The Fodorgraph Redux

Hi.

In this post we bring you a brief addendum to our interview with JFo.

After we ended out chat about linguistics, the conversation took a turn for the political. Since we enjoyed the outcome quite a bit, we've decided to make a habit of asking all our interviewees about their beliefs regarding the politics of science doing.



If the value of this topic isn't self-evident to you, consider the following:

• science is done by people
• science is done by people working within massive institutions 
• massive institutions are closely networked (read: funded) with states & industries
• (therefore) the structure of these institutions is going to reflect the interests of the states & industries in which they are embedded, at least in part 

This way of organizing our science world not only has the consequence of shaping the values of our universities, but it also has the consequence of narrowing down which individuals get to participate by filtering out those persons that don't share those values. 

Of course, the political economy of the university system is not solely determined by institutional pressures from outside; for all sorts of historical and economic reasons it is still the case that a significant part of the House of Higher Education is run by those that work in it. 

The practical outcomes of this arrangement (for science) aren't unambiguously negative. For instance, our state system still reflects (some shred of) a commitment to the public welfare. Thus our universities produce scholars that are often civic minded. One could easily imagine (and in a number of cases witness) an arrangement in which universities are places where scholars are totally divorced from a concern about the popular applications of their work. (Needless to say, what it means to be civic minded is hotly contested; see Noam's Liberal Scholarship and Objectivity for an in-depth discussion of the topic...sort of). 

On the other hand, this arrangement often leads to attenuating the deep questions into superficial engineering questions. Typically, this happens under the pressure of industry for new sources of profit. For those of us interested in brain-y things, the more egregious case of this is probably the study of artificial intelligence. That is, at some point in its development as a field, A.I. went from being concerned with understanding organic intelligence by studying the nature of computational, representational theories of mind to being concerned with building better ipods. If you'd like to hear someone with more clout on the topic say this, check out this (fairly) recent symposium on artificial intelligence held at MIT which included the fields founding figures. Specifically, check out what Patrick H. Winston has to say (time index 1:39:00)   

More specifically for linguistics, the era of the corporate university has had some dubious affects on linguistics. For example, the field has been inundated with quantitative studies wherein the motive for descriptive analysis of language overrides any interest in the big questions: such as what the hell is it that we're studying? what is language? (see here for a more personal account of this sort of change by Sascha Felix). 

As JFo says in the interview: the corollary to the desire for short-term profit in industry is the desire for discoveries at the 0.05 significance levels in the academy. In other words, the political climate inclines people to take less risks. (You can find Sydney Brenner saying something analogous in this recent interview).

Maybe where this whole big-picture discussion meets the everyday life of the researcher is at the laboratory. It is now common to hear that a researcher or research institute will spend half of their time on writing grant proposals. It is equally common to hear serious grumblings about the peer-review system, and the publish-or-perish era as a whole. In sum, there seems to be a general crapification of academic life that has measurable consequences. 

Homework Question: what happens when you build an enormous infastructure that is dependent on state and industry funding and then you take away the state?

Side-notes:

1. Apologies for some glitches in the recording. Stand by for new recording equipment.
2. Tune in two weeks from today to hear our interview with C. Randy Gallistel.   

The Fodorgraph

A fodorgraph is an explicit representation which is what is left when you take a literal physical image, subtract the spatial array of colored marks, and then throwaway the paper.

The Philosophical Lexicon

Hello Again,

In this post, the PB team brings you this interview featuring both a thoroughly novice interviewer and the fabulous Jerry Fodor.

During this phone conversation, we chatted about Fodor's recent heretical forays into the debate about the notion of natural selection among other such light topics as Bayesian & probabilistic models of mind, modularity, nativism, generative grammar, & neuroscience.

I'd like to highlight three aspects of the interview that stood out for me.

First, the words modularity & nativism aren't part of google's legitimate word list. At present they are appearing on my screen with blaring, red squiggly lines beneath them (perhaps Peter Norvig had some say in this state of affairs?). Simultaneously exerting a centripetal and centrifugal force on people in the field of linguistics, these terms are strongly associated with Fodor. And rightly so: he has spent a lifetime working out and defending a representational theory of mind that crucially presupposes them. For what it's worth I think that they have been given a bad rap in some of the recent literature, and are due for a second fitting, which is exactly why I thought it relevant to invoke them during this interview.

I won't go into a full blown defence of either, save to say if you haven't directly read Fodor discuss these topics you are missing out. The style of argumentation is in and of itself so illuminating about what a good exposition of a set of arguments looks like that the effort of reading him is worth it on those grounds alone.

Second, Fodor thinks that neuroscience has achieved virtually zilch with respect to furthering our understanding of the mind. This may sound like an exotic viewpoint, but it does echo a stirring in linguistics with respect to what the proper orientation is between neuroscience & cognitive science should be. This concern is, to varying degrees, noticeable in the work of people like Norbert Hornstein, Randy Gallistel, and Noam Chomsky. For an example of something in print on this topic that readily comes to mind see this or this.

Third, a comment about history – which features heavily, though not by any means primarily, in Fodor's recent argument about natural selection (as the prototypical adaptationist thinks of the notion). History is not a scientific level of explanation. Why?
If I follow Fodor's line of thinking, he claims something to the effect that it is impossible to specify a materialist-deterministic mechanism which, given a particular constellation of factors, determines why a person or thing ended up where they did and not some other place. And for better or for worse, materialistic-deterministic stories are the only ones we presently accept in the sciences.

For instance, consider the notion of natural selection and behaviourist learning theory. As mentioned in the interview, both of these strands of thought have something deeply in common. In essence, if the only thing we've got in these narratives is a history of the selective pressures on an organism then they will fail to be predictive for the same reasons as narrow behaviourist narratives fail to be anything but post hoc. That is, they present a history of, figuratively speaking, selective pressures. Fodor's argument on this topic runs quite a bit further. In any event, I won't spoil your fun in teasing apart the whole argument as it exists in print. Or, if you desire, in video-debate. The interesting idea that caught my attention was the claim in his book What Darwin Got Wrong that in the 19th century history was widely considered an adequate level of explanation. Intuitively, this contextualizes some of the explanatory inadequacies in both Darwin, Marx, and the neogrammarians. More importantly, if you buy the argument, it militates against attempted revivals of neogrammerian doctrines (see for example Evolutionary Phonology by Juliette Blevins). For a specific treatment of the problem of dealing in historical explanations in linguistics see Purnell (2009) in this book (chapter 17).

This post has become unwieldy so I think I had better stop here. But at the risk of wearing out my welcome I think I had better say one last thing. Why does all this jazz about natural selection matter? The answer is that inquiry into the evolution of language has become very popular these days. And also very polemical (for example see here; particularly see the comments). I think a lot of the work in evolution of language is trying to get a free lunch from genetics, adaptationist lit, and evolutionary biology. I also think that this is likely to lead to a lot of bruised egos and not much of a lunch.

The End.