To elaborate somewhat: By #1 I mean that in the fields of biology, psychology and neuroscience the idea that behaviours or ideas or patterns of thought can be “innate” will be marginalised and not accepted by mainstream researchers.
By #2 I mean that, not only will behavioural economics provide accounts of deviations from traditional economic models, but mainstream economists will accept that these models need to be discarded completely and replaced from the ground-up with psychologically-plausible models.
By #3 I mean the idea that the brain can be thought of as a computer and the “mind” as its algorithms will be marginalised. I give this lower odds than nativism being discredited only because the cognitivist tradition has managed to sustain itself through belligerence rather than evidence and is therefore likely to be more persistent and pernicious. Nativism, on the other hand, has persisted because of the difficulty of experimentally demonstrating that certain behaviours are learned rather than innate (as well as belligerence).
By #4 I mean that traditional linguistics, and especially generative grammar, will be marginalised. This one has long puzzled me since the generative grammarians based their ideas on intuition and explicitly deny a role for data or experiment (or the need to reconcile their beliefs with biology). The main problem has been the absence of a viable alternative research program. This is beginning to change.
If we could agree on a suitable judging mechanism, I would bet up to $10,000 against you on #1 and on #3 at those odds (or even at substantially different odds). I also disagree on the latter claim in #2, but that’s not as much of a slam dunk for me as the others.
Can you unpack what you mean by innate. I think babies would have a hard time surviving if sucking things wasn’t a behaviour that was with them from their genes.
And more generally, the distinction innate/learned is overly simplistic in a lot of contexts; rather, there are adaptations that determine the way organism develops depending on its environment. The standard reference I know of is
J. Tooby & L. Cosmides (1992). `The psychological foundations of culture’. In J. Barkow, L. Cosmides, & J. Tooby (eds.), The adapted mind: Evolutionary psychology and the generation of culture. Oxford University Press, New York.
It would be valuable to do an outside view sanity check: historically, how frequently have research programs of similar prestige been discredited?
There are all the standard problems with authority—lots of folks insist that they’re in the mainstream and that opposing views have been discredited. Clearly nativism &c. have been discredited in your mind; when do they get canonically discredited? Sometimes I almost think that everyone would be better off if everyone just directly talked about how the world really is rather than swiping at the integrity of each other’s research programs, but I’m probably just being naive.
Re 3, my domain knowledge is somewhat weak, so everyone ignore me if my very words are confused, but I’m not sure what would count as a refutation or the mind being an algorithm. Surely (surely?) most would agree that the brain is not literally a computer as we ordinarily think of computers, but I understand algorithm in the broadest sense to refer to some systematic mechanism for accomplishing a task. Thought isn’t ontologically fundamental; the brain systematically accomplishes something; why shouldn’t we speak of abstracting away an algorithm from that? Maybe I’ve just made computationalism an empty tautology, but I don’t … think so.
I don’t think the innate/learned dichotomy is fundamental; it’s both, everyone knows that’s it’s both, everyone knows that everyone knows that it’s both. Like that old analogy, a rectangle’s area is a product of length and width. What specific questions of fact are people confused about?
I think these research programs represent something without a clear historical precedent. Traditional economics and generative linguistics, for example, could be compared to pre-scientific disciplines that were overthrown by scientific disciplines. But both exhibit a high degree of formal and institutional sophistication. I don’t think pre-Copernican astronomy had the same level of sophistication. Economics also has data (although so did geocentric astronomy) whereas the generative tradition in linguistics considers data misleading and prefers intuitive judgement. What neither has is a systematic experimental research program or a desire to integrate with the natural sciences.
Cognitivism is essentially Cartesian philosophy with a computer analogy and experiments. In practice it just becomes experimental psychology with some extra jargon. Nativism, too, comes from Cartesian philosophy (Chomsky was quite explicit about this). While cognitivism has experiments it has an interpretation that isn’t founded in experiment (the type of computer the brain is supposed to be and the algorithms it could be said to run is not addressed) and an opposition to integration with the natural sciences (the so-called “autonomy of psychology” thesis).
These research programs are similar to pre-scientific research programs but have managed to persist in a world where you have to attempt to “look scientific” in order to secure research grants and they reflect this fact.
You point to many problems and I wouldn’t take any bets because of these. It would be too difficult to judge who had won. On the nature/nurture debate: Empiricism evolved into constructivism/interactionism (i.e., the developing organism interacting with the environment with genes driving development), which is the dominate view in biology, and it’s not obvious what, precisely, modern Nativists believe. But it is obvious that they still exist since naive nativist talk persists almost everywhere else. It’s similarly difficult to figure out what computationalists mean by their analogies and the degree to which they intend them to be analogies vs. literal propositions. This is probably why the natural sciences tend not to base research programs on analogies. What is clear is that they have a particular style of interpreting their results in terms of representations and sequential processing that is clearly at odds with biology and display no interest in addressing the issue.
Nativism, too, comes from Cartesian philosophy (Chomsky was quite explicit about this).
First, this is the genetic fallacy. Secondly, I don’t take Chomsky’s authority seriously.
The experimental evidence that, say, Steven Pinker presents in How the Mind Works for innate mental traits and for the computational perspective are sound, and have nothing to do with Cartesian dualism.
The point is that the views have their origins in philosophy rather than experiment. We’re not dealing with a research program developed from a set of compelling experimental results but a research program that has inherited a set of assumptions from a non-empirical source. This is more obviously the case with computationalism, where advocates have shown almost no interest in establishing the foundational assumptions of their discipline experimentally, and some claim that to do so would be irrelevant. But it’s also true for nativism where almost no thought is given to how nativist mechanisms would be realised biologically.
I’m not entering any of these into PredictionBook because all 4 strike me as hopelessly argumentative and subjective. (Take #1 - what, you mean stigmatised even more than it already is as the province of racists/sexists/-ists?)
Regarding 3, there’s no way to find evidence against it (or for it, for that matter). You can’t look at a given system and measure its sentience. The closest to that anyone’s ever attempted is to try and test intelligence, but that assumes cognitivism/computationalism, among other things.
I agree with orthonormal, except that I don’t have $10,000 to bet.
Next 10 years:
Nativism discredited (80%)
Traditional economics discredited (80%)
Cognitivism/computationalism discredited (70%)
Generative linguistics discredited (60%)
To elaborate somewhat: By #1 I mean that in the fields of biology, psychology and neuroscience the idea that behaviours or ideas or patterns of thought can be “innate” will be marginalised and not accepted by mainstream researchers.
By #2 I mean that, not only will behavioural economics provide accounts of deviations from traditional economic models, but mainstream economists will accept that these models need to be discarded completely and replaced from the ground-up with psychologically-plausible models.
By #3 I mean the idea that the brain can be thought of as a computer and the “mind” as its algorithms will be marginalised. I give this lower odds than nativism being discredited only because the cognitivist tradition has managed to sustain itself through belligerence rather than evidence and is therefore likely to be more persistent and pernicious. Nativism, on the other hand, has persisted because of the difficulty of experimentally demonstrating that certain behaviours are learned rather than innate (as well as belligerence).
By #4 I mean that traditional linguistics, and especially generative grammar, will be marginalised. This one has long puzzled me since the generative grammarians based their ideas on intuition and explicitly deny a role for data or experiment (or the need to reconcile their beliefs with biology). The main problem has been the absence of a viable alternative research program. This is beginning to change.
If we could agree on a suitable judging mechanism, I would bet up to $10,000 against you on #1 and on #3 at those odds (or even at substantially different odds). I also disagree on the latter claim in #2, but that’s not as much of a slam dunk for me as the others.
Can you unpack what you mean by innate. I think babies would have a hard time surviving if sucking things wasn’t a behaviour that was with them from their genes.
And more generally, the distinction innate/learned is overly simplistic in a lot of contexts; rather, there are adaptations that determine the way organism develops depending on its environment. The standard reference I know of is
J. Tooby & L. Cosmides (1992). `The psychological foundations of culture’. In J. Barkow, L. Cosmides, & J. Tooby (eds.), The adapted mind: Evolutionary psychology and the generation of culture. Oxford University Press, New York.
A few thoughts:
It would be valuable to do an outside view sanity check: historically, how frequently have research programs of similar prestige been discredited?
There are all the standard problems with authority—lots of folks insist that they’re in the mainstream and that opposing views have been discredited. Clearly nativism &c. have been discredited in your mind; when do they get canonically discredited? Sometimes I almost think that everyone would be better off if everyone just directly talked about how the world really is rather than swiping at the integrity of each other’s research programs, but I’m probably just being naive.
Re 3, my domain knowledge is somewhat weak, so everyone ignore me if my very words are confused, but I’m not sure what would count as a refutation or the mind being an algorithm. Surely (surely?) most would agree that the brain is not literally a computer as we ordinarily think of computers, but I understand algorithm in the broadest sense to refer to some systematic mechanism for accomplishing a task. Thought isn’t ontologically fundamental; the brain systematically accomplishes something; why shouldn’t we speak of abstracting away an algorithm from that? Maybe I’ve just made computationalism an empty tautology, but I don’t … think so.
I don’t think the innate/learned dichotomy is fundamental; it’s both, everyone knows that’s it’s both, everyone knows that everyone knows that it’s both. Like that old analogy, a rectangle’s area is a product of length and width. What specific questions of fact are people confused about?
I think these research programs represent something without a clear historical precedent. Traditional economics and generative linguistics, for example, could be compared to pre-scientific disciplines that were overthrown by scientific disciplines. But both exhibit a high degree of formal and institutional sophistication. I don’t think pre-Copernican astronomy had the same level of sophistication. Economics also has data (although so did geocentric astronomy) whereas the generative tradition in linguistics considers data misleading and prefers intuitive judgement. What neither has is a systematic experimental research program or a desire to integrate with the natural sciences.
Cognitivism is essentially Cartesian philosophy with a computer analogy and experiments. In practice it just becomes experimental psychology with some extra jargon. Nativism, too, comes from Cartesian philosophy (Chomsky was quite explicit about this). While cognitivism has experiments it has an interpretation that isn’t founded in experiment (the type of computer the brain is supposed to be and the algorithms it could be said to run is not addressed) and an opposition to integration with the natural sciences (the so-called “autonomy of psychology” thesis).
These research programs are similar to pre-scientific research programs but have managed to persist in a world where you have to attempt to “look scientific” in order to secure research grants and they reflect this fact.
You point to many problems and I wouldn’t take any bets because of these. It would be too difficult to judge who had won. On the nature/nurture debate: Empiricism evolved into constructivism/interactionism (i.e., the developing organism interacting with the environment with genes driving development), which is the dominate view in biology, and it’s not obvious what, precisely, modern Nativists believe. But it is obvious that they still exist since naive nativist talk persists almost everywhere else. It’s similarly difficult to figure out what computationalists mean by their analogies and the degree to which they intend them to be analogies vs. literal propositions. This is probably why the natural sciences tend not to base research programs on analogies. What is clear is that they have a particular style of interpreting their results in terms of representations and sequential processing that is clearly at odds with biology and display no interest in addressing the issue.
First, this is the genetic fallacy. Secondly, I don’t take Chomsky’s authority seriously.
The experimental evidence that, say, Steven Pinker presents in How the Mind Works for innate mental traits and for the computational perspective are sound, and have nothing to do with Cartesian dualism.
The point is that the views have their origins in philosophy rather than experiment. We’re not dealing with a research program developed from a set of compelling experimental results but a research program that has inherited a set of assumptions from a non-empirical source. This is more obviously the case with computationalism, where advocates have shown almost no interest in establishing the foundational assumptions of their discipline experimentally, and some claim that to do so would be irrelevant. But it’s also true for nativism where almost no thought is given to how nativist mechanisms would be realised biologically.
I’m not entering any of these into PredictionBook because all 4 strike me as hopelessly argumentative and subjective. (Take #1 - what, you mean stigmatised even more than it already is as the province of racists/sexists/-ists?)
Regarding 3, there’s no way to find evidence against it (or for it, for that matter). You can’t look at a given system and measure its sentience. The closest to that anyone’s ever attempted is to try and test intelligence, but that assumes cognitivism/computationalism, among other things.
I agree with orthonormal, except that I don’t have $10,000 to bet.