This example pushed me into formulating Crowe’s Law of Sarcastic Dismissal: Any explanation that is subtle enough to be correct is turbid enough to make its sarcastic dismissal genuinely funny.
Skinner had a subtle point to make, that the important objection to mentalism is of a very different sort. The world of the mind steals the show. Behaviour is not recognized as a subject in its own right.
I think I grasped Skinner’s point after reading something Feynman wrote on explanations in science. You can explain why green paint is green by explaining that paint consists of a binder (oil for an oil paint) and a pigment. Green paint is green because the pigment is green. But why is the pigment green? Eventually the concept of green must ground in something non-green, wavelengths of light, properties of molecules.
It is similar with people. One sophisticated way of having an inner man without an infinite regress is exhibited by Minsky’s Society of Mind. One can explain the outer man in terms of a committee of inner men provided that the inner men, sitting on the committee, are simpler than the outer man they purport to explain. And the inner men can be explained in terms of interior-inner-men, who are simpler still and whom we explain in terms of component-interior-inner-men,… We had better have remember that 1+1/2+1/3+1/4+1/5+1/6+… diverges. It is not quite enough that the inner men be simpler. They have to get simpler fast enough. Then our explanatory framework is philosophically admissible.
But notice the anachronism that I am committing. Skinner retired in 1974. Society of Mind was published in 1988. Worse yet, the perspective of Society of Mind comes from functional programming, where tree structured data is processed by recursive functions. Does your recursive function terminate? Programmers learn that an infinite regress is avoided if all the recursive calls are on sub-structures of the original structure, smaller by a measure which makes the structures well-founded. In the 1930′s and 1940′s Skinner was trying to rescue psychology from the infinite regress of man explained by an inner man, himself a man. It is not reasonable to ask him to anticipate Minsky by 50 years.
Skinner is trying to wake psychology from its complacent slumber. The inner man explains the outer man. The explanation does indeed account for the outer man. The flaw is that inner man is no easier to explain than the outer man.
We could instead look at behaviour. The outer man has behaved before. What happened last time? If the outer man does something unexpected we could look back. If the usual behaviour worked out badly the time before, that offers an explanation of sorts for the change. There is much to be done. For example, if some behaviour works ten times in a row, how many more times will it be repeated after it has stopped working? We already know that the inner man is complicated and hence under-determined by our experimental observations. This argues for caution and delay in admitting him to our explanations. We cannot hope to deduce his character until we have observed a great deal of his behaviour.
But let us return to humour and the tragedy of Sidney Morgenbesser’s sarcastic dismissal
Let me see if I understand your thesis. You think we shouldn’t anthropomorphize people?
The tragedy lies in the acuteness of Morgenbesser’s insight. He grasped Skinner’s subtle point. Skinner argues that anthropomorphizing people is a trap; do that an your are stuck with folk psychology and have no way to move beyond it. But Morgenbesser makes a joke out of it.
I accept that the joke is genuinely funny. It is surely a mistake for biologists to anthropomorphize cats and dogs and other animals, precisely because they are not people. So there is a template to fill in. “It is surely a mistake for psychologists to anthropomorphize men and women and other humans, precisely because they are not people.” Hilarity ensues.
Morgenbesser understands, makes a joke, and loses his understanding somewhere in the laughter. The joke is funny and sucks every-one into the loss of understanding.
Dennett’s heterophenomenology seems to offer some of the good points of Skinner’s behaviorism without a lot of the bad points.
Heterophenomenology notices that people’s behavior includes making descriptions of their conscious mental states: they emit sentences like “I think X” or “I notice Y”. It takes these behaviors as being as worthy of explanation as other behaviors, and considers that there might actually exist meaningful mental states being described. This is just what behaviorism dismisses.
In Beyond Freedom and Dignity Skinner writes (page 21)
A more important reason is that the inner man seems at times to be directly observed. We must infer the jubilance of a falling body, but can we not feel our own jubilance? We do, indeed, feel things inside our own skin, but we do not feel the things which have been invented to explain behaviour. The possessed man does not feel the possessing demon and may even deny that one exists. The juvenile delinquent does not feel his disturbed personality. The intelligent man does not feel his intelligence or the introvert his introversion. (In fact, these dimensions of mind or character are said to be observable only through complex statistical procedures.) The speaker does not feel the grammatical rules he is said to apply in composing sentences, and men spoke grammatically for thousands of years before anyone knew there were rules. The respondent to a questionnaire does not feel the attitudes or opinions which lead him to check items in particular ways. We do feel certain states of our bodies associated with behaviour, but as Freud pointed out we behave in the same way when we do not feel them; they are by-products and not to be mistaken for causes.
Dennett writes (page 83)
The heterophenomenologlcal method neither challenges nor accepts as entirely true the assertions of subjects, but rather maintains a constructive and sympathetic neutrality, in the hopes of compiling a definitive description of the world according to the subjects.
So far Skinner and Dennett are not disagreeing. Skinner did say “We do, indeed, feel things inside our own skin,...”. He can hardly object to Dennett writing down our descriptions of what we feel, as verbal behaviour to be explained in the future with a reductionist explanation.
Dennett continues on page 85
My suggest, then, is that if we were to find real goings-on in people’s brains that had enough of the “defining” properties of the items that populate their heterophenomenological worlds, we could reasonably propose that we had discovered what they were really talking about—even if they initially resisted the identifications. And if we discovered that the real goings-on bore only a minor resemblance to the heterophenomenological items, we could reasonably declare that people were just mistaken in the beliefs they expressed.
Dennett takes great pains to be clear. I feel confident that I understand what he is taking 500 pages to say. Skinner writes more briefly, 200 pages, and leaves room for interpretation. He says that we do not feel the things that have been invented to explain behaviour and he dismisses them.
I think it is unambiguous that he is expelling the explanatory mental states of the psychology of his day (such as introversion) from the heterophenomenological world of his subjects, on the grounds that they are not things that we feel or talk about feeling. But he is not, in Dennett’s phrase “feigning anesthesia” (page 40). Skinner is making a distinction, yes we may feel jubilant, no we do not feel a disturbed personality.
What is not so clear is the scope of Skinner’s dismissal of say introversion. Dennett raises the possibility of discovering meaningful mental states that actually exist. One interpretation of Skinner is that he denies this possibility as a matter of principle. My interpretation of Skinner is that he is picking a different quarrel. His complaint is that psychologists claim to have discovered meaningful mental states already, but haven’t actually reached the starting gate; they haven’t studied enough behaviour to even try to infer the mental states that lie behind behaviour. He rejects explanatory concepts such as attitudes because he thinks that the work needed to justify the existence of such explanatory concepts hasn’t been done.
I think that the controversy arises from the vehemence with which Skinner rejects mental states. He dismisses them out-of-hand. One interpretation is that Skinner rejects them so completely because he thinks the work cannot be done; it is basically a rejection in principle. My interpretation is that Skinner rejects them so completely because he has his own road map for research in psychology.
First pay lots of attention to behaviour. And then lots more attention to behaviour, because it has been badly neglected. Find some empirical laws. For example, One can measure extinction times: how long does the rat continue pressing the lever after the rewards have stopped. One can play with reward schedules. One pellet every time versus a 50:50 chance of two pellets. One discovers that extinction times are long with uncertain rewards. One could play for decades exploring this stuff and end up with quantitative “laws” for the explanatory concepts to explain. Which is when serious work, inferring the existence of explanatory concepts can begin.
I see Skinner vehemently rejecting the explanatory concepts of the psychology of his day because he thinks that the necessary work hasn’t even begun, and cannot yet be started because the foundations are not in place. Consequently he doesn’t feel the need to spend any time considering whether it has been brought to a successful conclusion (which he doesn’t expect to see in his life-time).
To draw something else from the distinction: Skinner seems to be talking about the objects of psychotherapeutic inquiry, such as “disturbed personality” or “introversion”; whereas Dennett is talking about the objects of philosophy-of-mind inquiry, such as “beliefs” and “qualia”. The juvenile delinquent is imputed as having a “disturbed personality” by others; but the believer testifies to their own belief themselves.
This example pushed me into formulating Crowe’s Law of Sarcastic Dismissal: Any explanation that is subtle enough to be correct is turbid enough to make its sarcastic dismissal genuinely funny.
Skinner had a subtle point to make, that the important objection to mentalism is of a very different sort. The world of the mind steals the show. Behaviour is not recognized as a subject in its own right.
I think I grasped Skinner’s point after reading something Feynman wrote on explanations in science. You can explain why green paint is green by explaining that paint consists of a binder (oil for an oil paint) and a pigment. Green paint is green because the pigment is green. But why is the pigment green? Eventually the concept of green must ground in something non-green, wavelengths of light, properties of molecules.
It is similar with people. One sophisticated way of having an inner man without an infinite regress is exhibited by Minsky’s Society of Mind. One can explain the outer man in terms of a committee of inner men provided that the inner men, sitting on the committee, are simpler than the outer man they purport to explain. And the inner men can be explained in terms of interior-inner-men, who are simpler still and whom we explain in terms of component-interior-inner-men,… We had better have remember that 1+1/2+1/3+1/4+1/5+1/6+… diverges. It is not quite enough that the inner men be simpler. They have to get simpler fast enough. Then our explanatory framework is philosophically admissible.
But notice the anachronism that I am committing. Skinner retired in 1974. Society of Mind was published in 1988. Worse yet, the perspective of Society of Mind comes from functional programming, where tree structured data is processed by recursive functions. Does your recursive function terminate? Programmers learn that an infinite regress is avoided if all the recursive calls are on sub-structures of the original structure, smaller by a measure which makes the structures well-founded. In the 1930′s and 1940′s Skinner was trying to rescue psychology from the infinite regress of man explained by an inner man, himself a man. It is not reasonable to ask him to anticipate Minsky by 50 years.
Skinner is trying to wake psychology from its complacent slumber. The inner man explains the outer man. The explanation does indeed account for the outer man. The flaw is that inner man is no easier to explain than the outer man.
We could instead look at behaviour. The outer man has behaved before. What happened last time? If the outer man does something unexpected we could look back. If the usual behaviour worked out badly the time before, that offers an explanation of sorts for the change. There is much to be done. For example, if some behaviour works ten times in a row, how many more times will it be repeated after it has stopped working? We already know that the inner man is complicated and hence under-determined by our experimental observations. This argues for caution and delay in admitting him to our explanations. We cannot hope to deduce his character until we have observed a great deal of his behaviour.
But let us return to humour and the tragedy of Sidney Morgenbesser’s sarcastic dismissal
The tragedy lies in the acuteness of Morgenbesser’s insight. He grasped Skinner’s subtle point. Skinner argues that anthropomorphizing people is a trap; do that an your are stuck with folk psychology and have no way to move beyond it. But Morgenbesser makes a joke out of it.
I accept that the joke is genuinely funny. It is surely a mistake for biologists to anthropomorphize cats and dogs and other animals, precisely because they are not people. So there is a template to fill in. “It is surely a mistake for psychologists to anthropomorphize men and women and other humans, precisely because they are not people.” Hilarity ensues.
Morgenbesser understands, makes a joke, and loses his understanding somewhere in the laughter. The joke is funny and sucks every-one into the loss of understanding.
Dennett’s heterophenomenology seems to offer some of the good points of Skinner’s behaviorism without a lot of the bad points.
Heterophenomenology notices that people’s behavior includes making descriptions of their conscious mental states: they emit sentences like “I think X” or “I notice Y”. It takes these behaviors as being as worthy of explanation as other behaviors, and considers that there might actually exist meaningful mental states being described. This is just what behaviorism dismisses.
In Beyond Freedom and Dignity Skinner writes (page 21)
Dennett writes (page 83)
So far Skinner and Dennett are not disagreeing. Skinner did say “We do, indeed, feel things inside our own skin,...”. He can hardly object to Dennett writing down our descriptions of what we feel, as verbal behaviour to be explained in the future with a reductionist explanation.
Dennett continues on page 85
Dennett takes great pains to be clear. I feel confident that I understand what he is taking 500 pages to say. Skinner writes more briefly, 200 pages, and leaves room for interpretation. He says that we do not feel the things that have been invented to explain behaviour and he dismisses them.
I think it is unambiguous that he is expelling the explanatory mental states of the psychology of his day (such as introversion) from the heterophenomenological world of his subjects, on the grounds that they are not things that we feel or talk about feeling. But he is not, in Dennett’s phrase “feigning anesthesia” (page 40). Skinner is making a distinction, yes we may feel jubilant, no we do not feel a disturbed personality.
What is not so clear is the scope of Skinner’s dismissal of say introversion. Dennett raises the possibility of discovering meaningful mental states that actually exist. One interpretation of Skinner is that he denies this possibility as a matter of principle. My interpretation of Skinner is that he is picking a different quarrel. His complaint is that psychologists claim to have discovered meaningful mental states already, but haven’t actually reached the starting gate; they haven’t studied enough behaviour to even try to infer the mental states that lie behind behaviour. He rejects explanatory concepts such as attitudes because he thinks that the work needed to justify the existence of such explanatory concepts hasn’t been done.
I think that the controversy arises from the vehemence with which Skinner rejects mental states. He dismisses them out-of-hand. One interpretation is that Skinner rejects them so completely because he thinks the work cannot be done; it is basically a rejection in principle. My interpretation is that Skinner rejects them so completely because he has his own road map for research in psychology.
First pay lots of attention to behaviour. And then lots more attention to behaviour, because it has been badly neglected. Find some empirical laws. For example, One can measure extinction times: how long does the rat continue pressing the lever after the rewards have stopped. One can play with reward schedules. One pellet every time versus a 50:50 chance of two pellets. One discovers that extinction times are long with uncertain rewards. One could play for decades exploring this stuff and end up with quantitative “laws” for the explanatory concepts to explain. Which is when serious work, inferring the existence of explanatory concepts can begin.
I see Skinner vehemently rejecting the explanatory concepts of the psychology of his day because he thinks that the necessary work hasn’t even begun, and cannot yet be started because the foundations are not in place. Consequently he doesn’t feel the need to spend any time considering whether it has been brought to a successful conclusion (which he doesn’t expect to see in his life-time).
Okay, I can see that interpretation.
To draw something else from the distinction: Skinner seems to be talking about the objects of psychotherapeutic inquiry, such as “disturbed personality” or “introversion”; whereas Dennett is talking about the objects of philosophy-of-mind inquiry, such as “beliefs” and “qualia”. The juvenile delinquent is imputed as having a “disturbed personality” by others; but the believer testifies to their own belief themselves.