Echo chambers

Anyone who is at least moderately alert will listen to King Charles speaking about climate change knowing well enough that he does not understand the issue in any meaningful technical sense. He speaks from a climate echo chamber, not even a specifically royal echo chamber.

The metaphor ‘echo chamber’ where people merely echo the words of like-minded people is a good one, although it tends to be misused by being relegated to a term of abuse. A pity because echo chambers are an essential aspect of how we all acquire and maintain our ideas.


Whereupon I may proceed laboriously to create and modulate my opinion, groping perhaps to a final epigram, which I say expresses just what I think, although I never thought it before.

Such is my discourse when I am really thinking; at other times it is but the echo of language which I remember to have formerly used, and therefore call my ideas. It is clear therefore that even in expressing my own mind when I conceive what I have felt, I have never really felt just that before. My report is an honest myth.

George Santayana - Scepticism and Animal Faith (1923)


Ideas are almost always remembered language, usually the echoes of echo chambers. We think and as we think we talk to ourselves with or without speaking while mulling over remembered language. This is what thinking is. There are no ideas in the sense of facts and analytical structures lodged in the brain.

We recall images, feelings and emotions too, because remembered language doesn’t come without baggage. Yet this remembered language is the intellectual basis of what we experience as an idea, there is virtually nothing else. To say so is no more than a change of perspective, but it can be useful.

When activists chant their radical ideas in the street, they are almost always chanting remembered language, nothing else apart from the baggage which can be equally prominent. No carefully structured reasoning, no facts and analytical structures lodged in radical heads, only remembered language inserted via an echo chamber.

Nobody is immune. The MP who stands up in the House of Commons to pontificate about Net Zero is almost certainly repeating remembered language and nothing else. Given the composition of the House technical understanding is unlikely anyway. 

Similarly, most UK voters vote for red, blue or yellow echo chambers. Unfortunately, the voter’s echo chamber is not the MP’s echo chamber, still less the government’s echo chamber.

This is the point to be made - nobody is immune from echo chambers. It’s what we do. We use the word ‘idea’ because we must, but ideas rarely have any depth to them, they are almost always remembered language. As is this blog post, built from the remembered language of B.F. Skinner, George Santayana, King Charles and a host of others imperfectly remembered. 

The deferred aspect of Net Zero

It is difficult to deal effectively with deferred aversive consequences because they do not occur at a time when escape or attack is feasible—when, for example, the controller can be identified or is within reach.

B.F. Skinner - Beyond Freedom and Dignity (1971)


The widespread negative consequences of the UK government drive towards Net Zero are certainly deferred in Skinner’s sense. They are not sufficiently aversive at a time when it is still possible to reject the policy by voting against political parties promoting it.

Currently, negative consequences of Net Zero are only aversive to those who pay attention to what is being done. The negative consequences are not likely to be aversive to financially secure decision-makers. Not until the negative consequences become entirely obvious and the controller can be identified or is within reach.

The simple fact

The simple fact is that a culture which for any reason induces its members to work for its survival, or for the survival of some of its practices, is more likely to survive. Survival is the only value according to which a culture is eventually to be judged, and any practice that furthers survival has survival value by definition.

B. F. Skinner - Beyond Freedom and Dignity (1971)


This is so obvious it hardly needs to be said, yet it does need to be said because in Skinner’s sense, survival has become politically unacceptable. To talk about it has become socially dubious, even politically far right whatever that means.

Yet survival is a powerful driver, perhaps the most powerful driver of our behaviour. In which case the obvious question arises – survival of what beyond family and friends? Not our culture, that has been dealt with.

Many voters have strong cultural memories though, and the political class knows it. Here's "Sir" Keir Starmer trying to convince us that there is still something left for him to put right.

Starmer’s embrace of Thatcher is no harmless exercise in political cross-dressing

Sir Keir Starmer wrote an article for The Telegraph last weekend. That is startling enough, for a one-time contributor to Socialist Alternatives, but what he said was more extraordinary and – for many – more inflammatory.

The Labour leader, explicitly ‘extend[ing] the hand of friendship to those who voted for the Tories’, attempted to portray himself as a change-maker, a transformative politician in a glorious tradition. Conjuring up that tradition, he cited Clement Attlee, as any Labour leader must, but sailed closer to the wind by naming Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair. The eruption of fury from the left of his party may have been part of his intended achievement, in the hope that it will conversely endear him to voters of that quicksilver centre believed to be the key to unlocking electoral success.

It's all there

 

At the other end of the age-continuum we find the verbal behavior of senility—slow halting speech under faulty stimulus control, “forgotten” intraverbals, the rambling of trivial intraverbals and self-echoics, the reduced audience-control which makes for irrelevance, unchecked repetition, and so on.

B.F. Skinner - Verbal Behavior (1957) 

Exploitable fears

Verbal behavior is, of course, frequently punished. The community which has hitherto reinforced a response may change its practices. A different community is more likely to punish—possibly with all the manifestations of “zenoglottophobia.”

B. F. Skinner - Verbal Behavior


A word similar to Skinner's zenoglottophobia is xenoglossophobia with a related meaning.

Foreign language anxiety, also known as xenoglossophobia, is the feeling of unease, worry, nervousness and apprehension experienced in learning or using a second or foreign language.

Skinner's zenoglottophobia is a word he may have invented, but it has a familiar meaning - fear of language from another verbal community with an associated possibility of punishment.

Zenoglottophobia pretty well describes woke culture, cancel culture, internet censorship and the language games driving modern politics. Activists corrupting almost every debate by corrupting the language and promoting a kind of free speech phobia. It's something we observe - many people are afraid of free speech and the associated possibility of punishment. 

It seems to be one reason why mainstream political parties are so unwilling to tackle even the most deranged and divisive language games. They are attracted to politically exploitable fears – it’s what they do. There are no exploitable fears in free speech.

Merely an evolved practice

Verbal behavior in which the reinforcement is thoroughly generalized, and the control of which therefore rests almost exclusively with the environment, is developed by the methods of science. The reinforcing practices of the scientific community thoroughly suppress the special interests of the speaker. This is not necessarily a sign of superior ethics in scientists; it is merely an evolved practice which has proved to be particularly valuable.

B. F. Skinner - Verbal Behavior (1957)


Suppose we go back a few decades. If we look around, we may be lucky enough to spot a small scientific community producing work of interesting but limited scientific value. A dusty little backwater where long-term climate changes are studiously analysed, reams of data are collected, obscure papers written, published and read by other obscure practitioners.

Moving on, suppose there is a move to supplant the limited scientific value of this little backwater by vastly greater political value. Nothing more is required to evolve our dusty little backwater into something else, something with far greater overall value. On that it thrives as it never did before.

Our once dusty little backwater attracts more students, more scientists and more money because of its enhanced value as a pseudoscientific political activity. That’s it. No longer an obscure scientific endeavour, but a high-status political endeavour. And then? Then it attracts people with a political disposition. 

Soon enough, the dusty old backwater is extinct, its niche gone, scientifically dead. Politically it thrives, but there is a reason why it now prospers - it is merely an evolved practice which has now proved to be particularly valuable.

The greasy pole becomes ever more greasy

Two intellectual movements in Western culture have greatly increased the individual’s sensitivity to controlling variables by reinforcing behavior descriptive of such variables and punishing its absence. One of these is the literary movement of self-analysis culminating in the writings of Marcel Proust, as a result of which the reader is led to search for the causes of passing moods, capricious memories, or fragmentary verbal behavior…

The other cultural movement is, of course, psychoanalysis. Freud’s interpretation of revealing slips and other anomalous behavior of everyday life has forced the speaker to react more sensitively to the variables which may be inferred from his behavior and, as we saw in the last chapter, to reject responses which reveal objectionable variables.

B. F. Skinner - Verbal Behavior (1957)


Anyone may disagree with Skinner’s choice of Proust and Freud, but the intellectual movements he identified seem to be real. We have become highly attuned to our passing moods, capricious memories, or fragmentary verbal behavior. We were always sensitive to what our own behaviour reveals to others, but Freud seems to have attuned us to that too. Obsessively attuned in some cases. Not at all attuned in others.

What we identify in ourselves varies wildly of course, but it is reasonable to assume that this movement is far from complete. We see it whenever a public arena is dominated by those who are clearly insensitive to their own behaviour and what it reveals. Some just don’t care of course.

The reputations of major actors on the public stage have become increasingly threadbare as the intellectual movement Skinner identified gains impetus via modern technology. Almost as if modern communication autonomously sifts and identifies public behaviour as inadequate, dishonest, corrupt or simply stupid.

We are all human, shallow and understandable. How does traditional leadership survive that? The answer may be that it cannot survive it.

For example, those paying attention probably realise that Boris Johnson has little to offer beyond Brexit. Keir Starmer has even less and other political leaders nothing at all. Where does that leave us? Possibly in a situation where traditional democratic leadership is becoming impossible, where we are becoming too sensitive to the shallow and understandable nature of human behaviour. As yet there are few good alternatives though.

Does it matter whether Boris survives a no confidence vote? Inspiring confidence is the problem. While the nature of leadership appears to be changing, we are stuck with traditional climbers of the greasy pole. They cannot inspire confidence. Skinner’s two movements may have changed things forever.

But can therapists make a difference?

‘I was enjoying a life that was ruining the world’: can therapy treat climate anxiety?

People are increasingly looking for help to deal with feelings of fear, helplessness and guilt amid the climate crisis. But can therapists make a difference and is seeking treatment just a form of denial?

Instead of therapy being a form of denial, I'd turn it round and suggest that denial could be a form of therapy. Not reading Guardian climate stories would be a solid start - can't go wrong there.

The piece is worth reading for those who wish to remind themselves how absurd middle class people can be with a politically correct cause to uphold. Desperately embarrassing behaviour, but it mostly feels like an act to me. Shallow virtue-signalling which also signals the interests and practices of a particular verbal community.

Which behavior most closely matches the actual situation is a question not so much of fact, accuracy, or comprehensiveness as of the interests and practices of verbal communities.

B.F. Skinner - Verbal Behavior (1957)

Quashed

There was a time when shadow ministers were expected to know what they were talking about. The shadow women and equalities minister, for instance, would be expected to know basic things like the definition of the word “woman”. Not any more, however: the current office-holder, Anneliese Dodds, couldn’t give a straight answer to the question a couple of weeks ago. Now her predecessor in the post, Charlotte Nichols, has raised the stakes even higher. Wading into the debate about men’s participation in women’s sport, the MP for Warrington North has used Twitter to blast anyone who refuses to accept that a six-foot-one male swimmer is a woman.

Clearly this is worth explaining, but it isn’t easy. Or rather it is easy but most explanations make assumptions about mental processes we infer but cannot observe. Intentional lying for some kind of social or political gain could be an example. Political spite could be another. Stupidity or cowardice two more.

There is obviously something suspicious in the ease with which we discover in a set of ideas precisely those properties needed to account for the behavior which expresses them. We evidently construct the ideas at will from the behavior to be explained.

B.F. Skinner - Verbal Behavior (1957)

It may be simpler to explain what we see on the surface rather than a multiplicity of ideas about what goes on inside the woke skull. On the surface, woke folk are not necessarily lying in the normal sense of the word. They are not saying something they know to be untrue, but playing a game which disallows certain aspects of language. Part of their ability to describe reality is quashed. 

In which case, most woke folk are not saying one thing and thinking another. Maybe some are, but on the surface they are consistently woke and for practical purposes this is what matters - the surface. It's where the damage is done.

Awkward people have a disposition to use language which makes contact with the real world. Others have this same disposition but it is weaker and more easily quashed by social pressures. Something we commonly observe in numerous social situations. Reality can be quashed within language games.

We are social beings disposed to form worthwhile allegiances and with that comes imitation, especially the imitation of language games. We have such dispositions even at the cost of quashed realities because once a reality is socially quashed there is no social cost. On the contrary, there can be a social benefit to quashed realities in any language game.

The woke folk referred to above are playing a language game we call gender politics. It is not necessary to define what is going on inside their skulls. It is simpler to observe how the game is played, because that tells us that an aspect of reality is being quashed by their fashionable language game. There are aspects of human reproduction which woke folk cannot express. Simple observation tells us so.

We already know this but tend to ignore it, yet it is the main danger posed by political discourse. The woke nonsense quoted above is a reflection of how dangerous and powerful language games can be. They can extinguish reality for so long that eventually it has to be learned again.

Effective nonsense

As an addition to the previous post, we all know what a vast amount of nonsense infests the internet. Generally easy to spot for those paying attention, but unfortunately some of it is emotionally effective nonsense, particularly the political version. We have known about the problem in its various guises for a very long time –

The possibility that poetry may be effective in an emotional way, though otherwise nonsense, has often been recognized. Thus A. E. Housman writes:

Even Shakespeare, who had so much to say, would sometimes pour out his loveliest poetry in saying nothing.

Take, О take those lips away
That so sweetly were forsworn,
And those eyes, the break of day,
Lights that do mislead the morn.
But my kisses bring again, bring again,
Seals of love, but sealed in vain, sealed in vain.

That is nonsense; but it is ravishing poetry.

As Joseph Conrad, in describing an example in Lord Jim, says, “...the power of sentences has nothing to do with their sense or the logic of their construction.”

B. F. Skinner - Verbal Behavior (1957)

No black scorpion

But if you ask me what is the good of man, I cannot mention to you anything else than that it is a certain disposition of the will with respect to appearances. 

Epictetus

Many dreadful events unfolded in the nineteen thirties, events which changed the world, but something else was unfolding too, a certain pragmatic clarity of outlook with more subtle consequences. Or perhaps there were no consequences at all. Perhaps that’s the point.

No black scorpion.

In 1934 behaviourist B F Skinner attended a dinner where he sat next to philosopher Alfred North Whitehead. After Skinner had explained his work on behaviour to the great man, Whitehead remarked “Let me see you account for my behaviour as I sit here saying ‘no black scorpion is falling upon this table.’”

Next morning Skinner began work on his book Verbal Behavior, in his view his most important book. An account of language in terms of stimulus, response and reinforcement, it took him twenty years.

Language, Truth and Logic.

In 1936 philosopher A J Ayer published Language, Truth and Logic, a short and accessible philosophy book which rattled the teeth of the staid world of philosophy. In later years Ayer rejected much of it as wrong, yet for most of us it is near enough, a starting point, an engaging account of what makes sense and what doesn’t, what a personal philosophy can do for us and what it cannot do.

Skinner was 30 and Ayer 25. Young and keen as mustard. Both were empiricist in outlook, believing that what we know of the world is mainly derived from what is observable. Both were interested in the way we use language, knowing how deceptive it can be. Skinner was interested in how we use language to mould our personal and collective behaviour, Ayer in how we use it to deceive ourselves and others.

Unfortunately there is a problem with the essentially straightforward approaches used by both men to tackle the endless complexities of the human situation. Vested interests, hierarchies, the power of politics, authority, academia, status and money all benefit from otherwise pointless complexities.

There is another glass ceiling apart from the one we hear so much about these days. Cause and effect are all very well in their place, but allowing such ideas onto the hallowed ground of politics and power is a different matter. Everything would have to change. Everything would have to adapt, to accommodate the cold blue light of reason emanating from even the lowliest peasant, from even their children. Whatever next?

When Ayer and Skinner were young men, science, engineering money and optimism were helping to transform their world into what appeared to be a better place, not merely physically better but intellectually better too. The stultifying deference of centuries appeared to be crumbling away before an onslaught of merit, education, curiosity and cool reason.

Perhaps the onslaught still goes on at a slower pace, but the horrors of war intervened, diverted our attention into less useful directions. Other imperatives and influences choked off anything which might damage the status quo. The imbecilities of popular culture began to take hold. The mindless thump, thump of popular music, mawkish sentiment, idiot lyrics and faux rebellion.

The embarrassing crassness of celebrity culture grew and grew as mass communication grew and grew, as the technology of influence became cheaper and cheaper. An endless diet of dumb piped into almost every home via millions of radios and televisions.

Ayer and Skinner were revolutionaries in their way. If we had listened, if we’d absorbed the essence of their message then perhaps in time we’d have learned to control the world. But we didn’t. And we won’t because of the sheer weight of pressure to bend the metaphorical knee, swill the beer and dance round the maypole just as our medieval forebears did.

Democracy and mass education went nowhere because how could they go anywhere? The peasants would have to get up off their knees, throw aside the beer mug, burn the maypole and that would never do. So we have cheap wine instead of beer, cheap food, cheap jobs, expensive homes and mass voting instead of democracy. Maybe our suspicions should have been aroused as the franchise grew because surely a vote wasn’t worth anything if millions could have it for nowt.

As for education, no doubt it serves its purpose but we aren’t about to teach the radical stuff which so enthused Ayer and Skinner eighty years ago. We aren’t about to teach kids how to think clearly, how to slice through the mental shackles because in the end it still doesn’t suit the way we are, the way we seem content to remain.

Behavior used to be reinforced by great deprivation; if people weren't hungry, they wouldn't work. Now we are committed to feeding people whether they work or not. Nor is money as great a reinforcer as it once was. People no longer work for punitive reasons, yet our culture offers no new satisfactions.

B F Skinner

It seems that I have spent my entire time trying to make life more rational and that it was all wasted effort.

A J Ayer

Walden Three

Society attacks early, when the individual is helpless.
B F Skinner - Walden Two (1948)

B F Skinner’s novel Walden Two provides a fictional setting for what he saw as a potentially achievable utopia although he was not so sanguine as to think it ever would be achieved. The book sold millions of copies and certain features of the modern world suggests many influential people are probably familiar with its ideas.

From Wikipedia

Walden Two embraces the proposition that the behavior of organisms, including humans, is determined by environmental variables and that systematically altering environmental variables can generate a sociocultural system that very closely approximates utopia.

Skinner’s basic message is not complex – a non-competitive self-governing and pragmatic society could condition its inhabitants to be contented, possibly even happy. Keeping things that way in Walden Two is the job of the Board of Planners, members of which serve for ten years and appoint their successors. These are the behavioural engineers who oversee managers who manage the various departments. Apart from these roles they are merely ordinary citizens with no special status

Although such a utopia is unlikely to be achievable globally or even long term on a smaller scale, it is possible that Walden Two has spawned a number of ideas in the minds and general outlook of elite global bureaucrats. Let us call these ideas Walden Three.

Popular assent is always interesting because it is a litmus test for power and how power expects us to behave. If a significant number of people passively assent to certain aspects of daily life then there are usually others who benefit, almost always those who planned and engineered matters in the first place. 

To take one possible example as an aspect of Walden Three. Our fake UK democracy based on passive assent makes sense if we accept that it came about by systematically altering environmental variables. An essentially two-party adversarial system is a vitally important environmental variable and there is no doubt that it is manipulated as in the 2011 AV referendum. In Skinner's terms it was manipulated by behavioural engineers. They may not think of themselves as such, but that's what they are.

In which case there is nothing to be gained from plugging radical alternatives because those who plug them cannot do it by systematically altering environmental variables. Our Walden Three democracy ticks the behavioural boxes it is supposed to tick and doesn’t tick those it is designed to leave alone such as meaningful reform. China has something similar if less subtle.

Those who weave assent into our lives are Skinner’s planners and managers, the behavioural engineers who do not necessarily subscribe to what they promote. They may or they may not, but elite Walden Three planners and managers are likely to know what they are.

What we have at the moment is far less formal and structured than Walden Two, and far more complex with a vast array of caveats and exceptions, but the basic controlling structure seems to be fairly consistently applied. It may be fallible, complex and layered but in real life that was inevitable.

What else do we see in Walden Three – what is visible now apart from the failure of UK democracy? We see an educated middle class being replaced by a more adaptable citizen class, a general lowering of expectations towards a more sustainable global citizens' lifestyle. We see the traditional role of parents replaced by official controls and responsibilities. Ultimately, as in Walden Two, parents may have few childcare responsibilities for their own children, it depends on how the Walden Three planners see it.

We see the official view of a safe and healthy lifestyles slowly becoming compulsory. We see even minor forms of dissent controlled by endless disapproval and ostracism. We see well-financed mass narratives obviously engineered to fit exiting narratives and obviously designed to further a prime social objective of global equality for all citizens. Which is why the middle class of the developed world has to go because their lifestyle is not thought to be globally sustainable.

Given the importance of our consumer society and the trillions it spends each year and given the global reach of the modern world, Walden Three seems inevitable. It may even be achievable and it isn’t easy to see how things could be otherwise if we are to have a complex but comparatively stable global society. We do not need a global society of course, but that’s not on the agenda.

Take my advice

from andertoons.com

I've been wondering if Science and our Christian traditions are in the same boat. Here's a tentative angle on why that may be. It won't appeal to everyone and after further reflection, may not even appeal to me, but no matter, here goes.

B F Skinner equated science with advice or guidance, in my view a powerful idea. For me, the word advice is one way to see past the traditional divide between science and religion.

Both science and religion offer advice/guidance - technical advice in one case, spiritual and moral advice in the other. Good advice is a core aspect of both scientific and religious integrity.

By integrity here, I mean  a situation where the advice offered stems from highly visible and altruistic core values applied to particular situations. By altruistic advice, I mean advice offered for the common good in its widest sense.

Political speeches are forms of advice which usually disguise self-interest as altruism. In that respect they don't fool us, but that's not the point - the point is to insinuate ambiguous language into the public domain - to make it respectable and therefore suitable for other uses.

Placing advice/guidance at the centre, highlights the corrupting role of political power games which in my view are wrecking both our Christian and scientific traditions for the same basic reason. Power games cannot work when people, especially children, have free access to good advice based on altruistic values outside the political domain. They cannot work when ambiguity is challenged from a position of authority and for the common good.

Scientists don’t just hoover up data, devise theories and test them via experiments. They aim to offer the best scientific advice on how the physical world behaves in defined circumstances - for the common good.

If you do A you will get B.

If you do A you may get B or C but not D.

Advice is a surprisingly useful way to classify what scientists actually do, rather than what fantasists and authoritarians say they do. So scientific experiments are merely tests of scientific advice. If an experiment fails then the advice that gave rise to it was wrong. If you do A you do not get B and so on.

Tentative advice we call theories.

It’s no different to advising someone on the best place to get a decent cup of coffee or the best blogging platform, or the best holiday destinations. Many scientists would no doubt prefer or even insist that science is fundamentally different to these mundane activities.

It isn’t.

Scientists merely give technical advice about the real world – just like engineers, which is why the two activities are so similar. Technical advice about complex subjects such as human beings is difficult, so psychologist have as many problems as their patients. Economics is another complex subject where good advice is difficult to give. Not that the difficulties throttle back the advice.

Religion is slightly different, as here the advice is moral and spiritual - but still advice, still based on altruistic values and the common good.

By keeping the focus on advice based on altruistic values, I think it is easy enough to see how all kinds of advice can be twisted by political power games. Good advice can be morphed into coercive advice which is neither  disinterested nor altruistic. Eventually, advice may become an overt command - do this or else. The war against smokers is a particularly good example. Climate science and Islam are two more.

In totalitarian societies, advice doesn’t even have to be explicit. Big Brother watching you is all the advice you need. A CCTV camera on the High Street is a form of coercive advice, a symbolic raised fist.

Health advice on cigarette packs has morphed into threats.
Health advice on alcohol is morphing into threats.
Health advice on food will morph into threats.

For centuries our Christian traditions have been tainted by power games. Sound moral and spiritual advice becomes polluted by the politics of coercive power. Religious hierarchy becomes tainted by the elevation of personal ambition over altruistic spiritual and moral advice. Dogma takes the altruistic load off lazy and corrupted shoulders, so why should it surprise us if scientific hierarchy goes the same way?

In some respects it all seems to be an inevitable outcome of power games. We may criticize the past excesses of organized religion, but the real culprits are the power games we forever fail to tame.

In the same way, scientific advice has become tainted with political power games and the corrupting effects of personal gain. The Royal Society and the Met Office are evolving into bastions of privilege. They play power games with their scientific prestige and we should not be surprised that it has happened, nor should we naively expect the situation to improve of its own accord.

Science and our Christian traditions are in the same boat.

Climate science is the most blatant example of scientific advice hopelessly corrupted by political games. To my mind, the antics of climate scientists are mainly interesting for that reason. Problems with the corruption of our altruistic Christian traditions are not only reflected in the corruption of an altruistic scientific integrity, they share the same cause – non-altruistic power games.

This implies of course that scientific integrity is sliding down the same slope as our Christian traditions so things are not about to improve any time soon. Religious integrity and scientific integrity are fighting the same battle against the same opponents – and both are losing ground.

Selfish power games divert us from simple altruism and sound advice based on the common good – they always have.

Mentalism

B F Skinner was a lifelong opponent of what he called mentalism, where unobservable mental events are used to explain or describe human behaviour. In other words, mental states cause action. Basically, Skinner’s take on these unobservable mental events was that they are merely words or metaphors which explain nothing, simply because they are unobservable.

Take the word concept as an example.

We might say that someone worries about apocalyptic climate change because they misunderstand the uncertainty of certain key concepts. Somehow they have the concept wrongly configured inside their heads and that causes climate silliness.

Yet a concept, although useful as a term, is a metaphor for some rather vague assumptions about unobserved and unobservable mental events. How, as Skinner might have asked, do we observe this wrongly configured concept except via silly behaviour - mostly verbal behaviour. What else is there to analyse but the silly behaviour?

So it may be better to root out concepts and simply describe behaviour. What do people do when they worry about apocalyptic climate change? Well in the vast majority of cases, the answer seems to be not much.

They may respond in a broadly predictable way to certain verbal cues and make some minor lifestyle adjustments which are quite likely to be both fashionable and mildly ostentatious. But that’s it – minor behavioural changes. Observable behaviours though.

The real problem arises when multi-billion projects such as wind power arise because of these behaviours. Note that wind turbines don’t get built because of concepts. The minister giving approval for them has no concepts inside his or her head - whatever concepts might be. He or she doesn’t even understand why the wind turbines are being built in any technical sense. The minister merely grinds out some imitative political behaviour.

It is not necessary to assume that anything at all is going on inside the minister's head. There will be some fiendishly complex neurological processes of course, but we don't know much about those and neither does the minister.

The minister is showing symptoms of a contagious imitative behaviour, because behaviour is often contagious. That’s why we get epidemics of it. We don’t get epidemics of concepts. Most people worry about apocalyptic climate change with no discernible mental activity at all - let alone concepts.

Private matters

from spaceandmotion.com

As both Lugwig Wittgenstein and B F Skinner have observed in their different ways, language is necessarily public. There is no such thing as a private language and we can’t speak or think outside of socially constructed modes of expression. Even so that does not rule out private events. It just means they may be difficult or even impossible to express in a public language..

So it is quite reasonable to suppose that a person might become convinced of some matter for private and socially inaccessible reasons. As long as they don’t mutilate the established uses of language in describing their private certainties, then who can possibly gainsay their point of view?

So one person may have their god and another person may have no god or a different god, but these matters may be driven at least in part by private events. We cannot automatically decry such experiences, merely because we ourselves do not seem to touch reality in quite the same way.

These private differences seem to be important and authoritarian attempts to iron them flat are doomed to fail. Equally mistaken is the idea that science covers everything and, at least in principle, will tell us all we are equipped to know. These days that particular myth is not even worth demolishing, but there are still important principles at stake. We should not lose sight of them.

Reality touches us in different ways - it always has, so these differences must be important. We should study and try to understand them, but to deny or dismiss them is foolish, leading us into disaster after disaster.

We may not mutilate the competent and moral use of language, but that does not necessarily restrict what we know or suspect to be true. Private matters. 

Verbal behaviour

B F Skinner’s book Verbal Behavior probably isn’t on the mainstream reading list, yet I think it is the most important non-fiction book I’ve ever read.

It’s an odd book too, because although Skinner was a major psychological researcher and theorist, his book is not highly technical - reading more like philosophy than science. Skinner deliberately wrote the book in this way. His aim was to describe common modes of verbal behaviour in terms of his behavioural psychology, but framed within everyday observations.

He classifies verbal behaviour into six basic forms, using some made-up names to avoid being lumbered with cultural baggage from the beginning.

Tact – responding verbally to the physical environment (see that tree).

Echoic – imitating the verbal behaviour of another person.

Textual – reading and writing.

Intraverbal – responding to the verbal behaviour of another person, often via association.

Mand – motivating another person (as in a command such as come here.).

Autoclitic - verbal behaviour which modifies other forms of verbal behaviour

The autoclitic is complex, but one interesting aspect of it is where we influence ourselves by being our own audience. It’s how we analyse and adjust our own ideas, acting as our own critic, revising our own blog posts or comments, talking or thinking ourselves through them before that final mouse click.

To my mind, the autoclitic is where we respond to our own thoughts, acting as our own audience is a kind of free-will within a deterministic psychology. A piecing together of a personal philosophy using material from the outside world yet shaped and moulded to our own uniqueness. Yet nobody has to use the autoclitic in private. Nobody has to examine their own ideas away from the noise of the outside world, free from external stimulus, let alone modify them. It’s optional.

Skinner’s book was immediately attacked by Chomsky, probably because it blows Chomsky's notion of innate grammar out of the water. For me, that’s reason enough to value the book anyway, because I see Chomsky’s linguistic theories as untenable, or if I’m being more honest – absurd.

The other thing worth mentioning about the book is that it’s quite difficult. The concepts Skinner introduces and makes use of are not the problem, so much as the unfamiliar way one has to look at verbal behaviour. We are immersed in our own social and personal constructs to such a degree, that even though we may be able to see them for what they are, it isn’t a habit.

So I’m not recommending the book without reservation. It requires a solid grounding in behaviourism and isn’t an easy book to wade through even with such a grounding. It won’t chime with many personal philosophies either, but for those it does speak to, then I think it may be something of a revelation.

Skinner himself saw this book as the most important he'd ever written. I value the book for a number of reasons, not least of which is the way it provides a viable scientific view of how we manage to exert free-will in a deterministic universe, how we may come to conclusions which are in a sense our own conclusions.

However, this isn't by any means Skinner's main theme. His theme is that language is learned behaviour. Stimulus, response and reinforcement. 

Sophia

Sophia began to be teased by a little fear that Gerald was not his usual self. She did not think of him as tipsy. The idea of his being tipsy would have shocked her. She did not think clearly at all. She was lost and dazed in the labyrinth of new and vivid impressions into which Gerald had led her. But her prudence was awake.
Arnold Bennett (1867 – 1931) - The Old Wive's Tale

For those who haven't read the book, Sophia is a beautiful young Victorian woman, born and bred in the Five Towns (now Stoke on Trent). Her world is her mother's draper's shop, but she rejects the narrow confines of this middle class life to elope with Gerald Scales, a wealthy but foolish and unreliable commercial traveller. This is her first taste of a glitzy Parisian restaurant.

If we return to B F Skinner's observation on writers who seem to show a grasp of human behavior which is beyond the methods of science, I think we see what he meant, what we all know to be true, from just one of Bennett's sentences.

But her prudence was awake.

In spite of Sophia's rebellious nature, her background is important too and this reaction to Parisian glitz is entirely within character. For me, this one sentence sums up the lasting effect of Sophia's provincial upbringing, a moral history which cannot be described as accurately or as neatly in scientific language.

Stimulus, response and reinforcement are all there as Bennett unveils Sophia's character, but he does it more fully and more to the point, more credibly than any technical narrative. Not only that, but I suspect this will always be the case as long as we value and seek to encourage the art of good writing.

Skinner on literature

B F Skinner the behavioural psychologist, gained a BA in English literature and spent a year at his parents' home attempting to become a writer of fiction before moving into psychology. He always placed a high value on literature, sometimes seeming to believe that great writers have more to tell us about human behaviour than great scientists. For example, this quote from his book Verbal Behavior.

Human behavior is an extremely difficult subject matter. The methods of science have come to be applied to it very late in the history of science, and the account is far from complete. But it is a field in which literature is most competent, secure and effective.

A Dostoyevsky, a Jane Austen, a Stendhal, a Melville, a Tolstoy, a Proust, or a Joyce seem to show a grasp of human behavior which is beyond the methods of science. Insofar as literature simply describes human behavior in narrative form, it cannot be said to show understanding at all; but the writer often seems to "say something" about human behavior, to interpret and analyze it. A person is not only described as taking part in various episodes, he is "characterized".This is a significant expression, for it suggests where metaphor, as a pre-scientific vocabulary, finds its place.

False memories

Elizabeth Loftus
The work of American psychologist professor Elizabeth Loftus has been controversial but enlightening. Her work on the misinformation effect and false memories is what she is famous for, particularly her uncovering of false memories of child-abuse implanted by so-called therapists.

This has been an extremely controversial area as anyone may soon discover by following the above links, yet her work fits very well with Skinner's behavioural psychology. Our memories are fragile as Sam Vega observed in a comment on an earlier post.

Maybe we see a car pass by while walking down the street, a trivial event we may soon forget, but if it is suggested to us that the car was blue, then we are likely to remember it as blue, even if it was actually white. Of course this is less likely if there was some reason to take note of the car, such as it being unusual in some way.

Memories are not fixed records, but aspects of an overall picture which will be modified as we adjust the new circumstances. It may well be that memories are supposed to be mutable, their mutability being a key element of social cohesion. In part, it's how we reach agreement.

One of Elizabeth Loftus' most famous cases was that of George Franklin who in 1990 was suddenly accused by his daughter Eileen of raping and murdering her best friend twenty years earlier. Loftus was brought by the defence to testify on Franklin's behalf, specifically on the unreliability of so-called repressed memories reported by his daughter.

However, the jury didn't accept Franklin's defence and he was convicted of rape and murder and sentenced to life imprisonment. Fortunately for Franklin the verdict was overturned on appeal.

The booklet experiment.
This experience led Loftus to design experiments where she would implant false memories under controlled conditions. She recruited twenty four subjects and with the help of each subject's family members designed a small journal with four written accounts of past incidents in family life, one of which was false.

The subjects were then given their own family journal and asked to elaborate on the four incidents from their own memories. If they had no memory of the incident, they were instructed to write I don't remember this.

What Loftus found was that the false incidents were "remembered" with remarkable clarity and in great detail, subjects going on to elaborate them far beyond what was written in the jounal. One subject (shown in the above clip) "remembered" being lost in a shopping mall as a small child and wrote out details such as how scared he was and how an old man with glasses had come up to him in the mall.

But none of this ever happened. It was implanted via the journal and the three family incidents which were true. They authenticated the false incident and a repertoire of other memories supplied the detail.

Unwelcome ideas - part XII

B. F. Skinner was a proponent of what he called radical behaviourism. Put very simply, this is stimulus and response where reinforcement is said to occur when some responses become conditioned responses - or habits as we might prefer to call them.

Beliefs are habits. Beliefs are how we experience our own conditioning, our range of likely responses to a given stimulus such as a question, a situation or an event. We tend to refer to our beliefs as something we possess, something separate from our personality as if they were things we own, things we could indeed disown if we so chose. They are not.

If I believe in ghosts (which I don't), that means I am likely to read ghost stories or watch supernatural drama on TV. I’ll say ‘yes’ when asked if I believe in ghosts and I’m likely to avoid being alone in creaky old house at night. This kind of thing is what it means to believe in ghosts. My belief in ghosts is not something I have as a kind of mental possession, but a limit to my behaviour, framing my likely range of responses when exposed to a range of ghostly or ghost-suggestive stimuli, events or situations. It is an aspect of my conditioning - as is this blog or anything else I may do.

It would be more accurate to say that beliefs own us and we are certainly not free to disown them. If we were, then we would be free to become a different person, which if you think about it, makes no sense. Think for a moment how difficult it is to change your mind - impossible in some cases where a belief is an important aspect of personality. Some beliefs stay with us for life. Permanent frameworks within which we must live our entire lives - frameworks which may be a prison or a palace but always a mode of containment.

Is it impossible to change our beliefs? How can that be if we own them, if we possess them? Yet it isn’t difficult I think, to see that our beliefs are habits that frame our verbal behaviour as well as the covert verbal behaviour we call 'thinking'. So criticizing another person's beliefs is not the casual affair we tend to assume. We all know it is usually a futile activity, but it is surely impertinent too, a suggestion that the other person's personality is somehow defective.

Perhaps we should see our beliefs in terms of their social usefulness and their limitations, assessing them for their adaptability rather than pursue the troublesome chimera we call ‘truth’. In that case, 'truth' disappears and all we are left with is competent or incompetent behaviour - not that competence isn't a can of worms too.