Pragmatism Refreshed

Links about health care reform

2009-12-26T08:00:00.002-05:00

The subject of the day. I don't have a lot to say about it, so I'll simply offer links.

1. What I said 2 and a half years ago still reads well to my own biased eyes.

2. Here is something along analogous lines, that Ronald Bailey wrote back in 2003.

3. But let's be more up-to-date for a moment. Here is something from the folks at Cato, who are watching all this with some more particularity than I am.

4. Julian Sanchez reminds us that insurance is about managing risks. If health insurers aren't allowed to manage risks (by for example protecting themselves against liability for pre-existing conditions) then whatever exactly it is that they are doing, it is no longer insurance as that term has always been understood.

5. It does seem to be an odd but empirically observable fact that in some fields low-risk people purchase more insurance than do high-risk people.

6. Virginia Postrel tells us about her life, her breast cancer diagnosis of 2007, and what she makes of it in terms of health insurance as an industry.

7. On the intra-party split the Democrats now face? This may be important. The bill is hardly home-free given the huge differences betwen the two sausages that have come out of the two chambers of our sausage making apparatus. Here is a columnist in The New York Times on the intra-party split.

8. And here is ABC News.

9. Forty-five years ago, Kenneth Arrow wrote a "seminal paper" about the economics of health care. Krugman cites it as gospel, others aren't so worshipful.

From John Milton's Nativity Ode

2009-12-25T00:05:00.004-05:00

Time will run back, and fetch the age of gold,
And spekl'd vanity
Will sicken soon and die,
And leprous sin will melt from earthly mould,
And Hell itself will pass away,
And leave her dolorous mansions to the peering day.

Yea Truth, and Justice then
Will down return to men,
Th'enamelled Arras of the Rainbow wearing,
And Mercy set between,
Thron'd in celestial sheen,
With radiant feet the tissued clouds down steering,
And Heav'n as at some festival,
Will open wide the Gates of her high Palace Hall.

[lines 135-148].

I love these lines, and post them here each year due to the vividness with which they display hope, the most forward-looking of the virtues.

Merry Christmas

Longfellow, on the Bells of Christmas Day

2009-12-24T10:55:00.000-05:00

I heard the bells on Christmas day
Their old familiar carols play,
And wild and sweet the words repeat
Of peace on earth, good will to men.

And thought how, as the day had come,
The belfries of all Christendom
Had rolled along the unbroken song
Of peace on earth, good will to men.

Till ringing, singing on its way
The world revolved from night to day,
A voice, a chime, a chant sublime
Of peace on earth, good will to men.

And in despair I bowed my head
“There is no peace on earth,” I said,
“For hate is strong and mocks the song
Of peace on earth, good will to men.”

Then pealed the bells more loud and deep:
“God is not dead, nor doth He sleep;
The wrong shall fail, the right prevail
With peace on earth, good will to men.”

Dead-Tree Books

2009-12-20T09:00:00.002-05:00

I had hoped to write something about animal language again here, and about how a certain philosophical way of thinking about animal language can help us negotiate our way, in the contemplation of our own verbal behavior, between the upper dogmatism of a Chomskyan rationalism and the lower dogmatism of a Skinnerian positivism. But anything worthwhile along those lines would take more time and effort than I'm prepared to put into it right now, so I'll beg off with a simple observation about the (not entirely unrelated) question of the publication of books.

How long will the dead-tree book publishing industry last, in the face of Amazon's Kindle and other forms of digital competition?

For a sober discussion of the issue go here. But for a more amusing take, I prefer blogger Jeff Matthews.

His point? Try to think of it as if it were a new idea and consider how insane it would sound. If everyone was using digital screens to read, and accustomed to it, then the idea of creating tree farms (or deforesting continents so we need to rely on tree farms) so that we can produce pulp with expensive machinery so that we can spray ink onto tiny slices of pulp known as "paper" so that we can then market ideas and stories years after they were first conceived, hoping that they have remained topical in the interim ... all this would seem insane.

Yet it doesn't seem insane, because human beings are creatures of habit. We love our dead-tree books like some of us love our old vinyl records, and the transition to the newer ways of reading will take some time.

Ah, and that new book smell. Like the new-car smell, it has its addicts. And the flying buttresses of Gothic architecture offer a ready example of how an arrangement at first adopted for reasons of utility can come to seem valuable in itself, to be beautiful, even when there are other ways of keeping the walls up.

2010: A Year of Living Dangerously

2009-12-19T07:02:00.000-05:00

The Federal Open Market Committee, a body of the Federal Reserve, voted this week to keep the federal funds rate in the range betwen 0% and 0.25%.

Frankly, I believe this to be irresponsible. It is part of the bad old tradition of using the money supply to stimulate an economy by cheapening the currency. They also retained the "extended period" language. You can see the whole statement by clicking that link.

The first two sentences of the 3d graph are crucial: "The Committee will maintain the target range for the federal funds rate at 0 to 1/4 percent and continues to anticipate that economic conditions, including low rates of resource utilization, subdued inflation trends, and stable inflation expectations, are likely to warrant exceptionally low levels of the federal funds rate for an extended period. To provide support to mortgage lending and housing markets and to improve overall conditions in private credit markets, the Federal Reserve is in the process of purchasing $1.25 trillion of agency mortgage-backed securities and about $175 billion of agency debt."

This means full speed ahead for a policy of "quantitative easing," or the cheapening of the US dollar, and this in turn means increasing prices across the board are inevitable.

In the very short term, this is good news for some people. It is good news for businesses that have gone too far into debt, but whose debt is measured in nominal (non-inflation-adjusted) terms, because they'll be paying back that debt now in cheapened dollars, so in effect their debt is being reduced. It is good news, too, for some of hte unemployed. Some of those businesses, relieved of that debt, will be in a position to hire new employees. In simple terms, then, this policy will have and is having a stimulative effect, but it is like getting one's energy from a drug. The drug has effects on the body that go far deeper than the immediate rush, and even the rush won't be as great as some hope, because a body builds up tolerance over time, requiring ever-greater doses for the same effect.

Neal Lipschutz, managing editor of Dow Jones Newswires, expressed his disappointment immediately. "I continued to hope for the merest hint that zero rates can't go on forever. That would have been achieved by altering or eliminating the 'extended period' modifier for how long current policy would hold. But it stood unmolested."
Though Lipschutz didn't put it this bluntly, it does now appear that we are headed for 1970s-style stagflation.

The price of crude oil (which is globally set in terms of the US dollar) has been declining for the last month, from $80 to $70. Yet it began a climb immediately when markets learned that the FOMC was sticking with the near-zero rates and with the "extended period" description of their tenure.

Scheduling

2009-12-18T05:02:00.000-05:00

This entry was pre-packaged. Tomorrow's will be as well. By Sunday I might be writing my blogs in something like real time again, although I have a pre-packaged one lined up, just in case.

On Saturday, I'll be on Broadway, watching a performance of Finian's Rainbow.

I understand that there will be a cast album available in February.

The fascinating thing about this play, for me, is that the lyrics to its songs were written by none other than Yip Harburg, who is best-known as the lyricist for all the songs in The Wizard of Oz (1939). Any man who could write lines like "I'd unravel any riddle for any individle" has a streak of genius in him.

Finian's Rainbow was first on Broadway in 1947, smack in the middle of what we see in hindsight as its golden age, and its songs include "How Are Things in Glocca Morra?," "Old Devil Moon" and "Fiddle Faddle."

Grover Washington

2009-12-17T05:01:00.004-05:00

Grover Washington Jr., a renowned jazz saxophonist, died on this day, twenty years ago.

If you want to know more about GW, you can listen to him on this podcast on the WGBH website, with interviewer Eric Jackson in 1994.

Why is this worth mentioning? Because I've been using a "today in music history" calender all year, and sporadically mining tidbits therefrom for blog entries. I won't have such a calender for 2010, so this will be my last entry with that source of inspiration.

Stemmer Weighs in on Grammar

2009-12-13T07:49:00.002-05:00

The story so far. Skinner advanced a theory (or a research program, or something) about how human language is simply "verbal behavior," a structure of stimulation and response subject to operant conditioning, like the movements of a rodent through a maze.

Chomsky objected, on grounds of method, vocabulary, and grammar.

In 1970, Kenneth MacCorquodale replied on Skinner's behalf, and seems to have done a better job on the issues of method and vocabulary than on the issue of grammar, which many had seen from the start as the heart of Chomsky's critique (and is certainly the heart of his own professional work as a linguist). Grammars consist of very complex structures, and in his view our ability as humans to acquire this structure can not be explained as the result of a process of generalization. For example: Children who already know the sentence "The man who is tall is in the room" easily learn that the way to turn that into a question is this: "Is the man who is tall in the room?"

If behavioralism is right, Chomsky thinks, children would at least sometimes make the mistake of asking, "Is the man who tall is in the room?" It is often the case that when turning a statement into a question, we transfer the occurrence of the word "is" to the start of the corresponding question. "The tall man is here" becomes "Is the tall man here" and so forth. Following that practice mechanically, simply generalizing it, could produce mistakes like the italicized sentence above. "Children make many mistakes in language learning," Chomsky says, but never that one.

So our story comes to 1990, when Nathan Stemmer wrote his own reply to Chomsky.

Stemmer replies that behavioralists don't have to expect children to treat the word "is" in isolation and generalize its moves in such a way. Children, rather, likely learn the active sentence pattern first "X is Y," and latter generalize it over time to learn substructures, so that "X" might include the word "is" internally.

Consider, then, "The man who is tall is in the room." The phrase "The man who is tall" is X in the old "X is Y" pattern. The second appearance of the word "is" then becomes the copula -- the one that connects X with the Y of "in the room." Generalization, then, Stemmer says, "does not simply transform certain word sequences into other word sequences but rather certain structures into other structures," and does so without importing a Chomskian machine-shop into the brain. Is [the man who is tall] in the room. Voila.

So (you might ask after all of this) what is my view? As a curious amateur, on-looker, and stand-up philosopher I have to say I think both sides are wrong. I do think that the Skinnerians are right to distrust the presumption of human uniqueness that runs through Chomsky's work. And I side with them (and the whole empirical tradition) against innate ideas, even grammatical ones. Stemmer's contention that we don't need innate ideas to understand how statements can be transformed into questions within a natural language seems to me sound. On the other hand, the Skinnerians' materialistic, reductive philosophy is repugnant on its own account.

William James used to refer to himself as squeezed between the "upper and the lower dogmatisms," between the positivists and the Hegelians of his day. It is always thus. Closer to our time, Skinner has revived the role of W.K. Clifford and Chomsky is writing like one of those "priggish Hegelians" on the top side of the two dogmatisms.

Next weekend I hope to return to these issues from another angle.

Dayton Flies Past the Red Foxes.

2009-12-12T09:11:00.001-05:00

In college football news, the Dayton Flyers defeated the Marist Red Foxes 27 to 16 on November 21, in what was the season's final game for both teams. This gave the Flyers a share of the championship of the Pioneer Football League, or PFL.

I presume that the Dayton Flyers get their name from the Wright Brothers, who lived and worked in Dayton when they weren't at their testing ground in North Carolina.

Despite the outcome of the game, though, I have to say as a Marist alum that the year has been a good one for the Red Foxes, our boys on the Hudson. They were 7-4 overall, tying a record (this is only the second time in Varsity team history they got 7 wins in a season). They finished at 5-3 within the PFL. After a sloppy start they put together a six game winning streak in midseason.

Their offensive star, wide receiver James LaMacchia, became the first player in Marist history to exceed 1,000 yards receiving in a season. He broke through the 1,000 mark in the course of that final game against the Flyers, receiving a pass for a 77 yard TD play in the third quarter.

On to bigger and better things in years to come.

Sam Cooke

2009-12-11T01:39:00.002-05:00

One of the pioneers of soul, Sam Cooke, died forty-five years ago today, on December 11, 1964.

Cooke checked in to the Hacienda Motel that evening. According to the manager of the hotel, Bertha Franklin, he checked in with a woman, who evidently left him at some point thereafter. Cooke, enraged, broke into the manager's office (with a jacket and shoes, but pantsless) and demanded to know where his companion was. Ms Franklin said the woman was not in the office. Cooke didn't believe her and allegedly attacked her. Franklin then shot him in self-defense.

His death has given rise to conspiracy theory. Etta James, in her autobiography, claimed that she observed wounds on Cooke's body, in the funeral home, that went far beyond what Franklin's account would explain. She said Cooke was beaten so badly his head was nearly separated from his shoulders, his hands were brushed and his nose was broken.

Solomon Burke, another soul pioneer, has said: "I still think there was some kind of conspiracy ... I've always felt there was some sort of conspiracy there ... I listened to the reports and I listened to the story of what happened and I can imagine Sam going after his pants. I can imaging Sam going up to the counter and saying 'Hey, somebody just took my pants.' And he's standing there, seeing the woman with his pants. I can imagine him saying "Give me my pants." But I can't imagine him attacking her. He wasn't that type of person to attack somebody. That wasn't his bag. He was a lover, OK. He wasn't a fighter. He wasn't a boxer. You never heard of Sam Cooke beating up his women."

Franklin's word is not utterly uncorroborated though. She was apparently on the telephone at the time with the Motel owner when Cooke broke in to the office, and the owner then heard much of what transpired, up to the gun shots. Her testimony at the inquest backed up Franklin's, which is likely the reason criminal charges were never brought.

The theory, as always, depends on the theorist. Cooke was killed by the mob. Or he was killed by Whitey to take a strong black man down. Or he was killed by a pimp, and the clothes-stealing hooker was part of the set up.

As to the girl (hooker or groupie or whatever) who ran out on Sam Cooke? Lisa Boyer. She had a story to tell, too, and the conspiracy theorists have had much to say about that. But I will go no further. It is easy enough to wallow in such material if you wish.

All I wish to say on this anniversary of his death, however it came about, is that surely what is best about Sam Cooke is what lives on. Click there for an an example.

The Anniversary of the Madoff Fiasco

2009-12-10T03:53:00.002-05:00

It was one year ago today, Dec. 10, 2008, that the two sons of Bernard Lawrence Madoff informed authorities that their father had just admitted to them that his asset management operation was "one big lie." He would be arrested the following day. That makes this an anniversary worthy of some reflection.

Those two sons, Mark and Andrew, worked in the trading operation, not asset management, thus they just might have been innocent of any criminal involvement themselves, though I'm sure investigations are continuing, the books are not closed on that.

This distinction between the trading and the asset management side is crucial to the Madoff saga. Madoff's trading operation, formally known as a "market maker," launched in 1960, was legitimate. It was controversial in some respects (especially among those of us who consider the practice of payment-for-order-flow inherently dubious) but it was legal. It also may have been integral to the success of his ponzi scheme, formally known as an investment advisor (IA), although not integral in the way that was so often suspected.

Madoff was often suspected of attaining the unusually consistent results of the IA operation by "front-running," i.e. by making illegal use of information he acquired as a market maker. The SEC would periodically investigate Madoff, only to find that he wasn't front running, so he must be clean! The truth of course is that he wasn't front running because he wasn't really trading through the IA wing of his company at all. It was all a sham, and those surprisingly consistent results were simply invented. So the possibility of front-runing was serving perhaps two purposes. First, as noted it was a false scent that kept the regulators busy. But, secondly, it may have helped attract investors. "Pssst, this guy is likely front-running the info from his market maker side. We should get us a piece of that action."

Or ... maybe not. But it is an intriguing idea: that the victims were in part victimized by their own desire to get on the winning side of a con game. That con game wasn't happening. So they ended up on the losing side of another one.

Chomsky versus Skinner

2009-12-06T07:25:00.001-05:00

Let's return to the subject of language. Last week we discussed Skinner's view that "bread, please" is a paradigmatic instance of "verbal behavior," learned through behavior modification, in the same way that rats learn the route through the maze that will get them to the corn.

Chomsky's famous 1959 review of the book, Verbal Behavior, is sometimes credited with at least slowing the triumphal march of behavioralism through the social sciences. [By the way, is it "behaviorism" or "behavioralism"? So far as I know, the two labels are interchangeable.] Chomsky focused not on such phrases as "bread please" but upon proper sentences, and accordingly upon grammar. He contended that natural-language sentences have a "deep structure" due to the "internal structure of the organism," -- i.e. to neurology.

As to method, Chomsky objected that Skinner used the prestige of laboratory research for conclusions that go far beyond anything they warrant. He creates "the illusion of a rigorous scientific theory with a very broad scope, although in fact the terms used in the description of real-life and of laboratory behavior may be mere homonyms, with at most a vague similarity of meaning." The word "stimulus," is he says an example. In the case of an actual loaf of bread on the table, that bread might be the stimulus to which one refers in the use of the word "bread." But a lot of proper nouns refer to people the speaker has never met, places to which he has never been, etc. A lot of people who have never been to Moscow use the word "Moscow" in sentences all the time, and use it correctly. Why? On Chomsky's view, this can happen because they are hard wired for language. They have the nerve connections they need for it. On Skinner's view (as Chomsky understands it) the proper use of "Moscow" by someone who has never been there requires a stretching of the simplistic ideas of "stimulus," a stretching perhaps to the point where "stimulus" becomes a homonym of itself.

Skinner was personally unimpressed by this critique. He never answered it formally, and in an interview he gave for the Saturday Review of Books in 1972 he sought to explain why. He said he saw a pre-publication draft, only read the first half-dozen pages, and then decided Chomsky had missed his point. Then he commented somewhat whimsically on the field, and on the rise of Chomskyism. "Linguists have always managed to make their discoveries earthshaking. In one decade everything seems to hinge on semantics, one another decade on analysis of the phoneme. In the Sixties it was grammar and syntax, and Chomsky's review began to be widely cited and reprinted and became, in fact, much better known than my book."

As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, other behaviorists have stepped forward to defend Verbal Behavior from Chomsky's attack. One of the best-known examples of this is Kenneth MacCorquodale, who wrote a review of the famous review for the JOURNAL OF THE EXPERIMENTAL ANALYSIS OF BEHAVIOR in 1970.

You can access that here: www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1333660/?tool=pmcentrez

MacCorquodale quotes the "mere homonyms" passage, in particular, and expresses surprise at the implicit idea that "real-life" behavior could have different basic principles from laboratory behavior. In MacCorq's eyes, Skinner set out a hypothesis, and a research program, which of course is unproven because any research program deals of necessity with the as-yet unproven.

As to "Moscow," MacCorq tells us that the stimulus-response paradigm of behaviorism does not require that we stick to just one stimulus for every one response. Skinner's book itself "repeatedly and clearly insists that a verbal response may be controlled by different stimuli on different occasions." And one occasion for the response "Moscow" may well be the presence of the city of Moscow. What do the flight attendants say when your plane touches down there?

That is a point about scientific method, and about vocabulary. MacCorq for the most part leaves Chomsky's point about the grammar of the sentences of natural language untouched. Others of his school have addressed that, though, so we will have material for continuing this series.

Thoughts on Disney's birthday

2009-12-05T09:50:00.005-05:00

Walt Disney was born on this day, December 5, in 1901.

It has become fashionable in many quarters to burnish one's intellectual or aesthetic bona fides by sneering at Disney and all his works. But I think that as time passes and we see him in perspective, we can see him as one in a line of chroniclers of the ever-shifting nature of the old folk tales.

The term "Disneyification" is often thrown about on the presumption that Disney corrupted the pure folk intention of the sometimes gruesome older tales by making them sentimental and happily-ever-afterish.

But what is sometimes called "Disneyfication," what might more neutrally just be called sentimentalization, is actually a process that set in long before 1901, and of which Disney was only one avatar. Charles Perrault published a collection of folk tales in 1695, most of them already quite old by then, under the title: "Histories or Tales of Times Past, With Morals." But Perrault's collection had a still more intriguing subtitle, by which it is better known: "Tales of my Mother Goose."

Between the 1695 French-language collection and the German-language collection of the Brothers Grimm in 1812 there is some overlap. Both collections contain a Cinderella story. Disney's version entered the motion picture theatres in 1950. The distance between the first and second of those dates is almost as great as the distance between the second and third. We can think, I submit, of sentimentalization as a process underway changing this story consistently throughout the centuries involved, and we can think properly of each of these three dates as representing a different snapshot of that process.

Don't blame the photographer.

Here is the Perrault version of Cinderella.

www.Pitt.edu/~dash/Perrault06.html

Notice just a couple of points. In Perrault's version, in the third paragraph, the protagonist's first nickname is the harsher "Cinderwench," though we're told that the youngest of her stepsisters was nicer to her than the older one, and softened that to "Cinderella." Noblesse oblige? Also, Cindy chooses to sit among the cinders, when her household duties are done. She is not forced into that corner by her wicked step-mother. Indeed, the stepmother is more "haughty" than wicked.

Another point from near the end of the story: the Prince never sees her in rags. Perrault's story is, if you will, too class conscious for that. The Prince sends servants about the countryside to test out the glass slipper on maidens, he doesn't engage in such tedious work himself, and so doesn't put himself in the position of kneeling before a servant girl in order to try to get a shoe on her foot.

By the time of the Brothers Grimm, the story has changed. I don't say that they changed it, just that the story as they knew it more than a century later was different, and they recorded that fact for us. There is no use of "Cinderwench," for example. To the Grimms, she is "Ashputtle," which translates well into "Ash-maiden." Or Cinderella. On the other hand, there is no element of choice in her consignment to the cinder-clogged corners of the house. The "haughtiness" of the step-mother has turned to wickedness; the class conflict is sharper, and the disappearance of the harsher nickname confirms our sympathy for the oppressed. Also, the King's son himself gives her the wonderful slipper to try on, and then puts her on his horse and rides away with her.

Here is my point. Suppose the Grimms' version had been the same as Perrault's. Suppose in particular that the Grimms had had the servants of the Prince show up at the home of Cindy's step-mother and ask to try the shoe on all the young women of the house. Suppose then that Disney's version had changed this so the Prince himself comes by and rides off with the protagonist on a horse. Wouldn't that have been denounced as a "Disneyification" of the story by the people who like to denounce such things? It was in fact sentimentalization, but Disney is not guilty of it.

Leave Disney be. And, by the way, Happy birthday, Walt.

Grammy Nominations are out

2009-12-04T08:02:00.000-05:00

The Grammies (or should I write "Grammys") give me yet another opportunity to display my own alienation from pop culture.

Beyonce was nominated for 10 awards. Taylor Swift for 6. Kanye West also for 6. Make your own joke there.

I wonder if Kanye West likes fishsticks?

Yawn.

The Sense of Beauty (1896)

2009-12-03T07:35:00.001-05:00

It comes to mind for no reason except the thought that it has been too long since I've said anything here about either George Santayana or the field of aesthetics. Let us right both wrongs today. Santayana's first book, The Sense of Beauty was also the first major work on aesthetics written in the United States.

What does it tell us? It is remembered chiefly as the source of the definition of beauty as "pleasure objectified," and (although the book says much else of interest) -- let us stay with that. What does that expression mean?

It means, firstly, that "objectified" is not the same as "objective." It is not quite the same as "subjective" either, although "objectified" is a subset of "subjective."

Pleasure, after all, is subjective, and beauty is one specific sort of pleasure. But, secondly, of what sort? Some specific pleasures are called beautiful because they are so closely associated with the external object by which they are caused that, by an act of socially acceptable delusion, we attribute them to that object. "The more remote, interwoven, and inextricable the pleasure is, the more objective it will appear" -- is how Santayana at one point puts it.

A rose scented perfume is not "beautiful," though I may find it pleasant. The perception of the rose itself may give rise to the sense of beauty, because that scent is intermingled with the proximity of flower to thorns, the juxtaposition of red with green, the stubborn particularity of the branching -- all this is interwoven, and no element can be extricated from the whole without loss. So our pleasure in the rose is of the objectified sort. It is ... the sense of beauty.

"Bread, Please" as Conditioned Response

2009-11-29T00:01:00.003-05:00

I'd like to pursue the ideas to which I alluded here a week ago.

B.F. Skinner's book, Verbal Behavior (1957), grew out of a series of lectures he gave at Harvard in 1947-48. It naturally draws my attention that these were the William James Lectures, sponsored jointly by Harvard's Departments of Psychology and Philosophy. This is a series of lectures that began in 1930 and continued until the 1980s, and that hosted some of the most illustrious thinkers of that period within the interchange of those two disciplines. Just for example, not to elevate those above the others: Arthur Lovejoy gave the WJ lectures in 1932-33; Karl Popper in 1949-50; Gabriel Marcel in 1961-62.

The fact that Skinner gave his lectures on "verbal behavior" ten years before the publication of the book of that name would seem to suggest a considerable modification between the one format and the other.

Anyway, the book may be found here.

He defines "verbal behavior" in the first instance as "behavior shaped and maintained by mediated consequences," i.e. that has its desired effect through the actions of a listener. The desired effect of "bread please" is to persuade someone else at the table to move an object around, where physical constraints or social convention prevent the speaker from obtaining the bread for himself. Skinner later refines that definition a bit, but that remains a key to his approach.

"Bread please" seems a behavior generated by operant conditioning in a rather straightforward way. For a youngter, saying "bread" will suffice to get the bread. Indeed, one's parents (the conditioners) will likely be delighted that their child can form the word, so they will happily reinforce that speech by handing over a piece of bread. Later, though, "bread" earns only frowns unless modified by "please," so the growing child is brought within the scope of social convention.
More elaborate usages of language are only very complicated instances of the operation of much the same mechanism whence comes the phrase "bread please." That, at any rate, is Skinner's view. One of its advantages in his eyes is that it gets rid of the idea that words have meaning in the sense in which "meaning" might be something inside the brain and hidden from science. Words only "mean," for Skinner, because they get listeners to do things, and the doing is "as observable as any part of physics."

That is enough for today. I will say more soon about why Chomsky objected to the study of language in these terms, how later Skinnerians reacted to Chomsky, and how the dispute feeds into the question of the differentia of the human species.

A Story and a Joke

2009-11-28T08:05:00.003-05:00

Thursday night, I mentioned the gist of the following story to one of my companions at the feast. I've fleshed it out a bit since.

Many years ago, my best beloved, a brave group of harried and godly folk became tired of the game known in the old world as "football."

William Bradford said, "This is a stupid game. Let us travel to a distant place, where we can invent a better game and call IT 'football' instead."

And Captain Standish said, "I will lead the way."

Then said John Alden. "When we get there, we can assign a new lame-sounding name to the game we have rejected -- but I fear I am not the right person to invent the adequate nomenclature."

Priscilla. "Don't be so timid John. I'm sure you can come up with a good idea. Speak for yourself!"

John, emboldened, said: "Ah, then, let us call it 'soccer'! And let us never play it again!"

And they all said "Amen" as they walked aboard the Mayflower.

---------------

And as the holiday drew to a close, I watched a DVD of one of Jerry Seinfeld's old standup routines.

In the funniest bit, he talked about how sky-divers wear helmets. This seems odd to him, since in the event the 'chute doesn't open, the helmet won't save you.

"If the chute doesn't open, you're there as a cushion for the helmet. Later, all the helmets will get together and this one will tell his buddies the story. 'Yes, it was a close call. I would have been smashed up pretty awful if I hadn't had a human strapped beneath me.'"

Egypt: A random bit of history

2009-11-27T04:06:00.005-05:00

From an article entitled "Arab Government Responses to Islamic Finance: The Cases of Egypt and Saudi Arabia," by Rodney Wilson, published in Autumn 2002 in the journal Mediterranean Politics.

Ali Sabri became Vice President of Egypt under Sadat, but he was dismissed from his post in May 1971, as Sadat alleged that he had been planning a coup. With the demise of Ali Sabri, al Najjar wasted no time in making a second attempt to start an Islamic bank in Egypt. This time the government was more receptive to his ideas, and the Nasser Social Bank was established under a special statute, Law 66 of 1971, which meant that it did not have to register with the Central Bank or be regulated by it....The first general manager of the bank was Dr Abd al-Aziz Hijazi, a former Egyptian Prime Minister who knew little about Islamic banking, but who was a trusted establishment figure.

Question: why was the government, prior to Ali Sabri's dismissal, hostile to the idea of an Islamic Bank?

My personal view is that Sadat was at first riding the post-Nasser wave of Arab nationalism. Arab nationalist ideology is a very different thing from Islamicist ideology, of course (as the generally secular orientation of leaders such as Nasser and Sadat serves to illustrate. The creation of a bank with specifically Islamic features may have seemed a dangerous concession to Sadat in his first year in office. After the abortive coup (real or imagined) of Ali Sabri, though, Sadat may have been more interested in finding domestic allies, and might have thought this a necessary concession, after all.

Notice that the creation of an institutioin for Islamic finance came with a symbolically important caveat -- a name that included Nassar's, and that gave no indication that there was anything specifically Islamic about this institution. That, and the leadership of Abd al-Aziz Hijazi, whom Sadat clearly considered safe.

I'm just guessing, though. If you know beter, feel free to correct me.

Thanksgiving Day

2009-11-26T01:08:00.002-05:00

With all due respect to the Pilgrims, to the traditional sentiments of harvest time, and to expressions of gratitude, both cosmic and local, Thanksgiving Day is among its other functions the day that traditional rivalries play out on football fields -- the fields of both high schools and colleges.

I can't speak to today's games because I'm not writing this today. I wrote this last weekend for posting today. (Ain't I clever? Ain't technology wonderful?) But I will take this opportunity to express my regret at the end of the old Fermi-Enfield rivalry. This year's game between the two public schools of the town of Enfield, Conecticut will be the last in a string that goes back to 1972. Enfield will join the Pequot Conference as a full member next season, and the rules of that conference prohibit games outside said conference.

While I'm in this mood of nostalgia and regret, allow me to note (not that you have any choice) that there were several traditional Thanksgiving Day rivalries of recent decades in northcentral Connecticut that are no more, mostly because one of the other of the high schools involved has disappeared. New Britain would play Pulaski; Penney would play East Hartford; Middletown would play Woodrow Wilson High. But one of the schools in each of those pairings is no more.

Ah, but now I need to cheer myself up. What about that UConn/Notre Dame double-overtime game this past weekend? Was that amazing? Congrats to coach Edsall. This was the best possible recruiting poster for him as he builds a program fit for the national stage, doing what Calhoun managed to do for the same school's basketball program years ago.

Yeaaaah Huskies.

Animal language

2009-11-22T08:37:00.003-05:00

If language is just "verbal behavior," as Skinner said (1957), then there is nothing special about human language to separate itself from the singing of birds or the barking of dogs. It is on exactly this point that Chomsky (1959) picked his famous fight with Skinner, and insisted that human language is something special.

Although Skinner himself never responded to Chomsky's critique, others have done so on his behalf in the intervening half century. Here is an example from
1990.

Personally, I have long been fascinated by experiments into "animal language" in a rather specialized sense of the term -- not "animal verbal behavior" in a sense that would involve barks or tweets especially. The implicit, and often the explicit, view of many who study the language of whales, or who teach sign language to primates, is that language in a specifically human sense has non-human application. Maybe language in the narrower sense of the term, though rare, is not entirely unique to our species.

Just some plankton for thought.

In the House of Representatives

2009-11-21T07:19:00.001-05:00

The House Financial Services Committee voted 43 to 26 Thursday in favor of a measure sponsored by Ron Paul (R-TX) that would expand Congressional oversight authority vis-a-vis the Federal Reserve.

As the Wall Street Journal rightly noted yesterday in a front page story, this vote was part of a general backlash of "populist anger that Wall Street was bailed out while the public was not." Actually, I think (and hope) that there was more to it than that, but I approve of the backlash, however defined, and so I'm inclined to be happy about this vote.

The problem with central banking isn't the opacity of the bank's operations vis-a-vis politicians or their constituents. The problem with central banking is ... central banking. As an institution, it is inherently misguided. Even if Paul's bill should pass, it will amount to little more than some additional work for the GAO in auditing the Fed. Still, one has to approve of the sentiment.

Greed is not always good, greed does not always work. And the way to limit the dysfunctional consequences of greed is through keeping money real.

Separately, the House this week has amended a bill under consideration designed to reduce the systemic risk that accompanies the failure of large financial institutions. Like, just for instance, Lehman Brothers. The bill at issue is the Financial Stability Improvement Act (FSIA or HR 3996). One of the themes of the bill is the creation of a sort of polluter-pays system for the unwinding of large banks. The cost of the orderly unwind is supposed to fall upon the shareholders and unsecured creditors of the bank, not the taxpayers.

The amendment adopted Wednesday, sponsored by Representatives Miller and Moore (Democrats from North Carolina and Kansas, respectively) is designed to ensure that even the secured creditors of such institutions take a hit. If you follow that link you'll find that this amendment takes up only a page and a half, so it would be easy enough to read through if it were not written in legalistic jargon. The gist of it is that secured creditors of a bank that fails and ends up in receivership will take a haircut, in that in the discretion of the Receiver up to 20% of the secureds claim could be turned into an unsecured claim "as necessary to satisfy any amounts owed to the United States or to the [polluter-pays Fund]."

An intense quarrel has broken out over this amendment in the financial blogosphere. Felix Salmon, for example, weighs in here.

A Point of Etymology

2009-11-20T03:48:00.000-05:00

I have concerned myself in earlier blog entries here with various plagiarism scandals. Here for example.

There now appears to be a plagiarism scandal underway in the southern hemisphere. Isn't the web wonderful? How else would I ever have encountered a New Zealand newspaper story? Anyway, it appears that a novel written by Witi Ihimaera, an English Professor at Auckland University, is replete with stolen goods. So much so that he is buying back copies of his book, presumably to re-write those passages and issue a theft-free edition.

The simple and obvious question is: does Ihimaera flunk out those of his students who do stuff like this? Thank God for hypocrisy. Or, at least, for the sake of the education of the affected youngsters, I HOPE he's a hypocrite.

So let us take this occasion to be explicit about the etymology of the word "plagiarism." It comes from the Latin word plagiarius, which means: kidnapper. That seems a straightforward adaptation of meaning.

Plagiarus in turn came ultimately from the root PLAK, meaning "to weave." As one would weave a net as a snare or a trap. For kidnapping.

None of this tells us anything new about the offense, but then etymology like philosophy leaves the world as they each find it.

Nine subjects at random, with links

2009-11-19T07:02:00.002-05:00

1. Today, November 19, is the 90th anniversary of the day the U.S. Senate rejected the Treaty of Versailles, due to widespread opposition to -- or in some instances just unmollified reservations about -- US membership in the League of Nations.

2. It is also the 146th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln's delivery of the Gettysburg Address.

3. And a happy birthday to Calvin Klein (b. 1942), Meg Ryan (1961), and Jodie Foster 1962.

4. Ever wonder if there is a secret to winning stock car races? Yes. Drive fast. The Onion, as always, has the scoop.

5. But seriously (sort of): if you do care about NASCAR, you can catch up on this year's resulls here.

6. If you don't think NASCAR is a real sport, well ... you may be more interested in the ongoing debate over Bil Belichek and the punt that didn't happen. That link will take you to a column criticizing the decision to go for a first down.

7. And this link will take you to a column by one of Belichek's defenders.

8. Maybe you don't like sports. If you're up for a light-hearted look at finance news (yes, such a thing is possible), you might start with Jeff Matthews here. And then of course move on to Dealbreaker.

9. You think central bankers are a bunch of fun loving guys? You think that when they and their finance-ministry regulators from around the world get together, they do it in someplace warm, with a beach? Bermuda, maybe? You think wrong. The central bankers and finance ministers of the G7 will meet this coming February (FEBRUARY!) in Nunavut, Canada.

Dickens and Bohemia

2009-11-15T10:48:00.006-05:00

I'm looking again through Barzun's book, FROM DAWN TO DECADENCE.

Today's index-driven idleness takes us to a discussion of the sexual mores of Victorian England (pp. 575 - 577.)

While certain strata of society sought to retain "respectability," -- those in business, politics, the professions -- other strata, specifically artists and literary folk, created Bohemia in the middle of the 19th century. "It afforded cheap living, enforced no moral code, allowed modes of dress as singular as desired, and required no sustained solvency." Though first established in the Latin Quarter in Paris -- as two operas tell us -- Bohemia spontaneously developed branches.

Yet when a man of letters becomes as prominent as Dickens, he is by definition not a Bohemian, and the Victorians' attitudes toward his personal life, his "indiscretions," were ambiguous.

In 1857, after all, Dickens was much smitten by the actress Ellen Ternan. Rumors of adultery began to circulate. Dickens was sufficiently concerned with respectability that he felt it necessary to deny this emphatically, and against advice he put out a press release and published a statement in his own paper doing so. Later, as Barzun phrases it, "the young woman did become his mistress -- without his advertising the news -- but both felt guilty ever after."

These matters, scandalous though they were, did nothing to reduce the admiration in which Dickens was held by his public. Barzun cites them -- and other incidents in high-profile sexual mores in what he calls a "motley of arrangements and outcomes," as evidence of the waning of Romanticism, and the approach of "the low spirits, a resigned acceptance of the second best, that belong to the mood of Realism."

Moon Water Results?

2009-11-14T00:01:00.000-05:00

Positive!

The widely publicized experiment last month produced evidence of "significant quantities of ice on the lunar surface," NASA now says, making this convenient orbital body look good as a site for colonization, a stepping stone for the human race on the way to really distant destinations.

The director of the Lunar University Network for Astrophysics Research put things into perspective. "It is a big Wow," he said.

Gotta love that techno-scientific jargon.