An Essay by Rae Langton

http://web.mit.edu/langton/www/pubs/SpeechActs.pdf

AN ESSAY ON THE MYSTERIES OF THE MIND

Take Home Exercise for Philosophy of Mind and Cognition

(b)Critically evaluate the arguments for the Language of Thought and/or the Map Theory

In this essay, I examine the arguments for the several stances it is possible to take in the ‘debate’ (largely implicit) between the Language of Thought Hypothesis and the Map Theory of cognition. My ultimate conclusion is that, whilst so many fundamental issues are still extraordinarily unclear, there is one particular intermediate stance in this debate that has significantly more weight behind it than any other.

I first discuss how, for both hard-line connectionists (those who think that the brain undergoes no ‘classical computation’) and hard-line Fodorians (those who think the key parts of cognition will be explained only by classical computational models), the stakes between the “Language of Thought Hypothesis” and “Map Theory” of cognition are quite clear: if the LoTH is the right theory of all cognition, then the hard-line connectionists are completely wrong, and if complex cognition occurs without any real LoT, then the adherents of Fodor’s computational-representational theory are completely wrong. I argue that both these poles are probably wrong, but that the connectionist extreme is much less implausible than the Fodorian one. I secondly explore the intricate intermediate position that that all (or nearly all) cognition in non-human animals involves connectionist ‘software’, captured by “Map Theory”, and yet that the Language of Thought theory represents a classical ‘program’ run only by humans. This thesis has not been actually expounded in any literature I am aware of, although it seems to me to be the hypothesis that has the most weight behind it of all. As I argue, it is highly concordant with Noam Chomsky’s carefully considered hypothesis (since the mid-1990s) for the origin of the human language faculty/explanation for the “Great Leap Forward”; the notion that productive thought is bound up with productive language is supported by evidence from developmental psychology; the notion that the vast majority of biological ‘software’ is connectionist is strengthened by well-known considerations about the ‘hardware’ of the brain and the nature of evolution; and finally, despite Fodor’s many protestations, it seems to me that Prototype Theory is the best account of the nature of our concepts, and Prototype-structured concepts are better explained in terms of “Map Theory” than the “Language of Thought”.

In The Philosophy of Mind and Cognition, Frank Jackson and David Braddon-Mitchell are careful not to hitch the Map Theory to the connectionist programme in AI, or the Language of Thought to more ‘classical models of cognition’. They note that the truth is much more complex and that it may often be unclear whether a ‘classical’ program is being implemented in a connectionist substrate (indeed, they claim that there might be no “source code” for the brain at all) [Braddon-Mitchell & Jackson, 2007: 219]. Nevertheless, they do suggest a certain harmony between connectionism and the “Map Theory”, and between classical computation and Fodor’s LoT. This makes perfect sense, because a hard-line connectionist cannot possibly accept the LoTH, and the Map Theory is explicitly proposed as the one alternative to the LoTH.

Paul and Patricia Churchland, the influential reductive neuro-computationalists, are probably the most prominent proponents of what I’ve called ‘hard-line’ connectionism. For several decades, the central philosophical claim of these two neuro-philosophers has been that classical cognitive science is (and always has been) on the wrong track, because the brain’s hardware is connectionist[1] and we can only understand the brain’s ‘software’ by investigating the nature of the hardware, rather than constructing abstract, simple models of rules and representations which may have no “psychological reality”. In numerous articles and papers from the late 80s onwards, the Churchlands have argued that evidence from neurobiology[2] makes it clear that the Language of Thought (which they tend to lump together with ‘Folk Psychology’ as part of the one Fodorian package), even if apparently explanatory, simply doesn’t exist [P.S. Churchland, 1986; P.M. Churchland, 1989; P.S. & P.M. Churchland, 1990; P.S. Churchland & Sejnowski, 1990].

It is crucial to point out, of course, that there was always a key weakness in the Churchlands’ critiques of classical cognitive science and the LoTH – a weakness that would ultimately allow Fodor to evade their attacks without working up too much of a sweat at all. This key weakness was that the Churchlands didn’t attempt to provide a serious alternative, connectionist-based theory of thought (as opposed to mere detailed accounts of bio-chemical processes correlated to certain kinds of cognition) to the one they so roundly rejected. The absence of such a theory in the Churchlandian canon meant that it remained justified for Fodor to simply repeat the famous remark he made in his seminal 1975 work: that the LoTH is “the only game in town” [1975: 406]. And as Fodor and Pylyshyn pointed out in their influential 1988 critique of connectionism (which includes extensive reference to the Churchlands), without such an alternative account of the actual nature of thought, the neurobiological evidence marshalled in supposed contradiction of the LoTH cannot nullify the abductive argument, because the neurobiological details do not in themselves itself constitute an explanatory science of the mind [Fodor & Pylyshyn, 1988]. As Fodor and Pylyshyn emphasise in this same article, no connectionist can explain productivity and systematicity except by creating “Classical architecture” in connectionist models, yet these are the two key features of thought that form the basis of Fodor’s argument to begin with [Fodor & Pylyshyn, 1988: 33-40].

Fortunately for the connectionists, however, Frank Jackson and David Braddon-Mitchell’s “Map Theory” does provide such an alternative account of the ultimate nature of thought. Evidently, if such a theory is at all tenable, it lends significant credence to the hard-line connectionists, because the very fact of its existence destroys Fodor’s key abductive argument. And unfortunately for Fodor, it does indeed seem to me that the Map Theory is plausible as an alternative theory of thought – in fact, highly plausible. The idea of thought as involving highly structured, non-sentential, ‘nth’-dimensional map-like representations actually possesses a number of virtues over the LoTH: it is (at least intuitively) much more neatly reconcilable with connectionist networks and the ‘hardware’ of the brain, since a map is an inherently ‘distributed’ structure; it gives a far more plausible account than the LoTH of how it is that our beliefs about people, places and events can so fluidly change as we have new experiences and take in new information (our mental ‘maps’ are simply updated); it seems to explain memory and memory-retrieval in a much more plausible way than a Language of Thought, since it is not necessary to claim that we have a vast number of propositions stored in our memory which we can retrieve at will; it would appear to explain certain weaknesses we have in formal reasoning (for example, why content seems to matter to our ability to carry out tasks of reasoning with formally identical structure [Jackson, Braddon-Mitchell, 2007: 235]); it appears to have evolutionary considerations in its favour over the LoTH, since a Language of Thought is a highly elegant computational system which seems at odds with the haphazard makeshift nature of evolution (it seems unlikely that a LoT would be the kind of system to slowly crystallise, and it seems highly unlikely that our ancient Cambrian ancestors had a Language of Thought, whereas they might have had primitive ‘map-like’ representations); and it can account (seemingly) for “systematicity”, since the ‘places’ in the cognitive maps can be switched. All in all, therefore, the Churchlandian position is, in my view, massively strengthened by the “Map Theory”.

With that said, of course, the reason that I do not think that the hard-line connectionist position is likely to be right is that the Map Theory, even if it does seem to account for systematicity, it doesn’t quite answer Fodor’s productivity criterion. As a result, it cannot explain the apparent infinite generative capacity of human cognition – our ability to think an infinite array of discrete thoughts by finite (combinatorial) means. As I am about to suggest, however, it may very well be that only humans have this full-strength productivity. This would imply that the Map Theory might be a far more general account of biological cognition, and that the hard-line connectionist position might be the correct one for all creatures on Earth except us. As I’m about to argue, I think this is actually the most plausible stance of all.

Perhaps the major consideration in support of the view that only Homo sapiens has a LoT in Fodor’s sense (with a combinatorial syntax which allows for infinite productivity) is that it accords with Chomsky’s hypothesis about the evolution of the language faculty. Whilst undoubtedly a highly controversial hypothesis – disputed even by other notable generativists (for example, Ray Jackendoff and Steven Pinker [2005]) – the conjecture does have nontrivial theoretical and empirical backing.

Chomsky largely eschewed speculation about the evolution of the language faculty for the first few decades of the Universal Grammar research programme, but he has become quite vocal in espousing his ‘spandrelist’ hypothesis about the evolution of the “Faculty of Language” ever since he wrote The Minimalist Program in 1995. The central idea of Chomsky’s “Minimalist Program” is that it is possible to distil the ‘Universal Grammar’ into one basic computational operation called “Merge”, with two forms, “External” (for separate objects A and B) and “Internal” (for two objects where at least one object contains the other) [Chomsky, 1995]. This lends credence to this spandrelist hypothesis because of the elegant computational simplicity of such a system (“like a snowflake”), and the fact that this computational procedure subserves thought as fundamentally (or more fundamentally) as it subserves language.

The most rigorous defence of this evolutionary hypothesis appeared only recently, in a 2015 book Chomsky co-authored with the MIT computer scientist, Robert Berwick, entitled Why Only Us? : Language and Evolution. In this short work, Chomsky and Berwick specifically defend the thesis that this “Merge” operation first originated by a single mutation in a human individual around 80,000-100,000 years ago, which gave rise to recursion and hierarchical structure in that individual’s thoughts [Chomsky & Berwick, 2015]. Whilst they don’t invoke Fodor explicitly, it is clear that they see this as the moment the “productivity” property key to Fodor’s LoT actually emerged (for the first time in the history of life on the planet). They hold that this capacity would have had some selectional advantage, and would have spread throughout the population before being secondarily externalised [Chomsky & Berwick, 2015]. Much of the book is taken up by arguments in defence of an anti-adaptationist, ‘messy’ view of evolution as involving “stochastic effects” and both gradual and sudden developments, with more at work than simple natural selection in simple genetically varied populations. However, there are also a number of positive considerations adduced in favour of the hypothesis, many of them (in my view) highly compelling.

Firstly, recursion appears to be a property that is either absolutely present or absolutely absent, so seemingly couldn’t come about as a gradual adaptation [72]. Secondly, there is strong evidence (disputed by some) that no other species on the planet is capable of recursive communication – birdsong, they claim, never gets further than “linear chunking” or iteration of “motifs” [142]. Thirdly, the fact that human linguistic externalisation is modality-independent (sign language has the same level of syntactic complexity as spoken language, and is learnt as rapidly by children in the right environment) seems to constitute good evidence that the Faculty of Language was first a Faculty of Thought [74]. Fourthly, the sudden emergence of productivity around 80,000 years ago appears to be one of the best possible explanations for what Jarred Diamond famously called the “Great Leap Forward” [37]. Fifthly, the extent of language variation in the world can seemingly explained by the fact that the means of externalisation did not actually co-evolve with the core computational system, but are instead much more ancient systems being co-opted for the task [82]. Sixthly, the evolutionary timeframe of the change is certainly not ruled out by the reconstructed genomic evidence used to compare Homo sapiens with its ancestors and cousins [Chapter 4]. And, finally, there is a neuro-anatomical hypothesis for what actually happened to create the key “Merge” mutation – the dorsal and ventral “fiber tracts” linking different language-related areas of the brain formed a ring (which does not exist in birds) [Chapter 3].

There is also evidence from developmental psychology that lends support to the idea that language is bound up with a special form of thought that marks humans out as unique (and this naturally holds even if Chomsky and Berwick’s hypothesis is a fair way off the mark in terms of timeframe and suddenness of evolution). As Antoni Gomila notes in a critical review of Jerry Fodor’s 2008 book The Language of Thought Revisited, “there is no evidence for the systematicity and productivity of thought before the development of language, at the end of the second year” [Gomila, 2011: 151]. Gomila cites the child psychologist Elizabeth Spelke for this claim, whose experiments suggest that babies are born with modular packets of knowledge of particular contents (physical, numerical, biological, intentional), but that such knowledge does not admit of productive combination before language – instead it is context-dependent and encapsulated [Spelke, 2003]. It seems that the role of language in development is to create interaction between these different modules.

Another major virtue of this idea that the LoT is human-specific is that it means we can still maintain the benefits of a largely connectionist view of biological cognition (those benefits espoused by the Churchlands, in particular, general biological plausibility (in terms of physiology and evolution)), and the advantages of Map Theory as a general account of biological cognition. It only means that we have to say that humans may be the only species with a ‘classical program’.

Finally, adopting the Map Theory as an account of the majority of human thought also seems to work far better for explaining the fuzzy nature of human concepts, described by “Prototype Theory” in cognitive linguistics – the research programme pioneered by Eleanor Rosch’s studies about ‘categories’ in the 1970s. Map Theory would seem to suggest that concepts are not discretely structured, but form part of wider cognitive architectures. If one accepts the tight connection between connectionist software and Map Theory, then there is certainly reason to think that Map Theory is highly compatible with Prototype Theory since, as Gomila notes, connectionist models which are based on Prototype Theory have met with increasing success since the 1990s [2011: 149].

   

Overall, I think that the debate between Fodor’s Language of Thought Hypothesis and the “Map Theory” of cognition raise deep and interesting questions about the nature of the mind which are not currently soluble – although some possibilities seem distinctly more likely than others. I think that the LoTH is extremely unlikely to be a true theory of all cognition, and thus that the ‘hard-line’ Fodorians are seriously misled. I think that the Map Theory, most naturally joined with connectionist models, is far less implausible as a general account of the cognitive architecture of biological creatures – however I think it fails to account for productivity in humans. These considerations have ultimately led me to the view that the most likely hypothesis is that Homo sapiens is the only species to possess a Language of Thought, implemented as a ‘classical program’ on top of the connectionist hardware and software that all biological organisms probably possess.

Naturally, I acknowledge that this claim, despite the justifications I have given for it, is still an extremely speculative one. I am also aware that I have an aesthetic bias for this view: I think it is a beautiful notion that humans might be the only creature with a classical program that was key for our success in colonising the planet and reaching civilisation… So it might be totally wrong.

Reference List

Braddon-Mitchell, D and Jackson, F. (2007), The Philosophy of Mind and Cognition, 2^nd edition, Blackwell Publishing.

Chomsky, N. (1995), The Minimalist Program, The MIT Press, Cambridge, M.A.

Chomsky, N & Berwick, R. (2015), Why Only Us? : Language and Evolution, The MIT Press, Cambridge, M.A.

Churchland, P.M. (1989), A Neurocomputational Perspective: The Nature of Mind and the Structure of Science, The MIT Press, Cambridge, M.A.

Churchland, P.M. and P.S. (1990), Could a machine think? Scientific American 262 (1):32-37.

Churchland, P.S.  (1986), Neurophilosophy: Towards a Unified Science of Mind-Brain, The MIT Press, Cambridge, M.A.

Churchland, P.S and Sejnowski, T. (1990), “Neural representation and neural computation”, Philosophical Perspectives 4:343-382.

Fodor, J. (1975), The Language of Thought, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, M.A.

Fodor, J and Pylyshyn Z. (1988), “Connectionism and Cognitive Architecture: A Critical Analysis”, Cognition 28 (1-2):3-71.

Gomila, A. (2011), “The Language of Thought: Still a Game in Town?” Teorema: Revista Internacional De Filosofía, 30(1), 145-155.

Jackendoff, P and Pinker, S. (2005), “What's special about the human language faculty?” Cognition 95 (2).

Spelke, E. (2003), “What Makes Us Smart? Core Knowledge and Natural Language”, en Gentner, D. & Goldin-Meadow, D. (eds.): Language in Mind. Advances in the Study of Language and Thought, The MIT Press, Cambridge, M.A., 277-312.

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[1] The most general and simplistic reason for thinking this is that sensory neurons can be easily analogised to the input nodes in a connectionist model, output nodes can be analogised to the motor neurons and the hidden nodes can be analogised to the web of neural connections in our nervous systems [Braddon-Mitchell & Jackson, 2007: 223])

[2] The most straightforward data included the “distributed representation” used by the brain (held to be strong counter-evidence of the existence of discrete symbols) and the fact of “graceful degradation” (certainly counter-evidence of digital hardware).

Just an Essay Justifying "Universal Grammar" in a non-technical way

21. How successful, in your view, is Chomsky’s attempt to interpret the theory of grammar as an investigation of a human biological capacity?

The research programme that Noam Chomsky began in linguistics, starting with the publication of his monograph, Syntactic Structures, in 1957, and properly expounded in his 1965 work Aspects of the Theory of Syntax, is not very well understood by the majority of its popular and even academic critics. Chomsky’s frequent failure to hedge his claims about the postulated “language organ” (and his penchant for overly strong pronouncements) has contributed to this failure of understanding, since few critics bother to understand how he explicates these terms in his methodological framework or where they sit in his metaphysics of mind. Of course, at the same time, he has himself ignored some issues in biology that ought to have compelled him to slightly change his tune on “innateness”. Nevertheless, in this essay, I claim that, if one does properly understand the methodological and philosophical foundations of the generative-grammar-based research programme into the “Universal Grammar”, two things are evident: 1.) that the programme has been about as successful as its progenitors hoped, if not more (with no degeneration, in Lakatos’ terms), and 2.) that the programme has been successful in the independent sense that it has led to genuine insights about the human mind.

One of the major things that critics of ‘UG’ are wont to gloss over is that, strictly speaking, there is no one “theory of Universal Grammar”. Instead, there is only a general ‘UG’-research programme based on the construction of generative grammars held to capture the innate implicit knowledge which is falsifiably (and each model ought to be falsifiable individually) held to be required for the achievement of human linguistic competence (the generative grammar in the human mind).^[1] As this implies, the empirical support is (and could not be) uniform for ‘UG’, understood as the UG-research programme; instead, because the approaches to generative grammar that have been developed as part of this overall research programme since Chomsky’s exposition of a Transformational Grammar approach in Aspects to the Theory of Syntax (1965) vary in the level of ‘innate’ ‘knowledge’ they postulate, different evidence is required to falsify each of these approaches, and to confirm any one of them relative to the others. In particular, a stronger version of the famous “Poverty of the Stimulus” argument – one which draws on more evidence of linguistic universals, infant reliance on rules and hard-to-empirically-explain examples of “structure-dependence” –  are needed to support the early Transformational Grammar models than for the models proposed since the Principle and Parameters paradigm shift, with the Minimalist Program starting from the postulation that the generative system is simpler than a grammar (per se), and therefore probably being more prone to rejection by evidence of too many universals and such (this would, of course, be rejection relative to another model of generative grammar).

It is very important to acknowledge, of course, that there are some very sensible philosophical critics of the UG research-programme, like the Australian-born philosopher of biology, Fiona Cowie [1999], who see Chomsky’s very use of the word “innate” as problematic from a scientific viewpoint. One of Cowie’s motivations for her, in the end, quite moderate critique of “nativist” theories in What’s Within? is the fact that the word has no clear scientific interpretation. She shares this view with her fellow philosopher of biology, Paul Griffiths (of the University of Sydney), who in his 2002 paper “What is innateness?” points out that the word “innate” is no longer used in any field of biology except cognitive science, and argues that it ought to be discarded in cognitive science, too, since innateness is a “folk-biological” concept which yokes together three biologically separate notions: species-typicality, developmental fixity and intended design [Griffiths, 2002: 2].

Whilst I myself agree with this critique, I do not think it is in the least bit destructive of Chomsky’s research-programme, because I also think (and Griffiths does not explicitly deny) that the generativist talk of an “innate language faculty” can simply be substituted for one of two other phrases: a “developmentally canalised, species-typical language faculty” (in the case of Chomsky and his fellow non-adaptationists (spandrelists) about the evolution of the language faculty) or “an adaptive, environmentally canalised, species-typical language faculty” (in the case of Pinker, Jackendoff and the other adaptationists about the evolution of the language faculty).[2] One small criticism I have of Chomsky (along with fellow generativists like Charles Yang, Robert Berwick, Steven Pinker, Ray Jackendoff, etc) is that he hasn’t made this terminological alteration himself, still using the language of Cartesian or Humboldtian rationalism, of which he has always regarded his work a direct descendant [Chomsky, 1965, 1986]. However, since I don’t think that the use of this unscientific language is a significant problem for the UG-research programme, I will myself, in the rest of this essay, always type the folk term in single inverted commas while still assuming that I am defending Chomsky.

Past this terminological hurdle, the single biggest reason why I think that Chomsky’s research programme has been a success in both the senses I outlined in my introduction is empirical validation. It seems to me quite clear that the theory that Homo sapiens does have a developmentally canalised, species-typical language faculty has not been falsified over the decades, but is instead clearly still the best (indeed, the only) explanation for the empirical evidence of rapid language acquisition and human linguistic competence.

Despite the impression evoked by some critics, Chomsky’s generative research-programme did not begin as a scholastic, a priori enterprise, but was motivated by empirical considerations of a fairly fundamental kind. The reason that Chomsky’s famous 1957 monograph, Syntactic Structures, is often heralded as the founding document of modern cognitive science, despite not framing itself as a work of mentalistic investigation (and containing no argument for the existence of an ‘innate’ “language faculty”) is that Chomsky’s formal conclusions in SS directly entail the powerful scientific conclusion that at least one language (English) cannot be understood in behaviourist terms, and that English speakers must ‘possess’ (in some vague sense, leaving representational and acquisitional issues aside) what Chomsky would later call, in Aspects of the Theory of Syntax, “a system of generative processes” [1965: 4]. The most pivotal part of Chomsky’s monograph is his chapter 3 proof that a finite-state or Markov model (a model which involves the mono-directional chaining of words) is simply inadequate to generate all the grammatical sentences of English, and the implication, explored in the next two chapters (“Phrase Structure Grammar” and “Limitations of Phrase Structure Description”, in which he introduces the notion of a “transformation” to complement the inadequate phrase structure grammar), that an adequate generative grammar must be a hierarchical or syntax-based grammar of some kind.[3] Although the inadequacy of the finite-state model perhaps should have been obvious, it was no trifling result, because it refutes the strongest empiricist view about language production. If it is impossible to formally generate English sentences by a finite-state model, then it is also impossible to generate English sentences by the kind of finite-state model one might want to implement in a computer, or one might imagine existing in a brain: a complicated word-chain device relying on transitional probabilities. One instead needs generative principles, and this fact literally precludes the strongest empiricist understanding of language production.[4]

Evidently, behaviourists wanted to avoid talking about mentation at all, but the theory of language production found within works like Skinner’s Verbal Behavior (the subject of Chomsky’s famously destructive 1959 review) clearly rules out the possibility that human language is produced by a generative grammar. As Steven Pinker writes in The Language Instinct, the finite-state model is directly “congenial to stimulus-response theories: a stimulus elicits a spoken word as a response, then the speaker perceives his or her own response, which serves as the next stimulus, eliciting one out of several words as the next response, and so on” [1994: 93].

Of course, in Syntactic Structures itself, Chomsky uses his chapter 3 proof to motivate a more purely methodological conclusion: that linguistics ought to shift from static, structural description of corpora – the behaviourist methodology of American Structuralism[5] – towards the construction of the kind of descriptively adequate generative grammar he attempts to construct for English in SS (a transformational phrase structure grammar). Yet it is not hard to see how this led to the far bolder scientific shift expounded in Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. In order to make the case for an entirely new vision of linguistics in Aspects, Chomsky extended his insight about the necessity of a creative model for English sentence-production into all languages (on the strongly empirically based contention that no other human language can be adequately described by a finite state model either, supplemented by the empirically based assumption of strong human cognitive universality), and combined this with an argument in support of (essentially) 18^th Century Rationalism. His new claim was that the aim of the discipline should be to construct generative grammars that are descriptively adequate for all natural languages, and explanatorily adequate as “universal grammars”. That is to say, linguists should attempt to describe the ‘innate’ linguistic competence or “system of generative processes” held to be necessary for the acquisition of any natural language by a child [1965: 6].

At this point, I should point out that, whilst I am claiming that Chomsky’s research-programme was empirically motivated at its inception, I am not claiming that all its empirical presuppositions were thoroughly confirmed in 1965. It clearly might have been the case that the evidence collected after 1965 strongly disconfirmed these empirical presuppositions, and thus rendered the research programme untenable. If it had turned out that there were significant cognitive group-differences in Homo sapiens – that some populations don’t have (and couldn’t have) language with any recursion (as Daniel Everett claimed to show, falsely[6]) – then that would be a kind of falsification of the universalist aspect of the programme (although, presumably, that wouldn’t sound the death-knell for the investigation of the linguistic competence of the human populations with the developmentally canalised language faculty). Similarly, if “Nim Chimpsky” (or, for that matter, some other animal) had proven capable of learning actual grammar, rather than mere sign-strings, then that would have been a blow to Chomsky’s pretty significant working assumption that the language faculty is unique to humans (and it would probably have forced him to attribute to the ‘language faculty’ a lower degree of developmental canalisation).

More interestingly, it might have been the case that the evidence gathered after 1965 strongly favoured the hypothesis that language acquisition occurs by means of solely domain-general cognitive processes, as Michael Tomasello’s “usage-based theory of language” holds (a theory of language which, despite its domain-generality, avoids getting wrecked on Chomsky’s SS proof about the inadequacy of Markov word-chains by positing that speakers learn entire grammatical constructions by means of a powerful “theory of mind” and contextual-awareness) [Tomasello, 2003]. If it had turned out that the condition known as “Specific Language Impairment” was in all cases actually just a misdiagnosed general cognitive impairment, or that all fully articulate older children diagnosed with autism or an autism-spectrum disorder have either been misdiagnosed or had full cognitive empathy in the critical period for acquisition, then that would lend strong support to a Tomasello-type theory over one which postulates a language faculty.

As it stands, however, things have not turned out this way. Thus, the UG-research programme has been completely justified in continuing to exist and grow.

 In more recent years, some subtler empirical objections to the UG research-programme have come from the AI community, which has had far more success with trained statistical models (for example, probabilistic context-free grammars) than categorical models (any of the ‘pure’ models created by generativists). The schism between these two worlds – one practical, one theoretical – came to the fore in 2011 after Chomsky made some highly disdainful comments about statistical approaches to “various linguistic problems” (accusing statistical modellers of doing ‘butterfly-collecting’ rather than “science”) at the Brains, Machines and Minds symposium held on MIT’s 150^th Anniversary. Soon after, the Director of Research at Google, Peter Norvig, published an essay on Chomsky online in which he argued that the father of linguistics was entirely in the wrong, since probabilistic models have been far more successful in actual implementations than any categorical ones [Norvig, 2011]. Nevertheless, as Chomsky’s student Charles Yang has argued in response to similar critiques, whilst there is now “a good deal of evidence against the ‘triggering’ model of learning” (which, Yang happily concedes, deserves to be replaced by a “probabilistic model”, which is domain-general) “one needn’t, and shouldn’t, abandon the categorical theory of GRAMMAR”, which is domain-specific [Yang, 2007: 215]. In other words, it is still perfectly cogent to study the abstract generative processes, because, as Chomsky has always claimed, they represent the underlying linguistic competence and nothing more.

 There is one kind of critique of Chomsky’s research-programme which has nothing to do with the empirics of ‘UG’, but the metaphysics. Towards the end of her critique of ‘UG’ in What’s Within? Fiona Cowie brings up an objection of exactly this metaphysical kind. Tapping into a broader philosophical doubt many hard-line connectionists and ‘Churchlandian’ eliminativists have about the computational theory of mind in general, Cowie claims that it is deeply problematic that Chomsky cannot specify what the implicit “knowledge of language” ^[7] he theorises about actually is [Cowie, 1999: 274]. In particular, it is unclear, she claims, in what sense grammar actually could be “represented” [1999: 274].

Despite the seeming importance of this line of objection, Chomsky is simply a deflationist about this question of “representation”, and I think he is right to be so. The reality is that there is no possible theory of linguistic-competence – no possible explanatory scientific theory of language – other than one which posits ‘knowledge’ in the form of a system of “rules and representations” [Chomsky, 1980]. This means that Chomsky’s UG research-programme is the only possible scientific research programme into the faculty of language. The fact that, as Chomsky himself says in a reply to the philosopher Georges Rey (quoting Randy Gallistel) “we clearly do not understand how the nervous system computes,” or even “the foundations of its ability to compute,” should not put a halt to the only scientific investigation into the human language faculty, just as it shouldn’t put a halt to any other cognitive scientific studies (including in other species) [Chomsky in Chomsky and his Critics, 2003: 276]. As Chomsky says in that same reply, “surely no one expects that some isolable part of the organism is dedicated to digestion, or navigation, or language, or any other component that is singled out for investigation in any rational approach to the study of a complex system” [Chomsky, 2003: 276].

In summary, I believe that Chomsky’s attempt to interpret the theory of grammar as an investigation of a human biological capacity has been highly successful, according to any reasonable criteria for such things. The Universal Grammar-research programme he began in the early 1960s has enjoyed significant internal development while its core presuppositions have been strongly confirmed. This has, in turn, revealed to us important insights about the human mind.

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[1] Of course, the “theory of Universal Grammar” might then be understood as the empirical presuppositions necessary for the tenability of this programme in general. However, across the history of the UG-research programme, it seems to me that the only constant empirical presuppositions are: 1.) human cognitive universality (no significant cognitive group-differences in Homo sapiens), and 2.) the existence, in all humans without severe impairment, of a developmentally canalised, domain-specific, computational ‘module’ (in the vaguest possible sense) which explains human “linguistic competence” (and possibly several other human abilities) for which we can construct generative models (not even grammars per se) by investigating the syntax of the world’s languages. It seems to me that many critics who mount general attacks on “Universal Grammar” believe they are attacking a stronger thesis than the conjunction of these two propositions.

[2] Strictly speaking, it would be best to rephrase Chomsky’s usage of “innate language faculty” with “a developmentally canalised, species-typical language faculty which originated as a spandrel but proved adaptive and was then selected for” [Chomsky, 2012: 14].  

[3] He doesn’t use the word “hierarchical” in SS.

[4] Of course, this in itself shows nothing about the ‘innateness’ (more properly, developmental canalization, etc) of the generative processes necessary for language production in an adult speaker. In itself, it also clearly doesn’t rule out the possibility of probabilistic language models more sophisticated than Markov chains (i.e. probabilistic generative grammars), or, arguably, Michael Tomasello’s usage-based theory of language [2003], which I’ll discuss later.  

[5] Of which one of the major proponents was Chomsky’s teacher and mentor, Zellig Harris.

[6] Pirahã does have recursion, and (more fundamentally) Piraha speakers can learn Portuguese, so Everett’s ‘argument’, such as it is, poses no problem for the research programme at all [Nevins, Pesetsky, Rodrigues: 2009].

[7] Which he has tried to re-term the “cognizance of language” in an attempt to stop the philosophical controversy.

Two Old Socratic (Facebook) Dialogues on Aesthetics (with a particular focus on literature), the Value of Literary Analysis and the Value of (Different Forms of) High Art

Note: this is slightly redacted. In both dialogues, I sent several amusing gifs and HR reacted to some of them. I have eliminated all traces of this and stitched together the remaining fragments to make the dialogue seamless. There are also a couple of other redactions done to anonymise non-prominent persons.

1 March
TA
01/03/2016 15:54
what are your aesthetic views precisely
(other than, photography is lame)
TA
01/03/2016 16:02
last year, i was saying there are true judges and you were saying there are not
HR
01/03/2016 16:20
the view of mine that I was referring to is, I suppose, not really a strictly philosophical aesthetic problem
It's the view that: art is a terrible medium for direct communication and thus should be minimally 'about' ideas and maximally in pursuit of some other, mystical kind of thing which I haven't yet figured out
HR
01/03/2016 16:20
this isn't an issue that seems to interest you
TA
01/03/2016 16:20
oh yeah
the mystical thing
you lunatic
HR
01/03/2016 16:21
but I mean, you can reject the mystical bit
and accept that it makes very little sense to decide to communicate serious, complex ideas in art
TA
01/03/2016 16:21
i think art should be about what it's like to be a fucking human bean!
HR
01/03/2016 16:21
yeah, lol
TA
01/03/2016 16:21
and that wasn't a typo
Hector Ramage
01/03/2016 16:21
the classic thing is
(I got that)
DFW made pretty shit art, I feel, if that was his central criterion
TA
01/03/2016 16:22
yes yes yes
that's what everyone says
in the new yorker etc
HR
01/03/2016 16:22
and, anyway, he entertained two meaningfully opposed ideas about aesthetics throughout his media career
TA
01/03/2016 16:22
dt max, james wood etc
HR
01/03/2016 16:22
one was about being a human bean
the other was that making and reading literature represents the zenith of intellectual achievement
TA
01/03/2016 16:24
surely the best way of figuring out what you think a given genre of art SHOULD be like is thinking about the properties of the works in that genre of art that you do like
HR
01/03/2016 16:24
naturally
TA
01/03/2016 16:24
for example, i like mister squishy
so i think fiction sometimes should be highly experimental
and i like good old neon
so i think fiction should sometimes be weird first-person philosophical things
and i mostly liked the more non-fictiony bits of infinite jest
so i think fiction should sometimes be non-fictiony
and i like the road
HR
01/03/2016 16:26
I think that if I don't think too hard about it, I like M Squishy
but I think I'm intensity matching when I do that
TA
01/03/2016 16:26
so i think fiction should have nice spare sentences and emotional power
but then these don't all line up nicely
overlapping family resemblances
i think it's easier to say what i don't think fiction should be
come to think of it
HR
01/03/2016 16:27
yes
I don't think fiction should ever really be written when the author is proceeding essentially as if they were writing an essay
and I am fairly convinced that DFW did that all the time
and this is possibly unsurprising given that he spent a lot of time in creative writing programs founded on the fallacious view that art is about communicating ideas
the edifice of modern English literary academia is built on this fallacious foundation
TA
01/03/2016 16:29
quite
i agree with that, more or less
not entirely of course
communicating ideas
HR
01/03/2016 16:30
(dfw was almost right when he said that 'fiction exists to make you feel less lonely')
(but he formulated that thought incorrectly, and this is only part of fiction's 'job')
TA
01/03/2016 16:30
is really central to all literary fiction
but i guess the key is that the ideas should have extra power by virtue of being expressed in a literary form and NOT complicated philosophical ideas
eg heart of darkness
is good
imo
because it expresses some vague and nevertheless important ideas about mankind etc
in a way that is almost irreducible in its power
HR
01/03/2016 16:32
I kind of agree, I think
the irreducibility of the experience of consuming art is fairly central to my argument against the current orthodoxy
(lol)
but every act of exegesis, in literature, is a reduction
a really brutal reduction
TA
01/03/2016 16:33
yes
HR
01/03/2016 16:33
and because fiction is fiction, if you want to get at the ideas that an author putatively is trying to express, if you want to get to the artichoke heart, you must vivisect
TA
01/03/2016 16:33
what do you think
of farenheit 451
(to go through school texts)
too didactic?
HR
01/03/2016 16:33
(the only true way to express what HoD is expressing is to give someone a copy of HoD)
TA
01/03/2016 16:33
yes
HR
01/03/2016 16:33
pretty didactic
TA
01/03/2016 16:34
similar to HoD, i think dickens novels are probably a more irreducibly affecting way of polemicising class divisions than essays
however
i still find them a bit boring
HR
01/03/2016 16:35
same
TA
01/03/2016 16:35
stiglitz is easier to read
HR
01/03/2016 16:35
no doubt
honestly, now that you draw my attention to it, the most useful and laudable function of didactic art is probably the introduction of complex ideas to schoolchildren
TA
01/03/2016 16:37
yessiree
so art is childish
HR
01/03/2016 16:37
that art is childish
there is a reason that we treat allegory as a very distinct subset of literature
the art is robbed of something by the prominence and barefacèdness of the ideas
the giving famishes the craving
TA
01/03/2016 16:39
hmm
HR
01/03/2016 16:39
(Eliot quote deliberately wanky)
my above assertion about the way we treat allegory could be totally wrong
I just thought it up then
but it think it's plausible
the weird and unacknowledged truth is that the establishment treats all writing as if it were allegory
TA
01/03/2016 16:41
they have to to exist don't they
HR
01/03/2016 16:41
for a literature professor, writing exists so that ideas can be sleuthed out by tweedvested academics
what have to exist?
TA
01/03/2016 16:42
literature professors
HR
01/03/2016 16:42
well it is of course in their interest to promulgate their own warped view of art
so that they have jobs
TA
01/03/2016 16:42
and but so
and so but
now did they now did they
HR
01/03/2016 16:43
oh god, yes
TA
01/03/2016 16:43
definitely something to be said for the view that intellectualising art
HR
01/03/2016 16:43
are you referring to that Wallace 'story'
TA
01/03/2016 16:44
sort of bleaches it
kills it
wrings it dry
whatever
[insert metaphor here]
HR
01/03/2016 16:44
vivisection is my central metaphor for this process
go on
TA
01/03/2016 16:44
i mean, even philosophically, like we're doing
i don't mean what they do
i mean this
HR
01/03/2016 16:45
ah right
well, we're mostly intellectualising the intellectualisation of art
TA
01/03/2016 16:45
yes, true enough
HR
01/03/2016 16:45
we're doing meta-aesthetics
TA
01/03/2016 16:45
but my own personal journey
suggests that intellectualising art can make you stop caring about it
to some extent
well i mean
eg
if you like painting
and then you think, 'why do i like painting?'
you may conclude that you should be doing better things with your time
or that liking painting is fundamentally pretentious, and you should like movies or video games instaed
HR
01/03/2016 16:47
I see what you're saying
but my interest in literature has largely been kept aflame by my articulation of these views
TA
01/03/2016 16:48
hmm
yes
HR
01/03/2016 16:48
I feel as if I'm defending a sylvan grove from interlopers who only want its timber
they can't see the beauty of the unsullied, unhewed forest
unhewn, rather
TA
01/03/2016 16:49
yep
wel the strange thing about music
is that -- maybe because it has such a direct effect --
it seems impossible to not care about it
HR
01/03/2016 16:50
yes
for many people music is a pretty fundamental part of quotidian life
slightly more important than other kinds of entertainment
slightly more necessary
I think it probably is because of its emotional immediacy
music is minimally cerebral
TA
01/03/2016 16:52
but the thing is, fiction reqiures a much bigger investment than even shostakovich (or whatever)
not even literary fiction
HR
01/03/2016 16:52
yes
TA
01/03/2016 16:52
like john green
HR
01/03/2016 16:52
a bigger temporal and cerebral investment
TA
01/03/2016 16:53
and that
's why one is more inclined to reject it
because there are far more efficient thrills avaiable
and that's the central problem fiction has
how to justify the investment
HR
01/03/2016 16:53
yes
TA
01/03/2016 16:53
and that's why we're asking these questions
and that's why i'm typing
HR
01/03/2016 16:54
you have to make the reader want to work for it
--dfw, roughly
TA
01/03/2016 16:54
and that's why god is real
HR
01/03/2016 16:54
godel
TA
01/03/2016 16:54
godel is real
dfw, roughly is a strange name
sounds like a bostan nurlanov character name
HR
01/03/2016 16:54
it does
TA
01/03/2016 16:55
now
hmm
anyway, this greater investment is why you and i are agreed (is it not) that reading pulp fiction makes no sense whatsoever
i put that parenthetical interjection in a rather awkward place
it's hard to parse
and by pulp fiction i don't mean the book version of that annoying tarantino movie
i mean junk fiction
HR
01/03/2016 16:57
yes, I got that
TA
01/03/2016 16:57
i actually think it makes sense that the book industry should lose lots of people
with the emergence of other media
HR
01/03/2016 16:58
it makes sense that it should lose peeps, or that this happens
?
TA
01/03/2016 16:59
it makes sense that average people would flock away from books
why read some shitty romance book or fifty shades of grey or whatever
or even george rr martin books
when you could watch tv versions
maybe that's not right
there are probably some unique aspects of george rr martin books, for example
maybe he writes well??
sex scenes are longer?
HR
01/03/2016 17:00
moving images and actual sounds are certainly more emotionally immediate than fiction
and presumably the main reason to read pulp fiction is to experience various emotions
although that's a bit reductive
TA
01/03/2016 17:01
but anyway, i still think it makes sense that crappy books would die.
i don't think it 'makes sense' in the same way that excellent fiction would die
and i think that's where we wholly agree
in other words,
there is sufficient unique experiences to be reaped from certain complex fiction to warrant the continued popularity of fiction in the marketplace of entertainment
HR
01/03/2016 17:03
yes
well, this conversation has suggested to me that we agree more than I thought
TA
01/03/2016 17:03
but then again
hecfuck
i kind of just say things
HR
01/03/2016 17:04
I have sorted out the destructive parts of my thesis, but not the constructive parts
TA
01/03/2016 17:04
because they help me fit in
it's socially convenient for me to say that literary fiction ought to still be a fairly big business
but should it
HR
01/03/2016 17:04
I dunno
TA
01/03/2016 17:05
i haven't read any fiction for quite a while now
HR
01/03/2016 17:05
that issue actually doesn't really interest me
TA
01/03/2016 17:05
it does actuallly
by OUGHT, i mean according to your aesthetic pantheon
aesthetic cosmos
hierarchy
HR
01/03/2016 17:05
aesthetic chaos
TA
01/03/2016 17:06
in my time
i have started a fair few serious fiction books and not completed most of them
it was a struggle to complete catch 22 the first time
i never completed oliver twist in year 9
(half-way through approx)
i never completed great sexpectations
i never completed crime and punishment
i haven't completed bleak house
i never completed midnight's children
(approx half-way through)
samuel beckett's books seemed a bore, the little i read of them
HR
01/03/2016 17:08
(I feel you may have misunderstood some of my views if you think they have a huge amount of specific stuff to say about the market for serious fiction)
TA
01/03/2016 17:08
i never completed ulysses
HR
01/03/2016 17:08
I think, almost, that fiction should just be protracted poetry
TA
01/03/2016 17:09
well i was being too general perhaps
but anyway
ok
but you don't really adhere to that view completely
that's too monistic
monic
it's too reductive
HR
01/03/2016 17:09
character and plot should be subsumed and subordinated as techniques
that's true
I mean it very loosely
the point is that language should be the most important aspect of literature and the things we have to say about it
TA
01/03/2016 17:10
yes
Language
interesting use of language
is key
HR
01/03/2016 17:10
the way certain words were combined to portray or evoke or circumscribe some atom of real experience
TA
01/03/2016 17:10
i would agree with that
in fact, that's an excellent thesis
HR
01/03/2016 17:11
the task of the professor would be far more technicentric than it currently is
TA
01/03/2016 17:11
fiction should, above all, use language in an interesting way
i agree with that wholly
HR
01/03/2016 17:11
that ugly neologism means 'centred on technique'
TA
01/03/2016 17:11
it fits my views
except on ulysses
actually it probably still fits my views on ulysses
because what makes ulysses a wank
is not the interesting use of language per se
but how cryptic it is
i wouldn't mind lots of old english words and so on
if it was easier to follow and less frustrating
HR
01/03/2016 17:12
yes
but this problem is possibly because Joyce was an acolyte of the ideocentric view of literature, at least when he wrote U
TA
01/03/2016 17:14
(in case you didn't realise, this prescription still works with dfw)
(in my opinion)
HR
01/03/2016 17:14
perhaps
except that dfw is always trying to tell me some convoluted and almost certainly specious b. s. about modern life through his characters, plots, and atomic uses of language
TA
01/03/2016 17:16
well, actually
i think hector
HR
01/03/2016 17:16
(and, also, I don't really like dfw's style
the stories of his that I really like are ones in which he very consciously writes in a way that differs from his corpus)
TA
01/03/2016 17:16
you should rename your thesis or doctrine (or whatever you want to call it)
'techniemoticentrism' or 'technipathocentrism' or something
because, really, you're saying
well i don't need to explain what you're saying
HR
01/03/2016 17:18
(NB that I have not, in this convo, fully delineated my feelings on this issue. you are a lonely mariner on the bridge, looking out over the benighted sea of aesthetics, and you can only see the tip of my conceptual iceberg)
TA
01/03/2016 17:18
you genius
HR
01/03/2016 17:18
yes
TA
01/03/2016 17:18
you are a god
HR
01/03/2016 17:19
i thought using an iceberg as a metaphor for something only partially disclosed was really original
that reminds me
part of why conceptual visual art is so shit is because it's all about ideas and minimally about traditional technique and medium
I don't think a visual artist has ever had an idea worth sharing
TA
01/03/2016 17:21
but anyway, even if i can only see the tip of your iceberg (now it sounds gay)
is my suggestion not apt
a more accurate description of your views (in one word)
a more accurate description of your views (in one word)
HR
01/03/2016 17:22
no, yes, it is certainly apt
I just said that because I would have openly mentioned the primacy of emotion in my picture of art
but didn't get the chance to
the crucial thing is that the reader's emotional response is triggered not by what they read but by the way language is used to express the thing they read
TA
01/03/2016 17:24
yes
well, both, obviousy
HR
01/03/2016 17:24
it is mystical, to me. often it just feels insane.
yes
TA
01/03/2016 17:25
no you're right to think this
i think this should be uncontroversial, almost
HR
01/03/2016 17:25
mystical or insane?
TA
01/03/2016 17:25
because art is all about medium
to think your aesthetic view
HR
01/03/2016 17:25
yes
and the primacy of medium has been insidiously sidelined in English academia
TA
01/03/2016 17:26
art without medium-focus is like love without an object!
HR
01/03/2016 17:26
literary academia, rather
TA
01/03/2016 17:26
it's not quite true to say that it has been insidiously sidelined
well
i mean
because
how do you analyse the techniques themselves without talking about their effect?
in english, you analyse techniques to work out what the author is trying to say by those techniques
HR
01/03/2016 17:27
yes
this latter approach is orthodoxy
TA
01/03/2016 17:28
but you are partly saying, possibly, that we should dispense with analysis
HR
01/03/2016 17:28
you cannot analyse a technique intrinsically, divorced from its denotations
TA
01/03/2016 17:29
hence you shouldn't analyse techniques?
HR
01/03/2016 17:29
no
I think there is room for analysis in my theory
but it must be closer to critical, rather than theoretical/academic writing
more New Yorker, less English department
the analyser should say, maybe, how something made them feel, and how the marriage of subject matter and language aroused these feelings
this is all very dodgy-sounding
I have not thought it through yet
also, you need not continue this convo if it is boring you
I don't have too much more to say that I wouldn't rather say in person
TA
01/03/2016 17:32
no
it is not boring
to send gifs
i think that's not too dodgy
but i also think that you're probably preaching the demise of the school subject
HR
01/03/2016 17:33
yes, at least in its current incarnation
I am not silencing the colloquy forever
there is stuff to be said about art
but I think the current topics of conversation are the wrong ones
it's like admiring the Mona Lisa for its frame, or something
we're missing the good stuff
It was very heartening to read some interviews with William Gass where he articulates similar views about literature
'Rilke's ideas are total shit, but it's not about the ideas'
to paraphrase him
he does say "total shit", though

1 June
TA
01/06/2016 16:32
[Pasted status of someone I was not friends with at the time, names acronysed just now] 
"AM
3 hrs ·
What's the point of fiction writing
Share
55
Comments
PW
PW Only tool against other mind scepticism.
· 3 · 3 hrs"
don't know who AM is
HR
01/06/2016 17:25
lol
TA
01/06/2016 17:25
yeah
HR
01/06/2016 17:26
lol at both
TA
01/06/2016 17:26
we did recently answer this question ourselves
what was the conclusion?
HR
01/06/2016 17:26
we didn't exactly ask this question
aesthetic experience is mystical and difficult to talk sensibly aobut
W's answer is laughably stupid
TA
01/06/2016 17:28
it is
true
HR
01/06/2016 17:28
he's just being DFW, of course
TA
01/06/2016 17:28
yes
my thought
HR
01/06/2016 17:28
I have no doubt that that's a deliberate Wallace echo
TA
01/06/2016 17:28
if he used the word "solipsism" he would have been caught out directly
naked
HR
01/06/2016 17:28
yep
we need Ramon Glazov on the scene
TA
01/06/2016 17:28
yeah
i think when you're talking about value, you can't just be mystical
because that's, in a sense, circular
HR
01/06/2016 17:29
I'm not saying art's valuable cos it's mystical
TA
01/06/2016 17:29
but our conclusion was that there are several unique aspects to the literary genre
that make it intrinsically valuable
as compared with other genres
i think that was something we agreed on
HR
01/06/2016 17:30
that's no doubt true
we agreed on the primacy of technique
as a topic of aesthetic discussion
TA
01/06/2016 17:30
he should have said that
yes
HR
01/06/2016 17:30
technical achievement is one aspect of art that you can talk about quite confidently
and it is clearly integral to good art
TA
01/06/2016 17:32
quite
we were both also in agreement that there is no point to pulp, trash or pop fiction
and if AM is going to write that
HR
01/06/2016 17:32
yep
TA
01/06/2016 17:32
then i would advise him to stop
TA
01/06/2016 17:35
[Pasted another comment from the thread]
"HB: Fiction is important!! It's a legitimate method to creatively explore complicated ideas, as well as summarising them in a way that can be understood outside of academia. Yes there are bourgeois forms of the novel, like there are bourgeois forms of every medium, but nah fiction writing is huuuuge
this i think is a legitimate point. you raised this idea about three years ago and it was a mild revelation for me"
HR
01/06/2016 17:35
all of these answers are shite
TA
01/06/2016 17:35
no
just the idea that allegory
HR
01/06/2016 17:35
B's answer is almost sensible
TA
01/06/2016 17:36
can be a good means of transmitting an idea with greater punch and emotional force
HR
01/06/2016 17:36
you can make ideas moving, somehow
TA
01/06/2016 17:36
an idea or set of ideas
satire
HR
01/06/2016 17:36
and there are /some/ ideas which can be 'summarised' in art
TA
01/06/2016 17:36
gulliver's travels
HR
01/06/2016 17:36
yep
but satire is down the non-fictional end of the fiction spectrum
TA
01/06/2016 17:36
and also books like catch 22 and infinite jest and crime and punishment and c and c and c
to use the dfw formalism
HR
01/06/2016 17:37
nah
I don't know
TA
01/06/2016 17:38
no dude, this is an obvious point
most books have ideas to express
HR
01/06/2016 17:38
the idea on which literary scholarship is predicated -- that fiction is as valid a /communicative/ medium as plain prose -- is just total BS
TA
01/06/2016 17:38
and very often the form can lend greater power to such ideas
HR
01/06/2016 17:38
that's true
that's true
but this "It's a legitimate method to creatively explore complicated ideas" is just really false
TA
01/06/2016 17:39
this is a truism
very false
if you really mean complicated
HR
01/06/2016 17:39
this is the view I rail against
that you can achieve with fiction the conceptual complexity attainable in plain prose
TA
01/06/2016 17:39
yeah no shit
HR
01/06/2016 17:39
and it does sound insane, but heaps of people seem to believe it
TA
01/06/2016 17:39
you cunt
no one serious believes that
HR
01/06/2016 17:40
that is the foundational belief of contemporary English scholarship
you get a text, you treat it as if it were an essay, you explicate the ideas that author was using the text to convey
TA
01/06/2016 17:40
yes it makes no sense, we're agreed
it's like dissecting a toad when all you need is a sample of skin
(toad skin)
HR
01/06/2016 17:41
vivisection etc
B's a commie
TA
01/06/2016 17:43
anyway, 'idea' is an overly vague word
HR
01/06/2016 17:43
proposition about reality
TA
01/06/2016 17:43
what we are talking about (in fiction) is precisely not propositions
we're talking about 'themes' that can be translated into propositions
or maybe are expressed as propositions in the more heavy-handed moments, through a character's words or thoughts
HR
01/06/2016 17:44
precisely
but the job of literary scholars, apparently, is to extract propositions
TA
01/06/2016 17:44
yes
HR
01/06/2016 17:44
to impute them to the author or to the novel
and provide 'evidence' for the claim that the author thinks P
TA
01/06/2016 17:46
well, i mean, i think basically all of contemporary literary scholarship (at least what we saw) is just, you know, continental philosophy
it's like the books are just conduits for awful philosophy
HR
01/06/2016 17:46
yes
they are very similar disciplines
TA
01/06/2016 17:46
self-referential philosophy about texts
(often)
HR
01/06/2016 17:47
yeah
TA
01/06/2016 17:47
so, i mean, it's just a way of spending your life discussing and producing 'deepities'
to use dennett's coinage
HR
01/06/2016 17:47
yep
as I have said, to try to 'analyse' a text is to reduce it
and emergent qualities are lost in the process of reduction
TA
01/06/2016 17:48
we also agreed on this
HR
01/06/2016 17:48
aesthetic experience, at best, is irreducible and /untranslatable/, even
because the experience /is/ the words used
as in an excellent stanza in a poem, say
TA
01/06/2016 17:49
i know what you mean yes
trying to convey verbally the effect of a poetic couplet is like trying to paint an explanation of the effect of a great painting
why would you do it?
HR
01/06/2016 17:50
yes
and this extends to the 'meaning' of the text
why bother saying: 'Stevens is talking here about death. He thinks that death x and y, and we see this here and here'
TA
01/06/2016 17:51
yes
HR
01/06/2016 17:52
as I said last time we talked about this, the only way to explain HoD to someone, truly, is to just make them read the book
TA
01/06/2016 17:52
well, see, this ties in with what i was saying about english scholars' secret identity as cont. philosophers
they just use authors' names and quotes from various authors' books
throw in various literary terms
to 'analyse' these
but the service of their analysis is always some terrible sophistic thesis about
you know
HR
01/06/2016 17:53
something entirely confected
TA
01/06/2016 17:53
society, reality, constructions of things, the interactions of texts and reality etc
HR
01/06/2016 17:53
with vague peripheral connections to the themes of the work of art
yeah
well, yeah, current scholarship is obsessed with the nature of texts themselves
very reflexive
immensely boring
but, you know, DFW was totally into conty stuff like Derrida
and, as we have mentioned, he seems to have had a really lame idea of what literature is for
he really does seem to treat fictitious texts as essays
TA
01/06/2016 17:56
does that give you seizures? [in reference to a rapidly flashing gif I had sent imprinted with the DFW quote: "Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out."]
HR
01/06/2016 17:56
the quote gives me seizures
TA
01/06/2016 17:57
every part of it gives me autism and cancer, to use the locutions of young teenage boys on the internet
but clearly he treated fictitious texts as essays because he worshipped his intellect ay
i mean,
like,
HR
01/06/2016 17:58
he definitely did
I recently ranted in my head about DFW while waiting for my toast to pop
TA
01/06/2016 17:58
i personally basically get why one would write the stuff that wallace wrote
HR
01/06/2016 17:58
it seems pretty clear that he was obsessed with being seen as clever
TA
01/06/2016 17:58
like, if it's just what came most naturally to you
obviously it didn't come entirely naturally
HR
01/06/2016 17:58
and in fact was not nearly as clever as many people have been duped into thinking he was
TA
01/06/2016 17:59
but if he wasn't a natural nabokov or joyce or woolf or delillo or gauss
or whatever
then you know
HR
01/06/2016 17:59
yeagh
TA
01/06/2016 17:59
like, it might just be that the kind of fiction he wrote really was the kind of fiction that he most naturally fell into
and he's just lucky that people liked it -- but you can't necessarily hate him for that
HR
01/06/2016 18:00
that's true
but we have evidence that he really cared about being seen as smart
so it isn't impossible that that impulse infected his writing
(I'm thinking of how he lied about getting full marks on his SATs and some other examples  which I have forgotten)
TA
01/06/2016 18:01
yes, true enough
the fact that he didn't want to take a maths course
because it would lower his WAM
HR
01/06/2016 18:01
yeah
TA
01/06/2016 18:02
but, as i've said to you before
i -- and, perforce, many other people -- enjoy the bits in infinite jest where he just goes off on some tangent with lots of fancy words and information about this or that, and i enjoyed (at the time) mister squishy and stories like it
you're being somewhat of a purist or idealist when it comes to your criteria for good art
this has created blindspots
HR
01/06/2016 18:05
maybe
I get Wallace, I still like some of his stuff
I just don't think it's /smart/
or care about smartness
TA
01/06/2016 18:05
provocative

Socratic (Facebook) Dialogue on Ethical Questions Pertaining to Paraphiliae, Immoral Desires & Pornography, in which the Conflict between Virtue Ethics and Consequentialism is Foregrounded

TA
https://twitter.com/juliagalef/status/782277981255237632
the weird thing about the yudkowsky rationalists is that they're preoccupied with the weirdest shit. like what the fck is wrong with calling a horny guy horny when you're writing an article attacking him for constantly talking about his penis? it's fucking weird. i see no ethical problem with it at all, and i don't see why anyone should. in terms of journalistic 'bias', it's one of the strangest things to get antsy about.
 julia galef also posted a tweet a couple of weeks back about the nude donald trump statue that was erected in new york where she was like 'i'm not sure about this. how would democrats like it if the same thing was done for their candidate?'  you're not allowed to mock a megalomaniacal racist misogynistic fascist because you have to always maintain absolute 'ethical consistency'. i mean, fuck. that's crazy. that's just batshit insane. and the charge that it is ethically inconsistent is itself predicated on an assumption about equality between the candidates. surely if one accepts that trump is uniquely repugnant and uniquely dangerous, then humiliating him and not humiliating hillary makes perfect sense!
also i do actually have a big problem with the idea that no-one should feel ashamed of their sexuality. this seems to be a popular idea for lesswrongers (i think i read a luke muehlhauser essay [actually it was a guy called Scott Alexander] where he argued this). but i, like most people (i believe), think it's *absolutely right* that paedophiles are made to feel shame for their sexuality, and i think that exhibitionists should be made to feel shame, and i think that sexual sadists should be made to feel shame also (this last one is controversial, but the violent, cold, inhuman emotions that motivate a sexual sadist, even if they are the kind of sexual sadist that is very strong on consent, are presumably the same that motivate actual rapists, and i don't see why people shouldn't try to suppress those darker, more animalistic and grotesque sides of themselves)
TA
10:06
i suspect derek parfit would agree with me but i'm not sure. i hope so
i know he himself wouldn't tolerate any sadistic thoughts in his own mind, and no doubt doesn't have any
HR
11:13
do you think we should shame paedophiles because doing so might lower the probability that they will sexually abuse kids, or just because they 'deserve it'?
TA
11:14
both
we should shame psychopaths
for both reasons
and it is the same with paedophiles (who may sometimes also be psychopaths)
i mean
obviously, i don't mean toxic shaming
HR
11:15
I don't think the latter reason makes any sense
right
what you mean is: make sure they are aware that their urges are abnormal and evil
TA
11:15
i don't know what you mean "makes any sense". it doesn't make any sense to a utilitarian, probably
but i'm not a utilitarian
HR
11:16
which probably involves at least inadvertently shaming them
TA
11:16
yes that's what i mean by shaming
HR
11:16
it doesn't make sense to me to excoriate someone for something beyond their control
e.g. being a paedophile
TA
11:16
i never used the word excoriate
but also this is absurd
HR
11:16
(vs. being a sex offender)
TA
11:16
this is a dumb thing to say
'beyond their control'
what is what is not beyond people's control?
do you have a principled way of drawing that line?
HR
11:17
you realise I am talking here about people in whom a paraphilic sexual attraction to children is manifest, right?
TA
11:17
(no)
HR
11:18
not people who sexually abuse children
TA
11:18
i don't think we should 'excoriate' people who haven't sexually abused any children
i believe in rehabilitation yes
i believe in trying to reform people
excoriation would not be helpful
i'm not a retributivist
i don't believe in vindictive justice
i didn't mean any of this by 'shame'
what i want to say is this: urges can be immoral
HR
11:19
no shit
TA
11:19
unclean motives are real
i'm not a consequentialist
HR
11:20
yeah
TA
11:20
and the corollary is that immoral urges should be criticised and condemned
HR
11:20
sure
TA
11:20
or at least
'looked down upon' by society
that is, sadism should be looked down upon by society
(for example)
and i think it mostly is
HR
11:21
unadulterated sadism, sure
I probably break with you on sexual sadism
TA
11:22
yes right
i think almost everyone does
i see it as a kind of stoic thing
or at least, i have for a while now
to be fully moral
one must also try to control one's emotions
as well as one's actions
emotions and desires
some desires are immoral
and even if they are not as immoral as some other things
it is better to suppress them
HR
11:25
right
TA
11:25
even if being a consent-requiring sexual sadist isn't remotely as bad as being a rapist, it still betrays a kind of immorality in the form of a switchonable contempt for human beings, a switchonable rejection of human dignity and equality
HR
11:26
so you equally condemn sexual masochism?
(since, of course, it takes two to sadomasochistically tango)
TA
11:26
well slightly less so
because it's not a violent urge
HR
11:27
and the masochist clearly also rejects "human dignity"
yeah
TA
11:27
look, stoic beliefs are extreme, right, and you need unique brain chemistry to even get close to implementing them
but it is super clear from, say, seneca's writings that he'd be on board with this
like he even says shit like 'you should try not to feel anger'
right?.
HR
11:28
sure
I am not disputing your point on Stoic grounds
TA
11:28
no i know you are not
i'm explaining
but the point i would wish to strongly defend is this
the view that there's nothing at all wrong with sadistic urges, that they're perfectly fine, is false
or wrong
well i mean
obviously consequentialists disagree with this
HR
11:30
this is where I disagree with you
(I think)
TA
11:32
i think you're more utilitarian than me then
you're not a virtue ethicist
well you could still be a virtue ethicist
more epicurean
but see, this is what i don't really get: unless you are pretty much dismissing instinctive intuitions wholesale in the utilitarian fashion, why wouldn't you value the purity of being free from violent or sadistic thoughts and desires?
or the value of trying to fight them
HR
11:36
remember, though, sexual sadism, as a pathology, is really only superficially like sadism
sadism is a lingering urge to cause physical or mental suffering, and the derivation of enjoyment from inflicting suffering on others
in fact, I imagine that /consent/ is actually a problem for a (non-sexual) sadist
whereas sexual sadism does not seem to necessitate any violation of consent
TA
11:38
right
but this is utilitarian thinking
'purity' and 'dignity' are values lost in this calculus
i'm talking religious values
HR
11:38
it involves a connection between arousal and the infliction of /mere/ physical pain on a (willing) partner (I think)
yes
TA
11:38
i'm following the ancient traditions of the eastern religions and stoiicism in teh west
HR
11:38
very odd
TA
11:38
i'm thinking like a monk
HR
11:39
a very odd thing to invoke in this case
TA
11:39
in the christian tradition
HR
11:39
because it so obviously leads you to the wrong conclusion!
TA
11:39
right but many share my intuitions
the urge for moral purity is ancient
HR
11:40
of course
TA
11:40
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDKawZWyawE
HR
11:40
very nebulous term
TA
11:40
chomsky expresses extreme moral views here
i agree with the moral sentiment he expresses, even though it is truly extreme, when you look at the behaviour of average humans (including me)
when i say 'i agree with the sentiment' i mean i find it powerful
but you know with chomsky there's a moral consistency here too
because he thinks treating humans as cogs is immoral
in general
he thinks that wage labour is immoral
and that unnecessary hierarchies are immoral
my highest moral intuitions align with these views. now, i may not think that wage labour is going anywhere, or could suddenly disappear
but my highest moral intuitions do suggest such views as well
HR
11:44
I don't think Chomsky's views in this clip are /that/ extreme, actually, at least regarding the pornography industry as it exists and has existed
TA
11:45
no but
he says anyone who gets off to this stuff has a problem
that's the vast majority of the male population
HR
11:45
well, he specifically calls it "the degradation of women"
TA
11:45
that's an EXTREME view
yeah he says a standard picture
of women in underwear is the degradation of women
HR
11:46
that is extreme
true
but obviously becomes less extreme when you consider video pornography
TA
11:47
'that's not what human beings are'
that's telling right
he's talking about human dignity
he's channeling the kinds of religious, anti-utilitarian values i was talking about
that's the key sentence
'that's not what human beings are'
HR
11:48
sure
TA
11:48
that is bound up in his rejection of wage labour
that valuation of human dignity i mean
HR
11:49
I don't think this is actually materially connected to sexual sadism, though
TA
11:49
'eliminate the conditions in which women can't get decent jobs'
ah yeah
but maybe it's another video
but chomsky says somewhere
what i just mentioned
that anyone who gets off to pornography has a problem
HR
11:51
nah I think he might say that in this video
TA
11:51
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Fu7gDyooHw
TA
11:53
oh it's not this
no matter
anyway, i don't think we really disagree that much
HR
11:54
yeah
TA
11:54
because i'm not even sure (in fact i doubt) that it would be morally right for me to preach that sexual sadism is wrong
i'm not that extreme of an anti-consequentialist
that i think it's super important that everyone become kind of pure of mind and like Stoics
i think that's manifestly highly impractical
manifestly impossible
in fact, in the virtue ethics tradition (and the buddhist and daoist tradition), it's more an individualist thing
HR
12:00
mmm
TA
12:01
but you know another thing...
i have a falsifiable hypothesis (it might be completely wrong) about (heterosexual) sexual sado-masochism which is *consequentially* significant: that it is linked, or might help reinforce, sexist biases or sexist attitudes
well this statement is too general
like a correlation wouldn't be surprising but that's boring
that's not important
the claim, to be interesting, would have to be that indulging in sadistic fantasies involving sadistic acts towards women might help reinforce sexist biases (the second part of the claim)
i'm by no means sure that it's right
HR
12:03
well, it's /possible/
TA
12:03
yes it's just a hypothesis
HR
12:04
but, once again, you have to remember that sexual sadists generally respect consent
presumably no less than people in the ordinary population respect consent
TA
12:04
oh yeah but notice that i'm talking about biases
biases are a huge topic
biases are often subconcious
HR
12:04
right, but
TA
12:04
right
like think about it this way
imagine a guy who has just watched some kind of hardcore porn video involving sadistic acts performed on some woman
and then watches the presidential debate
straight after
like this is what i worry about in terms of the phenomenology of porn
HR
12:06
mmm
TA
12:07
cya
HR
12:07
but, then again, imagine the same scenario but he has just watched a standard hardcore porn video
TA
12:15
well if by standard you mean highly vanilla, with no dominant male performer saying 'cunt' 'slut' 'whore', and no overt sadism, i don't have a problem
i don't see this as problematic
at all
HR

13:56
well, as you point out in your "formal defence" of feminism, much porn depicting vanilla sex acts still involves some kind of degradation
and, of course, pretty much all heterosexual porn presents women as merely present for the satisfaction of the male
it is fairly rare to see the man and woman presented on equal footing, with equal sexual agency