What I'm reading 9/13/05 [Barsalou_99]

Barsalou (1999)

This paper is one of the most important papers in all the different areas of cognitive studies in at least the last 20 years.  It was successful in moving the field away from the computer metaphor, and the brain-in-the-vat mentality that had asphyxiated the field since Chomsky’s criticism of Skinner.  Since a summary can be found just about anywhere, I’ll spare the reader, and go directly to comments.

Comments:  I think what is most relevant to discussion is section 2.3.1 on Introspection.  Introspection is a very important component of Barsalou’s perceptual symbol systems, because many other aspects of his model (e.g., the knowledge of objects when they are not present, and abstract concepts) depend on it.  At least one aspect here is unclear to me.  For example, when a person considers the concept of TRUTH, Barsalou explains that an introspective, or interospective, process takes place where a comparison is made in order to assess the truth.  It seems to me that what the neural basis is for the comparison is still unclear, and it comes dangerously close to a homunculus problem.

Secondly, I’ve always noted the difference between Barsalou’s emphasis on symbols that are grounded in modality-specific areas of cortex, and Glenberg’s (1997) belief that action, and proprioception are the central component in grounding concepts and in how people understand concepts.  My question is are all modality-specific symbols separate but equal?  Or do certain modalities contribute more to our understanding of concepts than others, and in which situations?  I think that Conway and Christiansen (2004) provide a clue to this question.

What I'm reading on 9/13/05

Moral Sources by Taylor (1989)

Rather than summarize Taylor’s chapter, as I did with Russell’s, I will keep it short and add comments at the end so as to do some serious thinking toward the discussion of all of these papers and how they relate to abstract concepts.  The problem as Taylor points out, was that some philosophers and also normal people have taken the position of silence when it comes to articulating what GOOD is. Taylor wrote that that is not an optimal existence, because as he pointed out language about the good empowers, inspires, and/or moves people.  Taking that effect as evidence of some sort of moral reasoning, or as moral sources, he believed that the position of silence was a “stifling of the spirit and to the atrophy of so many of our spiritual sources, which is the bane of our modern naturalist culture.” (p107).  Thus, he argued as an alternative that people should work to understand the interdependence of ourselves, the history of morality and the notions of the good in our culture, and the kinds of narratives that people use to make sense of our lives (e.g., the rags-to-riches story).  He believed that the fruit of this labor will probably end people up on both sides of the fences, but it would also lead to “unprecedented understandings of agency and selfhood” (p105).

Comments:  I agree that silence is not a very good stance on defining abstract concepts like GOOD, TRUTH, or FREEDOM.  At maybe a few frustrating points in my short career, I may have thrown up my hands and said that they are ineffable.  And I loved that quality about them in the same way that Taylor talks about how using them is moving and sort of gut-wrenching in a good way.  So that is kind of interesting in that he seemed to make the argument that if people do not work to articulate the good, then they are depriving themselves.  But what if they have an appreciation and are inspired by the ineffable?

Secondly, there has been a lot of interesting work by Simone Schnall, Schubert, Robinson on directionality effects for emotional and moral stimuli (see also Prinz).  These effects supports the notion that there are implicit processes at work when people process and tap into moral sources.  Not only spatial effects, but also force dynamics effects have also been found as well (Need to find the reference, sorry).  It is not the case that metaphor is the reason behind this phenomenon, because there must be some direct experience that the metaphors we use map onto.  In any case, Taylor’s argument that these processes are implicit seems likely.

The automatic evaluation literature also speaks to this issue, and offers a interesting caveat.  The findings in this area by Bargh and others, as well as Strack, seem to demonstrate that there are implicit processes that differentially affect positively- vs. negatively-valences stimuli.  As I have observed first hand, and others have pointed out in these kinds of experiments the robust effect is found with the positive stimuli, and the negative side is a little less reliable.  Rather than elongate an already distended comments section, I will be leave the reader to ponder this caveat, and speculate more later.

In closing, I think that the role of the bodily state on moral reasoning, and processing of moral kinds of linguistic stimuli may be a fruitful experiment to try.  By that I mean using meditation to interfere, or facilitate with these implicit processes.  If anyone has references to work done on any of these areas, I would appreciate hearing more about it.

What Im reading on 9/11/05

Bertrand Russell (1921)

I’m breaking up the readings due for next Wednesday into separate posts, because it is going to be pretty long as is.  The first reading is for Barsalou et al.’s class, and the author according to the version Monica printed for me is Bertrant Russel.  That’s not a typo on my part.  That is what I have.  It is Lecture XI in Russell’s The Analysis of Mind.  In line with the meat of the course, we will be focusing on the discussion of abstract thought.  Russell begins by laying out the history of this debate with Berkeley and Locke.  The topic of this debate is essentially a epistemological issue.  How can we, as scientists, study abstract concepts?  Clearly, the reason that Russell wrote this paper is because the psychology of the time (roughly 1900-1920) was transforming.  Watson had leveled his famous criticism against Titchener and his acolytes in 1913, and the trend in psychology was toward strict empiricism.  

Russell was the first philosopher to realize the importance of behaviorist methods, and in his book he calls for psychologists to extend the behaviorist agenda as far as possible.  He was not a complete behaviorist, because he was cognizant of the limitations of behaviorist methods to study and explain all mental phenomenon most people would argue they experience.  Memory, dreams, imagination, creativity are all mental processes that behaviorism has difficulty telling us anything about.  Russell discusses Semon’s work on memory of faces and how it may be that a person generalizes the face for a man to a sort of fuzzy composite, but he concludes that this is no abstraction.  So then, how does he relate this to language abstraction?  According to the “imageless thought” people, he wrote that they have erroneously presupposed that thinking occurs in situations where a stimulus, in this case a given social situation, and the consequent bodily movement, an utterance.  This sounds eerily close to the approach to the study of language by Skinner.  Another example of how this idea played out in psychology was Watson’s and his student Karl Lashley’s attempts at correlating subvocal speech and thought as a means to expose inner speech that is not uttered.

Despite his arguments, which clearly fall on the side of behaviorism, Russell concluded that it fails to circumvent the problem of the relativistic nature of the world.  And consequently its methods are no better than introspection.