It's easy to be objective about sex but not about love.

Twice now I've taken a class from G that starts with the pummeling of poor hapless BF Skinner and behaviorism vs Chomsky and Universal Grammar. It's not so much that I'm a fan of behaviorism as it is that I can't accept that all-in-all his work was nullified by The Event (Chomsky published semantics and syntax in response to BF's verbal behavior). One might say that BF's work was put in a new light, limits of application set, new context for interpreting what was observed etc. etc., but not nullified. So I find myself wanting to defend the poor fellow. I love G's classes, they make me think.

Much of the viewpoint of this Master's program, especially the more theoretical parts, seems to come from Bateson, the inspiration for Dr. Clarke’s books on Systems theory in education. So when I'm looking to gain perspective I try and go back to this source. I'm halfway plowing through Steps to an Ecology of Mind (Bateson) and I found a jewel that speaks to yesterday’s topic on SR vs UG. In 1969 Bateson published an imagined dialogue between Father and Daughter titled "Metalogue: What Is an Instinct?" I'll post some outtakes that speak to our subject: (SR is Stimulus-Response, shorthand for behaviorism)

D: Daddy, what is an instinct?
F: An instinct, my dear, is an explanatory principle.
D: But what does it explain?
F: Anything-almost anything at all. Anything you want it to explain.
D: Don't be silly. It doesn't explain gravity.
F: No. But that is because nobody wants "instinct" to explain gravity. If they did, it would explain it. We could simply say that the moon has an instinct whose strength varies inversely as the square of the distance...
D: But that's nonsense, Daddy.
F: Yes, surely. But is was you who mentioned "instinct", not I.
D: All right - but then what does explain gravity?
F: Nothing, my dear, because gravity is an explanatory principle.
D: Oh.

So there we are, Universal Grammar which humans have innately, one might say instinctively, is an explanatory principle.

S-R psychology is also addressed in this dialogue:

D: Could we do without the idea of "instinct"?
F: How would you explain things then?
D: Well, I'd just look at the little things. When something goes "pop", the dog jumps. When the ground is not under his feet, he wiggles. And so on.
F: You mean - all the imps but no god?

(imps and gods were introduced earlier as bottom up/top down)

D: Yes, something like that.
F: Well, there are scientists who try and talk that way, and it's becoming quite fashionable. They say it is more objective.
D: And is it?
F: Oh, yes.
D: What does "objective" mean?
F: Well, it means that you look very hard at those things which you choose to look at it.
D: So, inevitably, when the objective creature looks at animals, it splits things up and makes animals look like humans after their intellects have invaded their souls.
F: Exactly. It's a sort of inhuman anthropomorphism.
D: And that is why the objective people study all the little imps instead of the larger things?
F: Yes. It's called S-R psychology. It's easy to be objective about sex but not about love.
D: Daddy, we've talked about two ways of studying animals - the big instinct way and the S-R way, and neither seems very sound. What do we do now?
F: I DON"T KNOW. (Emphasis mine)
D: Didn't you say that the royal road to objectivity and consciousness is language and tools? What's the royal road to the other half?
F: Freud said dreams.
D: Oh.

Language and Literacy Acquisition I

I miss having a blog or thread for this class. The worst thing about having threaded discussions for classes is when you don't have anything to say, but you have to go through the motions so that the thread count is updated and you get credit.

The best thing about having threaded discussions is that one gets a chance to 'talk back' to the teacher and class without bogging down the whole class in a tangent that may not be generally useful.

This blog doesn't exactly make a threaded discussion but I still offer it up to folks who care to make use of the facility for discussions on the class topics.

Linguistics and Math

I'm taking a course in the linguistic analysis of english. It includes gammar. I haven't thought about grammar since 7th grade. I've found however a connection between math and linguistics.

I'm reading God Created the Integers by Stephen Hawking.

In the section on George Boole, his thesis that introduces what will become boolean logic and the foundation of digital computing is titled "An Investigation of the Laws of Thought" and we find:

"It should be within the province of a general method in Logic to express the final relation among the elements of the conclusion by any admissible kind of proposistion, or in any selected order of terms. ... To a choice or selection in the order of the terms, we may refer whatsoever is dependent upon the appearance of particular elements in the subject or in the predicate, in the antecedent or in the consequent, of that proposition which forms the "conclusion".


Reading this after having refreshed myself on the meansing of subject, predicate, antecedent and consequent allows me to get more out of reading Boole. Math is not a universal language, there is a lot of linguistics that go with it and the studies of Math and linguistics are related.