[From Bruce Nevin (2003.10.22 23:00 EDT)]
Again, my apology for the extremely long delays in my responses. I hope
there aren’t too many words here that I should have thrown away, I have
only got to this today and don’t want to delay longer.
Bill Powers (2003.10.16.0644 MDT)–
[…]
I don’t think this is going to solve the
problem of “reifying reality.” The
words you used to describe the information in the bent piece of grass
do
NOT describe features of the world, but classes of perceptions within
which
there is infinite room for variations.
[…] To leave some things in “the environment” is to draw
an arbitrary line separating things outside us that we know directly
from
things we know only as perceptions. But there is nothing that we can
know
directly, so there is no place to draw that line.
If we do draw a line, it is for convenience only, just as the
engineer
separates his model of the environment from his model of a system
that
exists in and interacts with that environment.
What I am saying does not entail that I have to ‘reify reality’ or claim
special direct knowledge of the environment that somehow bypasses
perception.
Here’s a scenario. I control a perception of certain words appearing on
the screen in front of me in a certain structured way. Let’s say I write
this:
Linguistic structure is in our shared
environment.
I’ll assume you agree that I control perceptions of structure in this,
e.g. the words must come in that particular order to be an English
sentence, and this particular sentence. The input functions, references,
and output functions for my control of these perceptions accord with
conventions established as common knowledge among users of the English
language. In the course of learning those conventions I have become so
organized as to control these perceptions by means of various behavioral
outputs, in this case typing.
You, then, having also learned the common-knowledge conventions of
English, have become so organized as to construct the same structure out
of your perceptual inputs from your environment (a shared environment
thanks to the Internet). Recognizing that structure (which you have
created, but which you perceive to be the words, etc. that I have put in
the environment), and remembering common knowledge conventions as to what
intentions one has when producing such a structure, you ‘read’ in it a
perception of my intentions; in particular, a perception of meanings that
you perceive that I intended you to understand from it. But you also
infer meanings that I did not intend. You say:
You're asserting that you have direct knowledge
of the
environment, bypassing perception.
This is an inference that you have constructed. But you could not have
done so without first understanding what is directly said in my
sentence:
Linguistic structure is in our shared
environment.
I did not say how I arrived at that conclusion; you inferred that I must
be claiming to have arrived at it by some sort of direct apprehension of
the environment. What I intended (but did not say) was that I arrived at
that conclusion about the environment in the same way that we arrive at
any conclusions about reality: by inference.
What I am saying in the present post is that this inference follows
necessarily from the fact that you construct the same complexly
structured perceptions that I do (namely, the above sentence, prior to
any inferences from it), and that your only basis for doing so is the
effects of my control actions on your environment. There is no other
channel by which that information can get from my brain to yours.
Remember the PCT definition of
“control.” A is said to control B if and
only if a disturbance of B results in a nearly equal and opposite change
in
the effect of A on B. In short, if B is altered, A acts to restore B to
its
original condition, or simnply opposes the change before it becomes
significant. So do you really mean that if the other person’s perception
of
the first person’s intention is disturbed, the other person will act
to
restore that perception to its original condition?
In the scenario I outlined above, if I perceive that you are acting in a
way that is not consistent with your understanding as I intended you to,
then I do indeed act to resist that disturbance. The scout is miles away,
but if he comes back and finds them off course I bet he’ll give them a
refresher course in trail markings, or act in some other way (consistent
with that amount of delay in the loop) so as to resist the disturbance to
his control of their perception of his intention. Yes, I do mean exactly
that. In speech or writing, the loop is more quickly closed. In the
present instance, my control actions take the form of my saying the same
thing yet again, but in a different way, and heading off an inference
that I had not foreseen.
That doesn’t seem to fit your use of
“control” above.
In what way does it not fit?
I think we have to reflect on Martin Taylor’s
concept of nested protocols
in communication. At every level, the act of communication involves
one
person doing something that alters his own, and presumably someone
else’s,
perceptions. At every level it is necessary for perceptual input
functions to exist which convert perceptions of lower levels into
perceptions of higher levels, and this must happen in both sender and
receiver.
Yes. I see no contradiction.
To this I add the fact that transformations
from level to level are
many-to-one, meaning that there is a very large range of variation at
one
level which will leave a given perception at the next higher level
unchanged. I can bend any number of fibers from many kinds of plants over
a
range of directions in a large variety of bendings, and you will
still
perceive an indicator of the left branch of the path rather than the
right,
if you are organized to perceive such things. The same arrangements
may
mean nothing to a snake, or a bird, not because a different message
is
conveyed, but because a different receiver is involved.
Surely. For a convention be established in a public, the members of that
public must come to be organized to perceive certain inputs in the
conventional ways. (Not that so that they have to, but so that they are
able to.)
That is how
language works. By certain features we recognize "Oh, this is
speech, and not just noise of some kind," and we recognize further
"This
is English speech." This is analogous to the knot in the grass.
We
recognize that these sounds or these marks are an artifact of
perceptual
control by a human being, which is purposefully so structured that we
can
reconstruct the intention of the speaker or writer, and placed in
the
environment so that we may do so. The structure in this artifact is
information that has been placed in the environment by the speaker or
writer.
After my comments above, do you still believe this?
Yes.
What you’re doing, in
effect, is exempting certain observations from the general principle
that
“it’s all perception.”
Not at all. But that slogan must not be carried so far as to deny that
there is a reality.
You’re implying that the “structure”
in the
“artifacts” is really there in the environment, leading to
reconstructed
perceptions which are not in the environment.
I can only hypothesize about what must really be in the
environment, of course.
We do not know anything about the environment other than our perceptions,
but we do presume, with justification, that there is something there and
that our perceptions have some sort of correlation with it that is stable
enough for intersubjective agreement to be reliable.
I control my perception of marks on the screen being structured in a
certain way. I am confident that, whatever those marks ‘actually’ are in
your proximal environment, you will perceive them as being structured in
the same way that I do. This s is the letter s, this string of six
letters shared is the word shared, and so on up the layers of Martin’s
protocol analogy. At the level of story construction and argumentation
the structures get fairly complex. I may overlook some ambiguity, so that
you perceive some line of argument that I do not intend, and I certainly
cannot be aware of all the meanings that you invest in those structures
and all the inferences that you make based on your proper perception of
the sentence itself. But I am controlling my perception of your
perception of the meanings that I am trying to indicate by means of these
words. When you impute some meaning that I do not intend, or when I
perceive that what you reply is not a paraphrase of what I said, etc.
(imagine here appropriate, complicated HPCT circumlocutions saying the
same things in more precise terms unless you really insist that I
prove my bona fides in the most excruciatingly boring way), those are
disturbances to my control of my perception of your perception … etc.
… which I act to resist by saying the same thing yet again, but in a
different way, and resisting in various ways inferences that I did not
intend.
But what happens to this line of argument if
you acknowledge that
even the “structure” is a perception, having existence only for
such
organisms as possess the correct kinds of input functions, and are
capable
of understanding that this particular perceptual signal would not be
there
unless some other entity had done something to the (hypothetical)
common
environment?
Sorry, I don’t take the environment itself to be hypothetical. It is the
character of the environment, ‘beyond’ our perceptions of it, that
is hypothetical. I don’t question the existence of reality. And I
don’t believe you do either.
All that we know of the environment is the perceptions that we construct.
But I assume (and I believe that you assume) that those perceptions are
not entirely baseless.
In particular, people don’t need any sort of direct knowledge of the
environment (bypassing perception) in order to establish a social
convention. To learn that s is the letter s we don’t need proof that
something is constant in the actual Ding an sich environment
across all occurrences of the letter s, nor do we need to know that your
perception of the shape s is the identical experience for you as my
perception of the shape s is for me. I think all we need to know is that,
in operational terms, if I place the shape s before you, you will
recognize the letter s, and vice versa. (To be sure, this must be in
circumstances where you can reasonably be expected to be actively
controlling recognition of letters, i.e. probably not if I place a
garment in front of you, and the folds of cloth happen to take the shape
of the letter s.) Probably there’s a better way to put that, but there’s
no doubt about the existence of socially established conventions, and I
think we even have a pretty good idea how they get established.
If I see an “A” with the lines not
quite joined at the
top as an “H”, I will read “HIN’T” instead of
“AIN’T”.
Sure, there is potential for ambiguity at every level. The various kinds
of redundancy in linguistic structure resolve ambiguities that a simple
convention of marking trails with grass cannot resolve. We just recently
had a brief discussion of that (the passages using words with scrambled
letters). Glietman’s experimental work provides more subtle
examples.
I’m obviously not going to insist on this
level of purity in discussing any
system or environment; it would probably be paralyzing to do so. But
I
think we must agree, behind the scenes, on what the actual HPCT picture
is.
I think we do. Do you still doubt it?
Anyhow, you’re flirting with the ideas I
describe, but I think it’s simply
a mistake to speak of structure, form, and information in language in
this
way.
The reference perceptions for controlling by means of language are
conventional, that is, they are learned and maintained in such a way that
the users of the language know that other users of that language control
according to the same references.
(There’s some wiggle room for accommodating different dialects; the basis
for that is the same systemic redundancies that I mentioned earlier. For
example, having perceived the intended word on the basis of its context,
the hearer may adjust the lower-level references for recognizing the
phonemes in the word as pronounced by that person, making it easier to
recognize other words subsequently spoken.)
An engineer can get away with speaking of such
things because he knows
everything about the machine that will interact with the environment,
and
he can define these aspects of the environment in a way that is
independent
of the receiver. But you’re describing the receiver, not the
environment.
Any arrangement of the environment that impresses us as having a
certain
form will be perceived as that form, even though the physical world
could
be arranged in a gloogleplex of different ways while we perceive the
same
thing. You can’t explain why we perceive a given form by examining
the
environment, unless you happen to be examining it through a very
similar
receiver. You certainly can’t EXPLAIN why we perceive a form by
reference
only to features of the environment. The real explanation lies in
the
receiver, not the environment.
I’m not trying to explain what is really in the
environment, such that other people who hear me speak perceive the same
words. Whatever it is that my control actions have done to the
environment, such that I hear myself speaking those words, those actions
have structured the environment so that each of those people,
independently perceiving in that environment, independently constructs
perceptions of those very same words (modulo disturbances). I don’t have
to know what that structure is really in the real, Ding
an sich environment. Nor do I claim to know that. But I do claim that
my control actions have a real effect on that real environment. That
effect is the basis on which any number of English speakers listening to
me construct the same word-perceptions that I had as I spoke. Some sort
of transform of the structures that I perceive must really be out there
in that real environment, there being no other basis for them
independently to construct the same structures in their perceptions.
Let’s review:
The structure that we know about from the speaker’s point of view is in
the speaker’s perceptions, constructed by the speaker.
The structure that we know about from the hearer’s point of view is in
the hearer’s perceptions, constructed by the hearer.
The fact that this is the same structure, and intentionally so,
making use of social conventions to make it so, tells us that some
transform of this structure is present in the environment. There is no
other basis from which the hearer may construct the same structure
as the speaker did.
This may be easier to see if you consider additional time delay. Record
the speech. Let the hearer listen to it after an arbitrary delay, with
the speaker no longer present. Some transform of the structure is present
in the recording – that is, in the physical medium, whatever that may
really be, with the effects of the speech upon it, whatever those
effects may really be. (We don’t care what they really are,
we infer that they must be there.) It must be a transform of the
structure in the perceptions controlled by the speaker, else how could
the hearer construct from it her own perceptions of the identical
structure?
A transform of a structure is itself a structure.
Put the other way around, sure, it is possible to construct perceptions
of structure in artifacts in the environment which on closer (perceptual)
examination turn out not to be structured in that way. Illusions abound.
But to have a speaker perceive structure of such complexity and
interlocking redundancy (evolving through time, emergent from social
interaction, and all the rest of it), and subsequently to have hearers
independently perceive the very same structure in the environmental
effects of the speaker’s control actions – well, that’s asking an
incredible lot from simple perceptual illusions on the order of
perceiving a triangle where the lines don’t actually meet in the corners.
Incredible, of course, means not believable, and I, for one, don’t
believe it. If you believe it, please explain the reliability of these
shared hallucinations.
Ah, we get closer to the real issue. I think.
What this leaves out is the
necessity for each person to learn the significance of these signs.
I’m sorry I seemed to leave that out. I certainly meant to put it in, and
I have sought to emphasize it here. How else could conventions be
established?
What you call the “linguistic”
information is simply a collection of lower-level perceptions. That’s
what
I’m getting out of this so far.
There is something really in the environment. All we know of it is the
perceptions that we construct. But we are assured of its existence by the
intersubjective agreements that enable social conventions to emerge. We
depend upon socially established conventions, especially those for
language, to attain and communicate more complex agreements (and
disagreements).
/Bruce
···
At 08:00 AM 10/17/2003 -0600, Bill Powers wrote