural selection processes completely compatible with neo-Darwinian theory. After all, other complex computational "black box" type organs exist in the animal kingdom to permit such things as: Dopplar-shift echolocation, steriopsis, dam building, pollen-source communication, face recognition, and celestial navigation.
May I replace 'black box' with Chomsky's L.A.D. to respond? Chomsky, I believe, is attributing something that is presently unseen by scientific inquiry to an inner agency---as dam building, pollen-source, pigeon navigation, etc. are also attributed to phylogenic agencies before ontogenic investigations have been exhausted. Like I pointed out before, Chomsky was quick to point out that Skinner's theory** was not empirically conclusive while simultaneously admitting that 'present-day linguistics cannot provide a precise account of these integrative processes.'(4) Why would inconclusive evidence point to inner (unknown) agencies instead of outer (unknown) agencies except that, historically, this has been the case? The 'coincidental fallacy' is apt: people have feelings as they act and often attribute the acts to the feelings...Again, we need to consider that even phylogenic development is subject to environmental variables, many of which can---and already have---been altered...
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BS [prior]: :
To claim that cooperation is 'innate' while aggression is 'learned,' or that aggression is 'learned' while cooperation is 'innate,' is to enter into speculative value judgments (language games) that have little bearing on the salient issue, which is: to change what human behavior can be (ontogenically and phylogenically) changed for the better.
: [W]hy do you call them value judgments?
They are 'value judgments' because they are contested (and presently unverifiable). Some people will say that aggression is innate behavior while cooperation (insofar as it advances self-interest) is learned, while some people will say that cooperation is innate while aggression (a 'product of the system') is learned. Who is right, I couldn't say; perhaps both views are (language games).*** Let us say that a value is something (say, good) whereas a 'value judgement' is something plus a qualification (say, my idea of good and your idea of something not-so-good). This is, I believe, where the highly qualified arguments regarding 'nature vs. nurture' are at present---although I would add that the environment is accessible.
: And when you say "changed for the better", on precisely what do you determine this
"better" value?
I knew I might take some heat for that phrase. Can we agree that all the criticisms of capitalism and all the speculative talk of bettering it (socialist, anarchist, etc.) requires an agreement that 'better' is sought, that 'better' is possible? If so, how to find the 'better'? Critiques alone will not do this. Proposals will, experiments will, contracts will, and (above all) living culture design will (hence the 'intentional' in 'intentional community'). What values will prevail in doing so? My ideas are for consensus, small settings, and the abolition of the social division of labor; I will (or will fail to) attract (or be attracted to) those with similar values (histories of reinforcement and reinforcement contingencies). Others with other proposals will attract (or be attracted to) others with similar values (histories of reinforcement and reinforcement contingencies)...
Values, let us say, are reinforcers; contingencies are the determinants of reinforcers. In a competitive culture competition will be reinforcing whereas in a cooperative culture competition will not be so. Which one is 'best'? Ultimately, only survival arbitrates. What survives is the culture (species), not the individual; the individual, nonetheless, is the medium of culture survival, and so the more individuals that survive (prosper, are content, etc.) the more opportunities the culture has to survive. To design a culture where the cultural contingencies ('values') shape behavior that acts to promote each individual with impartial prosperity is the hope of behaviorism (a proposal, a specific plan).
Again, Skinner:
Who is to control? The question represents the age-old mistake of looking to the individual rather to the world in which he lives...Will a culture evolve in which no individual will be able to accumulate vast power and use it for his own aggrandizement in ways that are harmful to others? Will a culture evolve in which individuals are not so much concerned with their own actualization and fulfillment that they do not give serious attention to the future of the culture? These questions, and many others like them, are the questions to be asked rather than who will control and to what end.(5)
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* This point is where Wittgenstein and Skinner are harmonious. Skinner: 'The consequences of [verbal] behavior are mediated by a train of events no less physical or inevitable than direct mechanical action, but clearly more difficult to describe.' Verbal Behavior (Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1957), p. 2. Wittgenstein: 'By "understanding" we sometimes mean a state of mind at a moment. But we mean this only in conjunction with a certain behavior in the future. Unless we have both we would not say he has understood.' 'The Language of Sense Data and Private Experience' [1936], Philosophical Occasions, 1912--1951 (Hackett, 1993), p. 308.
** What Chomsky failed to do for the reader of his review of Skinner's book was to point out what Skinner himself pointed out at the end of the introductory chapter, which was that the book was not an empirical study but 'an exercise in interpretation rather than a quantitative extrapolation of rigorous experimental results' (Verbal Behavior, p. 11). Chomsky reviewed it as if it was an empirical study and, so, 'concluded' that Skinner's 'data' was inconclusive. This was straw-man building. The point being that Chomsky's review was 50-odd pages, Skinner's book almost 500 pages, and for many Chomsky's review of the book served as the book; to read Chomsky's review is not, however, to know the book in even the most superficial way.
*** 'Consider for example the proceedings that we call "games." I mean board-games, card-games, ball-games, Olympic games, and so on. What is common to them all?...Look for example at board-games, with their multifarious relationships. Now pass to card-games; here you may find many correspondences with the first group, but many common features drop out, and others appear. When we pass next to ball-games, much that is common is retained, but much is lost.---Are they all "amusing"? Compare chess with noughts and crosses. Or is there always winning and losing; but when a child throws his ball at the wall and catches it again, this feature has disappeared. Look at the parts played by skill and luck; and at the difference between skill in chess and skill in tennis. Think now of games like ring-a-ring-a-roses; here is the element of amusement, but how many other characteristic features have disappeared! And we can go through the many, many other groups of games in the same way; can see how the similarities crop up and disappear...[W]e see a complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing: sometimes overall similarities, sometimes similarities of detail.' Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (Blackwell, 1958), § 66.
Notes:
1. Horcones, 'Walden Two and Social Change: The Application of Behavior Analysis to Cultural Design,' Behavior Analysis and Social Change, 7: 1& 2, 1989, p. 40.
2. James Tobin, quoted in the Wall Street Journal, 28 October 1997, 1A.
3. Pitkin, Wittgenstein and Justice (University of California Press, 1974), pp. 59-60.
4. Chomsky, Review of 'Verbal Behavior,' Language, 35: 1, 1959, pp. 30 and 55.
5. Skinner, About Behaviorism, (Knopf, 1974), p. 206.
