all,
As I understand it the idea behind a learning paradox as far as cog
sci is concerned emerges in a historically specific moment: with
Fodor making the claim that learning is not possible in the course of
attacking Piaget's structuralist version of learning. (Chap 6 in
Piatelli-Palmarini's _Language and Learning, the debate between Jean
Piaget and Noam Chomsky_.)
I have always had trouble understanding just how such an absurd
conclusion could be so influential. There is a fine contempt for
everyday experience and the usual sense of rationality exhibited by
even putting the thesis forward.
My own take, after much puzzled reflection, is that Fodor tapped into
the heart of a central mistake concerning thought and learning and
did it in such a dazzlingly clear way that the only really choice was
to reject the tradition--which few were willing to do--or embrace his
analysis as necessary and brilliant.
Like Victor I think the existence of the debate/paradox is due to a
mistaken assumptions but I would nominate the idea that thought is
Logical--an idea with much deeper roots than Kant's expression of it.
(Nor is thought a formal Langauge which is where Chomsky comes in.)
Fodor explicitly commits himself to the idea of thought as logic in
the work cited and much, much of AI/Cog sci remains fundamentally
committed to this error regardless of gestures toward context or
situatedness. (IMHO)
I join Victor in nominating pragmatists as folks which had a better
handle on this and deserve to be recovered. The social element is
certainly central, and is central to my fondness for the pragmatists
Dewey and Mead. But in the the instance of learning it would be worth
recovering James as, that underutilized pragmatist, as well. He
addressed the problem of learning via association and pattern
recognition. Dewey and Mead respected and used James work because the
recognized that explaining learning in a way that was congenial to
social experience was a necessary part of the larger social
pragmatist project. (caution: again IMHO) And formalisms and Logic
lead, in the end to Fodor's point: that all is derivative and
sterile--because deductive logic, as beautiful and powerful as it is,
is not, in the end creative. (Dewey radically reconstructs logic on
an experiental basis in his book on the ideal of Logic)
I do think that the social alone is not enough. That path results in
not trying to describe the material process by which social learning
occurs. Social learning theorists of all stripes can credibly be
accused of spinning self-satisfying, ungrounded romantic fantasies
until the basic issue of _how_ social learning, a learning embedded
in the material situation, can be conceived of occurring. Pattern
recognition derived from associative learning (I look at
connectionists/neural net stuff in the current day) is the way to
establish an understanding of learning that links us all to the
material world, social and objective, without falling into the traps
of various formalisms--especially the formalism that holds thought to
be logical and to exist before experience.
Sorry for the screed, the conversation touches an old wound. :-) Very
fun line of discussion.
John
>Michael,
>This will have to be short since I'm in the middle of writing.
>
>The so-called learning paradox is like many of its ilk (paradoxes) is based
>on special assumptions that restrict the world of the paradox in ways that
>make the paradox possible. The paradoxical nature of paradoxical statements
>invariably arises from the contradiction between the constructed world of
>the paradox and the world we actually live and work in (sorry about my
>Englisch).
>
>The learning paradox is an interesting one, it's a most elegant rendering of
>the paradox engendered by philosophical idealism and especially subjective
>philosophical idealism of the Kantian kind. The special assumptions of the
>learning paradox is that we only know through thought and that thought is
>essentially subjective. Both Pragmatism - GHM, Dewey, and so on - and
>Historical Materialism regard thought as:
>
>1. Social and therefore external to the subject.
>2. Only one of many means by which men interact with the world.
>
>These two minor modifications of the concept of man's relation to the world
>effectively vaporize the learning paradox. If learning is:
>1. a matter of adopting socially engendered and enabled consciousness and
>purposes, and if
>2. the realisation of social consciousness and purpose in the world is
>effected by the interaction of the individual with conditions that include
>human thought, but only as a part of the totality of the extant sensable
>world (universe perhaps?) then
>3. the learning paradox evaporates into thin air, leaving behind it the
>realization that the peculiarly European intellectualist aberration of
>regarding the world solely in terms of thought and of regarding thought as
>strictly subjective activity is totally inadequate for the explication of
>the educational process.
>
>With highest regards,
>Victor
>
>----- Original Message -----
>From: "Michael Glassman" <MGlassman@hec.ohio-state.edu>
>To: <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
>Sent: Wednesday, July 28, 2004 6:06 AM
>Subject: RE: Learning Paradox
>
>
>So I don't know which direction to go with this - so I'm just going to forge
>ahead with something interesting I read related to this. And sticking to
>this whole Pragmatism trip I'm on I thought it might be interesting to pose
>it as a thought experiment (not by me, but by Daniel Dennett -did I get the
>name right). It seems this is a big argument among the cognitive scientists
>themselves. With the Pragmatic AI cognitive scientists (Dennett lists them
>all but I can't remember - but he lists Rorty who's not AI or a cognitive
>scientist, but always a good ally in a pinch I suppose) against the more
>nativist cognitive scientists such as Fodor and Searle.
>
>Before I copy the thought experiment, and it is a little long, and can hurt
>the head under some circumstances, I do want to say that Dennett makes the
>distinction between simple physiological systems such as plants and humans
>(sort of following on what Geoff says here - which sort of made me think of
>this whole thing).
>
>Here is the thought experiment with apologies to Professor Dennett (I hope
>this is legal). I will offer a couple of lines on the end concerning my own
>thinking. If there are no responses I will assume everybody's plate is too
>full, or everybody went to the beach (can't do that in Ohio). Oh, one more
>thing, which I think is really interesting thinking about this,
>
>Von Glaserfield (again, possible apologies about the name, but it's late and
>I don't want to look it up) suggests that the Learning Paradox focuses on
>the benefits of inductive logic, while Joe Glicks accomodatioin,
>assimilation, and adaptation focuses more on abductive logic (I got a C- in
>logic in college so I'm not going any farther with that).
>
>Here goes,
>
>
>Suppose you decided, for whatever reasons, that you wanted to experience
>life in the 25th century, and suppose that the only known way of keeping
>your body alive that long required it to be placed in a hibernation device
>of sorts, where it would rest, slowed down and comatose, for as long as you
>liked. You could arrange to climb into the support capsule, be put to sleep,
>and then automatically awakened and released in 2401. This is a time-
>honored science fiction theme, of course.
>
>Designing the capsule itself is not your only engineering problem, for the
>capsule must be protected and supplied with the requisite energy (for
>refrigeration or whatever) for over 400 years. You will not be able to count
>on your children and grandchildren for this stewardship, of course, for they
>will be long dead before the year 2401, and you cannot presume that your
>more distant descendants, if any, will take a lively interest in your
>well-being. So you must design a supersystem to protect your capsule, and to
>provide the energy it needs for four hundred years.
>
>Here there are two basic strategies you might follow. On one, you should
>find the ideal location, as best you can foresee, for a fixed installation
>that will be well supplied with water, sunlight, and whatever else your
>capsule (and the supersystem itself) will need for the duration. The main
>drawback to such an installation or "plant" is that it cannot be moved if
>harm comes its way--if, say, someone decides to build a freeway right where
>it is located. The second alternative is much more sophisticated, but avoids
>this drawback: design a mobile facility to house your capsule, and the
>requisite early-warning devices so that it can move out of harm's way, and
>seek out new energy sources as it needs them. In short, build a giant robot
>and install the capsule (with you inside) in it.
>
>These two basic strategies are obviously copied from nature: they correspond
>roughly to the division between plants and animals. Since the latter, more
>sophisticated strategy better fits my purposes, we shall suppose that you
>decide to build a robot to house your capsule. You should try to design it
>so that above all else it "chooses" actions designed to further your best
>interests, of course. "Bad" moves and "wrong" turns are those that will tend
>to incapacitate it for the role of protecting you until 2401--which is its
>sole raison d'tre. This is clearly a profoundly difficult engineering
>problem, calling for the highest level of expertise in designing a "vision"
>system to guide its locomotion, and other "sensory" and locomotory systems.
>And since you will be comatose throughout and thus cannot stay awake to
>guide and plan its strategies, you will have to design it to generate its
>own plans in response to changing circumstances. It must "know" how to "seek
>out" and "recognize" and then exploit energy sources, how to move to safer
>territory, how to "anticipate" and then avoid dangers. With so much to be
>done, and done fast, you had best rely whenever you can on economies: give
>your robot no more discriminatory prowess than it will probably need in
>order to distinguish what needs distinguishing in its world.
>
>Your task will be made much more difficult by the fact that you cannot count
>on your robot being the only such robot around with such a mission. If your
>whim catches on, your robot may find itself competing with others (and with
>your human descendents) for limited supplies of energy, fresh water,
>lubricants, and the like. It would no doubt be wise to design it with enough
>sophistication in its control system to permit it to calculate the benefits
>and risks of cooperating with other robots, or of forming alliances for
>mutual benefit. (Any such calculation must be a "quick and dirty"
>approximation, arbitrarily truncated. See Dennett forthcoming.)
>
>The result of this design project would be a robot capable of exhibiting
>self-control, since you must cede fine-grained real-time control to your
>artifact once you put yourself to sleep). Endnote 2 As such it will be
>capable of deriving its own subsidiary goals from its assessment of its
>current state and the import of that state for its ultimate goal (which is
>to preserve you). These secondary goals may take it far afield on century-
>long projects, some of which may be ill-advised, in spite of your best
>efforts. Your robot may embark on actions antithetical to your purposes,
>even suicidal, having been convinced by another robot, perhaps, to
>subordinate its own life mission to some other.
>
>But still, according to Fodor et al., this robot would have no original
>intentionality at all, but only the intentionality it derives from its
>artifactual role as your protector. Its simulacrum of mental states would be
>just that-- not real deciding and seeing and wondering and planning, but
>only as if deciding and seeing and wondering and planning.
>
>
>
>All right, now away from Dennett's brilliance to my more mundane questions.
>Is it possible that the robot cannot, will not have any original
>intentionality beyond what we have created for it, and if so is it possible
>for the robot, and us as the creators to survive? Isn't extinction
>inevitable if we follow the whole idea of the learning paradox. By the way,
>according the Dennett, Fodor seems to hate evolutionary theory (or is at the
>very lead annoyed by it).
>
>Hey, did anybody see Obama tonight? He rocked! And a great Pragmatist!
>
>Michael
>
>
>________________________________
>
>From: Geoff Hayward [mailto:geoff.hayward@edstud.ox.ac.uk]
>Sent: Tue 7/27/2004 6:03 PM
>To: xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
>Subject: RE: Learning Paradox
>
>
>
>Physiological metaphors one and all and a physiological system can but
>react according to the set parameters (thank you Claude) and that is the
>learning paradox. But if you move beyond the physiological individual
>you find some bootstrapping devices, albeit limited by our collective
>intelligence - which begs another question ....... an additional unit of
>analysis - the activity system. But how does this arise and how well
>does Activity Theory deal with issues of identity ... grey moments in an
>English summer.
>
>Geoff
>
>Dr Geoff Hayward
>Associate Director SKOPE
>OUDES
>15 Norham Gardens
>Oxford
>OX2 6PY UK
>
>Phone: +44 (0)1865 274007
>Fax: + 44 (0)1865 274027
>e-mail: geoff.hayward@edstud.ox.ac.uk
>
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: Glick, Joseph [mailto:JGlick@gc.cuny.edu]
>Sent: 27 July 2004 18:47
>To: 'xmca@weber.ucsd.edu'
>Subject: RE: Learning Paradox
>
>Assimilation, accommodation, adaptation, organization anyone?
-- 401 St. Charles St. Lafayette, La. 70501Land Line: (337) 269-0150 Cell Phone: (337) 739-6118
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