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Date:         Mon, 23 Nov 1992 16:15:46 PST
From:         Penni Sibun <sibun@PARC.XEROX.COM>
Subject:      Re: Ms communication
              23 Nov 1992 10:09:50 -0800
              <92Nov23.130532pst.11795@alpha.xerox.com>

(penni sibun 921123.1600)

   [From Bill Powers (921123.1000)]

   Penni Sibun (921123.2300) --

   >>   Your post is to the point. We have to consider what people use
   >>language for, not just try to explain language by examining words.

   >lots of us, both ``interactionists'' and more traditional
   >psychologists, have been doing this for a long time.

   Funny, Mary predicted almost exactly what you would say.

it's a good thing we're all as predictable as we are, or we'd have
even more trouble understanding each other!

   It's strange how everything I suggest, working out of the PCT framework,
   turns out to have been done or suggested by someone else in some branch
   of linguistics or psychology.

it's not, of course.  it's a major problem that *every* academic faces
these days--there's far too much work out there already done for
anyone to keep track of it.  and, if any of us is going to have time
to *think* at all, we have to deliberately lose track of some of it.
on the other hand, if one has acquaintances in other disciplines, one
has somewhat more breadth.

   Of course these things have been done by
   people who violently disagree with each other on almost every
   fundamental issue about language and psychology, and there seems to be
   no foundation of accepted principles in either discipline.

i think ling and psych are far too broad to have single foundations of
accepted principles.  i think it w/b unhealthy if they did!

   I detect a pulling together of the wagons in the face of outside
   threats.

well, don't infer that from me.  i don't have even one wagon!

look.  i think pct is interesting enough and fresh enough that someday
it might make it into the canon and textbooks.  it would break my
heart to see it do so burdened by the same old tired old ideas about
language (eg, that it's based on symbols) that have been sitting
around for a long time doing not much work.

let me try to explicate distinctions that i previously was implying.

communication--something that most organisms (can we agree on at least
all vertebrates?) do w/ each other a lot, in many different ways.

language--a kind of communication that is particularly flexible and
complex, and seems to incorporate systematic ways for communicating
about things not readily accessible in the here-and-now (including
``abstract'' things).

symbol manipulation--a practice of mapping bet. 2 sets of individuated
things, in which members of the first set, and relations bet. them,
are regarded as systematically substitutable for members and relations
in the second set.  (sorry--this isn't a very good defn; i hope it's
not impenetrable.)

i look on language as a specialized form of communication.  i do not
think that as it is used it involves symbol manipulation, at least in
any straightforward way, such as is implied by ``naming.''

   >herb clark and gradstuds at stanford have a whole suite of such
   >experiments.  i'm not sure what they would consider primitive
   >operations, if any, but i don't think naming w/b one.

   How about telling us what experiments they did and what they have
   discovered? This would seem to be an example of what I was asking about
   a few days ago, a base of non-controversial observations on which all
   linguists could agree, right?

well, clark & co are psychologists, and their observations are not
non-controversial.  but then again, i don't think anybody's are.  at
any rate, their results are of the statistical sort that seems to get
rick upset.

   When you say they have a whole suite of
   "such experiments," do you really mean experiments of the kind I have in
   mind? Or are you just free-associating?

well, i certainly can't read your mind.  you did however say:

   >>It would be interesting to devise some experiments to see why
   >>people use language as they do. I'm thinking of some task that
   >>requires two (or more) people to cooperate, but that requires them
   >>to convey information to each other.

and clark & co's work fit this bill.

   >>Suppose that the people are allowed to send symbols back and forth
   >>by picking them out of a list. The symbols are arbitrary, not
   >>familiar words, and can be defined only through common experiences
   >>with the task and with each other.

   >why should we suppose this sort of artificial task will be
   >revealing of anything particular to language?

   But I thought you just said this had already been done, with whole
   suites of experiments of the kind I am proposing.

you've restricted yr specification to symbol manipulation, whereas yr
proposal was to investigate language.  from the papers i have on hand
and what i remember, clark &co never insisted subjects commuicate only
via unfamiliar arbitrary symbols.  their typical paradigm is to have
two subjects who can hear but not see each other, and who have two,
perhaps identical, sets of tools (or shapes or something) in front of
them.  one knows what they're supposed to build (usu. by having a
model in front of her) and the other has to do the building.  the
frobs in front of them are not things which have names (or, often,
easy description).  the locus of study is how they use language to get
the task done.  at least half a dozen gradstuds have gotten or are
getting theses out of this paradigm.  it's a very rich mine.

   >there's literally tons of research on symbol manipulation.

   Good. So what facts have been found concerning the question I raised
   above, about how you get across the nature of the perception to which
   you're trying to attach a symbol? Or has the research all been too
   crappy to answer a specific simple question like that? "Tons of
   research" doesn't mean tons of _good_ research. If you do good research,
   you don't need tons of it.

i agree with you.  i imagine for a diff. reason, though:  i think the
research is misguided.  sure, you can hold up an apple, and i can say,
because i learned to, ``3 of clubs.''  but i don't think this is any
more fundamental a skill than your saying ``apple'' and my saying ``a p
p l e.''

unfortunately, my intro psych book has gone missing.  and maybe my
copy of premack is still back in ct.  but i'll take an example from
the latter.  the chimp sarah was taught to associate colored plastic
tokens with various things.  she was quite good, for example, at
knowing that red-square was associated w/ apples.  she also knew that
black-triangle--blue-circle--red-square was associated w/ her eating
an apple in a way that no other configuration of tokens was.  what was
touted as particular proof of her using the tokens in an arbitrary
fashion was that she knew that green-ellipse was associated w/ red
things (and not green ones; chimps have color vision).

   >one could cogently argue that skinner's pigeons can attach symbols
   >to objects; we don't want to say this means that pigeons have
   >human-like language, do we?

   Is Skinner's research now accepted in linguistics?

i don't know.  i was doing a _reductio ad absurdum_.

   >>I think the deaf community would have a lot to teach about what
   >>happens when a group of people is brought together without any
   >>initial means of communicating.

   >i find this notion incoherent.  w/ possible exceptions of severely
   >damaged individuals (eg, those w/ autism, those severely abused in
   >childhood), any group of individuals you bring together are going
   >to have myriads of ways of communicating.

   So there was no motivation for deaf people to learn ASL, because they
   already had ways of communicating? You find this notion
   _incomprehensible_, Penni.

perhaps my referent was sloppy:  by ``this notion'' i meant ``[bring]
together [a group (of people)] w/o any initial means of
communicating.''  i do find it incoherent to postulate that 2 or more
people in the same time/space (or close enough to be considered
``brought together'') would have no means of communicating, completely
regardless of what languages they may or may not know.

   >communication is a terribly important part of what human beings
   >(and all organisms!) do.

   Then why is it so hard to communicate with you?

probably because we are trying to do it w/ only words.  i mean that in
all seriousness.  i knnow we could get an awful lot farther, probably
an awful lot more smoothly, if we were in the same room conversing w/
each other (or even if we had shared that experience sometime in the
past).

cheers.

                                --penni
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