moving beyond

[David B. Kronenfeld]

Amen.  With maybe a little add to the effect that Bloomfield himself, in
his actual practice, as nowhere near as bad as he himself made himself out
to be (in what he said should be done)--to cover what then, at the time,
looked to be his science flank.  The "taxonomic" charge against Bloomfield
sort of sticks; the "radical behaviorist" one is, to my mind, a much harder
sell.
                                 David

At 12:10 PM 2/4/02 -0800, Liz Bates wrote:
>Like Talmy, I have mixed feelings about Bruce Ricman's "Beyond Chomsky"
>initiative, although my concerns are a bit different from Talmy's.  I agree
>that this proposed initiative seems to be quite naive regarding the long
>list of linguists who have provided critical alternatives, for many years,
>to Chomsky's particular variants of generative grammar.  So my response to
>each of these mailings has been "Good idea, but hasn't it already been
>done?"  But I have to disagree with Talmy about the magnitude of Chomsky's
>contribution in bringing down the hated behaviorists.  Talmy seems to be
>quite naive regarding the long list of psychologists who have provided
>critical alternatives to behaviorism, for many years, before and during and
>after Chomsky's own contributions.
>
>The truth is that radical, "black box", Watson/Skinner behaviorism was a
>flash in the pan.  Its primary role in history (it now seems) has been to
>serve as a scarecrow for generations of generative linguists.  I think it
>would be useful for functionalists and generativists alike to understand
>this a little bit better.  It is deeply human to want to look inside any
>box that is placed before us.  There were physiological psychologists
>trying to look inside that box throughout the 20th century, and
>experimental psychology has never been without a high proportion of
>influential mentalists.  Donald Hebb comes to mind: his 1949 book "The
>organization of behavior" was really about the organization of the
>mind/brain, and if there is one psychologist in the history of our field
>who has been proven SOUNDLY AND FULLY right, it was Donald Hebb (in case
>you have ever heard the term "Hebbian learning", it comes from Hebb's
>conjecture that "the neurons that fire together wire together", an
>unabashedly associationist principle that has been repeatedly confirmed and
>elaborated in neuroscience since his time -- Eric Kandel's Nobel Prize two
>years ago in many respects represents an acknowledgment of Hebb's victory).
>And then of course there was Edward Tolman, the Berkeley psychologist for
>whom the Berkeley Psychology building is named.  Tolman believed that the
>rat presses the bar because he EXPECTS to be reinforced -- rats have
>expectations, hopes, dreams and aspirations, and psychologists have to deal
>with those facts and build a theory that contains them.  If you would like
>to take a look at his classic paper "Cognitive maps in rats and men", here
>is a URL that will take you right to it...
>
>http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Tolman/Maps/maps.htm
>
>But the list goes on.  Do you know when the term "psycholinguistics" was
>first applied to a conference?  It was in 1952, five years before Chomsky's
>first influential book appeared.  The conference was organized by Charles
>Osgood, to put linguists and psychologists together to talk about
>similarities and differences in their mental models of language as well as
>their empirical methods.
>
>To be sure, there was a big non-linear acceleration in ideas and works of
>this kind after 1957, but I get a bit tired of hearing people say that
>Chomsky started the Cognitive Revolution.  The return to mentalism was
>inevitable, for two reasons: (1) accelerating progress in neuroscience
>brought with it a renewed hope that a mechanistic base could be found for
>mental phenomena, and (2) the birth of computing machines (symbolic and
>connectionist, born around the same time) meant that we now had a truly
>mechanistic (as in 'machines') set of metaphors for exploring mental
>phenomena.  If you look at fields like ethology, developmental psychology
>and physiological psychology, you will find that the same big non-linear
>blip was happening everywhere.  There was a return to mentalism all across
>the behavioral and neural sciences (that would eventually become the
>cognitive sciences), promulgated in many cases by people who had never
>heard of Chomsky, or if they had, they knew that he was an influential
>linguist who ALSO (like them) thought that we could investigate the
>contents of mind.  It is no coincidence that Piaget's works were translated
>into English or widely read by developmental psychologists in the 1960's
>(many years after they were written).  Piaget's influence on developmental
>psychology after that point was one more sign of the return to mentalism
>that characterized the Cognitive Revolution.  But here is where Chomsky and
>his followers hijacked the mentalist movement (or at least their sector of
>it): mentalism does not have to go hand in hand with (a) nativism, or (b)
>autonomy of domains, but Chomsky's particular version of mentalism
>contained (then and now) strong assumptions about the innateness and
>autonomy of language.  And in the "take no prisoners" atmosphere that
>flourished in that particular community, anyone who did not buy the *WHOLE
>PACKAGE* was roundly denounced as a behaviorist.  Piaget is the best case
>in point: as nativists got more and more control of the agenda in
>developmental psychology, Piaget was pilloried for his belief in
>construction and emergence (neither innate, nor learned, a category unto
>itself).  Piatelli-Palmarini's edited book "The Piaget-Chomsky Debate" was
>a high water mark (and low point in my own career, it was such a depressing
>patricidal moment). And yet Piaget was the consummate mentalist, someone
>who deeply believed that mind is rooted in biology, and can be studied with
>experimental methods like any other biological phenomenon.  His crimes, it
>seems, were his belief in emergence (as opposed to a strictly deterministic
>form of innateness, one that takes the form of a priori
>representations/knowledge), and his belief in the fundamental unity of
>cognitive phenomena (as opposed to domain specificity and autonomy).  Those
>beliefs were and are unacceptable to card-carrying members of the Chomskian
>orthodoxy.
>
>We live in an era today in which the vast majority of neurobiologists are
>convinced that cortex is largely constructed, the result of plastic and
>bidirectional processes that include genes-->structure but also
>experience-->structure.  Activity dependence and plasticity are
>acknowledged as primary processes in setting up the brain, including forms
>of experience that are going on in utero, with the body teaching the brain
>via exactly the same mechanisms that mediate what we have to call
>'learning' later on.  The emergentist approach is clearly on the rise in
>biology, and in computational neuroscience (in the various branches of
>neural network research).  Unfortunately, I think that Chomsky's strong
>insistence on a preformationist kind of nativism and a compartmentalization
>of the mind are now obstacles to change.  At one time he was an important
>part of the cognitive revolution (though he did not do it alone, and it
>would have happened anyway even if he had not been around).  Right now, I
>think we do need to move beyond those aspects of his views that have been
>eclipsed in neuroscience but are still embraced in linguistics.  But it is
>hard to make that point, because there is still a very strong sociological
>tendency in generative grammar to belittle anyone who promotes emergence,
>plasticity, or (God forbid) the kind of complex, rich and neurally valid
>associationism that Hebb understood long ago. If you don't buy the whole
>package, you are a behaviorist.  Talmy indicates in the following quote
>that he is indeed still Chomsky's student in that particular sense:
>
> >Who of the Bloomfieldians would have challenged the Watson/Skinner extreme
> >empiricist view of language learning by--ONLY-- rote, memory, immitation
> >and S(timulus)-R(esponse)? Who would have challenged Bloomfield's
> >anti-meaning and anti-mind dogma? Who would have raised the possibility
> >that beyond the surface item-and-arrangement strucures that Bloomfield
> >urge us to catalogue, classify, disect AND THEN QUIT, there lay a system
> >that 'supported semantic interpretation'?
>
>Who indeed?  My answer is: a whole lot of people, in linguistics and
>psychology and neuroscience and computer science, people were challenging
>the Watson/Skinner extreme for many many years.  Give up on that scarecrow.
>It doesn't exist, and in reality, it was never more than a kind of
>radical-chic stance taken by a handful of psychologists just to see how far
>they could go.  In some respects, I think that Bruce Richman's call for us
>to move "Beyond Chomsky" has come in a little late.  Many of us already did
>that a long time ago.  What we need to do now is to sort through a complex
>landscape of beliefs (emergence vs. learning vs. unfolding of innate
>knowledge; modularity vs. interactionism; autonomous syntax vs. embodied
>grammar) and figure out how they can be reconfigured and recombined for a
>new era.   -liz bates

David B. Kronenfeld             Phone   Office  909/787-4340
Department of Anthropology              Message 909/787-5524
University of California                        Fax     909/787-5409
Riverside, CA 92521                     email   kfeld at citrus.ucr.edu

Department: http://Anthropology.ucr.edu/
Personal:  http://pweb.netcom.com/~fanti/david.html